Hiring your content marketing team

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Hiring your content marketing team

- Hiring the right content marketing team is a critical part of creating a content marketing strategy that works for your business. Your content team will really help you succeed. They are the foundation of all your content marketing efforts, they are the ones creating your content on a daily basis, and determining what type of content should be created. But who do you look for and where do you find them? Creating the great content marketing team and hiring the right people is actually pretty difficult. So who do you need? First, let's talk about your internal team.

Who's your internal team? These are basically the folks in your organization that you work with on a day to day basis that help you create content internally for your business. So who makes up the different parts of that team? First, you have your Managing Editor. This person might have the title of Chief Content Officer, Director of Content, or Senior Content Manager. This is actually the role that I have at the company that I work for now, the Managing Editor. So your Managing Editor is in charge of a great portion of your content marketing strategy.

Your Managing Editor creates the content strategy and the editorial calendar. Coordinates amongst all the teams. Is in charge of brand voice, look, feel, and the quality of your content. Is in charge of writing and editing, so this person must be a great communicator. And is also in charge of vendor vetting and coordination. To make content work for your business, you'll often be working with outsource vendors. So your Managing Editor is most likely in charge of all that coordination.

What type of skills does your Managing Editor need? Excellent writing skills, of course, because they'll be spending a ton of time writing. Excellent project-management skills. They'll be working on a variety of different projects at any given time, so it's really critical that they're able to project manage something from start to finish. Copyediting skills, the ability to review a document and know grammatically, structurally, what's right and what's not right. Passion for content, of course. Content marketing requires a lot of passion.

You want this person to enjoy what they do. Cross-functional communication skills. Your Managing Editor will be communicating with various functions within your organization. They'll be working with executives, they'll be working with other members of the content and the marketing team, so cross-functional skills are important. Desire to be a thought leader and speak at industry events. Your Managing Editor should have the desire to be a thought leader in your space. They should speak in person and they should also do webinars.

Who else should be on your internal team? You should have an Associate Editor. Your Associate Editor could be a Content Manager, a Content Specialist, or a Content Coordinator. Now I do want to note here that some smaller teams might not have the benefit of adding additional team members, however, as you grow as an organization and as your content team grows, these are the folks that you want to consider adding. So what does your Associate Editor do? Your Associate Editor also creates content. Your Associate Editor should copyedit all the content, project manage content projects, coordinate with team members and then also manage the blog.

If you do have a blog, and we hope you do, this person should be in the day to day managing the blog and creating all the posts and helping to add them in. What skills does your Associate Editor need? Of course these skills are similar to your Managing Editor. Your Associate Editor should have great writing skills, excellent project-management skills, excellent copyediting skills, a passion to learn content. Cross-functional communication skills, this person will also be on the front lines of communicating with various functons within your marketing team.

And this person should also be a social native. So that means that your Associate Editor should also have the skills for social media, should be on social media on a daily basis and understand what's going on out there in the industry and what's going on out there in content marketing. So where do you find your internal content team? So this is the tough part, knowing what type of team members you should have, that's one thing, but knowing where to find them is another. So here's some tips that I find useful when I'm looking for different content team members to fill my team.

Check out LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a great resource for content team members. Do searches for content marketers in your area. Ask within LinkedIn content groups, so there's a ton of different content groups that you can join on LinkedIn. Put a posting out there to look for people that are searching for new content roles. Look for former journalists. Your former journalist will have that type of writing experience that you need and they may be looking to move out of journalism and into a role like content marketing. Get a referral.

Put a message out there to your own internal network, as well as your network professionally, and see if anybody knows a content marketer that's looking for a new role. Ask your Twitter network. Post a tweet out there asking to see if anybody's looking for a content role. And then of course, keep your eyes open for people creating great content. If there's a content marketer from another company that you really admire, that you've seen their work, feel free to reach out, you never know if they're looking for a new role. So who else should be on your content team? There are other internal team members that should be involved in content creation on a daily basis.

Employee contributors. These are employees throughout your company who create content. You ideally want to start creating a culture of content contribution. Your employees will create blog posts for you, they might help with different e-books or content projects. So look to other employees in your organization who might be thought leaders and who want to help create content. Subject matter experts. These are company experts who you will rely on for subject matter expertise for some of the content that you create.

You might be creating content that's fairly technical. So you want to rely on members of your organization that know very detailed information about that technical topic that you're writing about. These are your subject matter experts. Content requesters. These are employees who request content and who are involved in ideation. In both small and large organizations, you might have different members of the marketing team who need content and who request content. These people are also involved in the ideation in coming up with the outlines.

So next, let's talk about your external team. External writers . External writers are agencies, independent contractors and writing networks. These are particularly useful if you have a smaller team and you need additional hands, or even with larger teams you might have a large amount of content that you need to create and external writers help you meet those goals. External writers help you scale, should be able to learn your business and brand voice. Make sure you provide them with a style guide, this is especially important to learning your brand voice.

They should be watched and trained for quality. So take time to train your external writers on what type of quality you expect. They will work with your content team and your other internal writers. They are sometimes priced per hour or per word, so make sure to speak with your external writers and determine what pricing model works best for you. In addition to external writers, you will also be working with designers. Your design team creates the design of your content. So they have a very critical role to your content creation.

Your design team also helps to design all of your content assets, like your e-books, infographics, cheat sheets, and more. So they're a very critical part of rounding out your content team. So as I've discussed, your content team is a really critical part of creating a content strategy that works for your business. So now take some time, sit down, determine who you want to hire, write out some of the skills of the people you want to hire and then go out and find your content team.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/content-marketing-foundations/hiring-your-content-marketing-team