Content marketing has come a long way since its early days. You can no longer write something, post it online, and expect it to generate positive results because you were one of the first to write on the subject.
Today, the process of content marketing is significantly more complex.
Many companies have responded to that reality with appropriate urgency and commitment. It’s no longer unusual to find a company that has a full-fledged content marketing team in-house.
The content marketing team is also not an off-shoot of the more conventional marketing group. More often than not, the members of those teams have different roles within the company.
Let’s take a look at the common roles within a content marketing team, the different positions available on that team, and the responsibilities tied to each one.
1. Chief Content Officer or Director of Content Marketing
We’ll start at the top. The person often put in charge of the content marketing department is typically the Chief Content Officer or Director of Content Marketing – at least, where such an executive role exists.
This role is most often found in enterprise organizations.
This person oversees every facet of the content program to ensure that the company’s content marketing strategy is on point and meeting its business goals.
Among this professional’s main responsibilities is identifying the marketing goals and setting a strategy.
Is the company focused on breaking into a new market, or perhaps improving its online reputation?
The Director or CCO needs to identify those main goals and develop the strategy their team will use to achieve them.
They determine which people, processes, and technology are required to fulfill the company’s content goals.
Another important aspect of this person’s job is to coordinate and collaborate with other departments.
This is the person other executives seek out if they need something from the content marketing team. The chief content officer is also the person who reaches out to other departments if the content marketing team needs assistance.
2. Content Marketing Manager
Next up, we have the Content Marketing Manager. As the job title suggests, managers focus on laying out the roadmap for the team.
Content Marketing Managers set the general direction for the content team.
They are also in charge of delegating tasks and defining goals for the members of the team. They set deadlines so those aforementioned goals are met.
The members of the content marketing team interact more frequently with the content marketing manager than the chief content officer, where both of these roles exist. In a way, the content marketing manager also serves as a bridge between those two camps.
And in smaller companies, the Content Marketing Manager may be responsible for the entire program including the strategy, as well.
3. Content Creators and Contributors
Content creators and contributors are the lifeblood of the content marketing team.
Simply put, content marketing would not exist without the creators and contributors. They fuel the content engine with rich, high-quality, relevant content.
Content creators and contributors play a key role in keeping your business relevant. If something big changes with search engines and algorithms, your content creators and contributors can help your business keep up by producing content around it.
Examples of content creators and contributors you may look to add to your team include writers, video creators, photographers, graphic designers, and sound engineers.
These may be full-time or part-time, in-house or outsourced, in-office or remote – or any combination thereof.
4. Editors
You cannot allow every piece of content made by your team to just go live without someone reviewing it first. One major misstep could tank your company’s reputation.
Avoid those mistakes by hiring content editors. The content editor is responsible for maintaining a high standard for the department.
They develop and implement processes that ensure content quality and keep the brand out of hot water with copyright issues and the like.
Editors ensure that the content released by the department is as close to error-free as possible.
Beyond that, they may also have to tweak the content or request revisions in certain situations. With written content, they give direction, fact-check, line edit, and take other steps to ensure adherence to brand guidelines.
Depending on the type of media, you might also use video or audio editors, as well. These people can be in-house or outsourced.
Content editors work tirelessly to check the submissions sent to them. It can be a time-consuming and tedious job, and it’s also crucial to the content marketing team’s daily operations.
5. Editorial Assistants
Uploading content, editing and sizing images, sending reminders to authors, writing meta descriptions, and other repetitive tasks can benefit greatly from the involvement of an Editorial Assistant.
This person helps content editors and creators with their respective workloads by acting in a supporting role to manage what tasks they can.
Editorial Assistants with intermediate SEO knowledge can be beneficial, as they can employ important SEO techniques to support your organic ranking goals, too.
Again, this person could be in-house or outsourced. They could be available full-time, or only on contract as needed. It’s best to work with the same person or small group regularly so they really get to know the business and your content processes.
6. Community Managers
In 2021, every business needs a social media presence of some kind. If you’re not using social media to promote your business, you are not reaching your full marketing potential.
The community manager’s focus is on promoting your content and engaging readers on social networking platforms. The interesting thing about the community manager’s job is how multifaceted it is.
As the community manager, you must know how to converse with potential clients and customers.
You should also be capable of providing some customer service from time to time, or at least have processes in place for quickly triaging and escalating any issues that arise.
In some cases, a community manager may also be asked to create a short post to hype up a new product, service, or event. The community manager truly wears a lot of different marketing hats and must be flexible and willing to do whatever the business needs.
7. Analytics Specialists
Content production cannot be done blindly. There must be a purpose behind every piece of content that is published online.
If your goal is to boost your business’s visibility, the content you’re releasing should help you achieve that goal.
But how do you know if your efforts are paying off?
You need someone to interpret the results of your content marketing efforts and extract their real value. An analytics specialist can do exactly that.
Analytics specialists can assess the performance of your content marketing strategies and ascertain if they are living up to expectations, exceeding them, or perhaps falling short by tracking analytics data via a variety of platforms.
This person is skilled in measuring what matters and reporting to each stakeholder only those insights that matter to them. They won’t deliver the same report to the Director that they prepared for the video editor, for example.
Analytics specialists can also highlight ways to improve your content. They can tell you if the content length is appropriate or if it needs to be adjusted.
They can also determine if the content could use an infusion of more keywords, or perhaps if it needs to be posted on a different day or at a different time.
Many factors impact the success or failure of posted content, and thankfully there’s plenty of data to help steer us in the right direction.
8. Content Promotion Specialists
This is one area in particular where you may make use of freelancers. These are people you bring in to complete specific tasks; they aren’t permanent members of your team and are specialists in their field.
For example, you may want to hire someone who can upgrade your website to help your content stand out. You can hire a web developer to make this happen.
Paid search and social are also popular positions for freelancers since the skill, while still involving content, is so specific.
You could have a freelancer or agency helping you with link building and/or PR to get more eyes on your content, as well.
You may also decide to partner with influencers as you seek to create more exciting content. Influencers will likely charge a lot for their services, but that could be worth it in exchange for the buzz they’ll be generating for your company.
The Takeaway
In short, content marketing is not a solo operation.
To do it right, you must be willing to work with a team and hire the right people.
Your team almost certainly won’t look exactly as I’ve outlined above. In a small marketing team, you may have just one or two people responsible for many of the positions and responsibilities above.
And in enterprise companies, you could have a team of hundreds.
What matters most is making sure each phase of the content planning, production, publishing, and promotion process is covered by a dedicated expert.
Hopefully, you can reference the information in this article as you aim to put together your content marketing team and ensure your company’s content gets the hype it deserves!
More resources:
- 11 Stellar Content Marketing Examples to Inspire Your Digital Marketing Campaigns
- Content Marketing: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide
- The Difference Between Content Marketing & Content Strategy
Featured image: Shutterstock/AlessandroBiascioli
