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The role of a content marketer is to plan, create, and share helpful and educational content to reach ideal buyers at every stage of the buyer’s journey and beyond.
This broad job description acknowledges no one-size-fits-all strategy for content marketing in today’s competitive online world. As blog articles, videos, and images such as infographics fill social media and websites, the importance of excellent content marketing increases for companies trying to set themselves apart from their competition.
Partnering with marketers who understand your company mission, business growth goals, and buyer persona will allow you to focus on the daily needs of running your company. So, what sets the best content marketers apart from the masses? We have a few thoughts for you to consider.
What is a Content Marketer?
Before we dive into their characteristics, let’s explore what they do.
Beyond crafting clever copy and catchy headlines, the responsibilities of a content marketer extend into strategy, analytics, and a profound understanding of the target audience. They are strategic storytellers and digital communicators who play a pivotal role in a brand’s online presence and marketing efforts. Essentially, they are the architects behind creating, curating, and distributing engaging and valuable content across various digital platforms.
Content marketers are tasked with deeply understanding their target audience, identifying their needs, challenges, and preferences, and tailoring content that resonates with them. This involves a diverse skill set, ranging from excellent writing and creative abilities to a keen understanding of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), analytics, and marketing trends. Beyond just producing content, they are responsible for developing comprehensive content strategies that align with broader marketing goals, enhance brand awareness, and drive customer engagement.
The Best Traits of Content Marketers
Content specialists bridge the gap between a brand and its audience, fostering meaningful connections through the power of compelling and relevant storytelling. Here are the traits that enable them to take the organization’s business goals and develop effective content strategies to attract potential customers.
Detail Oriented
A great content marketer will take the time to understand your company thoroughly. They will know your mission, your sales process, and your target audience. More than that, the longer your partnership continues, the more important the details become.
The best content marketing specialists frequently research to ensure the details of your buyer persona are still accurate. As your company grows and you add new products, they will incorporate your growth into strategies.
Content marketing strategies should include data reviews to ensure your website incorporates relevant keywords in blog articles, images, videos, and meta descriptions. Additionally, social media strategies are constantly shifting. Your marketing professional should keep up to date on industry-relevant hashtags to make it easier for your ideal buyer to find you on social media.
Creative
Content marketers should be able to think outside the box. Developing relevant, helpful, and educational blog posts quarterly takes a lot of work–not to mention special offers, videos, promotional emails, and graphics. They must be willing to look for new and innovative ways for content creation as well as repurpose and promote content instead of just taking a cookie-cutter approach to doing the same old thing year after year.
The best content managers draw inspiration from industry experts and unique sources. Using various sources, they can create connections between industries and everyday experiences to help your readers see your company’s relevancy in today’s culture.
Analytics-Driven
Analytics has a role in every aspect of content marketing. Website traffic, including users and sessions, keyword rankings, referring channels, impressions, and clicks, offers valuable insights to help inform your content development. For example, your content marketers may identify that a specific web page is attracting a lot of traffic. They should then create additional content strategies around that subject.
Tracking email open rates will help identify which subject lines catch your customers’ attention. Content strategists should measure open rates and note the days and times most people read your emails to optimize your opportunities to connect with customers.
By incorporating A/B testing on landing pages, content marketers can sharpen language and images to measure which attracts the most qualified buyers. A marketer must back each change that benefits your company by analytics, or it’s only a guess. Leveraging analytics will ensure changes are helpful, not harmful.
Strategic
The strategy goes hand-in-hand with marketing analytics. Content marketing professionals cannot ignore analytics when creating a content strategy for the quarter. The best content marketing managers must consider everything from the highest engagement on each social media platform to the best days to publish blog articles.
They look ahead to consider the events of the quarter. Are there holidays that your company incorporates sales around? Do you have annual events that would benefit from extra social media promotion? Content marketing specialists are looking ahead with you and thinking of ways to support your sales team by developing fresh, high-quality content for your promotions, whether through email marketing, blog articles, or social media posts.
Content strategists also understand how to target your ideal customer and adjust things depending on whether you are reaching a local audience or have a broader scope.
Adding Value Through Content Marketing
The bottom line is that content marketers are vital to an organization’s bottom line. They are integral in driving website visitors from all digital media channels. I’ll leave you with a few statistics that tell the story of what they do better than any job description can.
According to the Content Marketing Institute’s “B2B Content Marketing 2023” report, 64% of the most successful organizations have a documented content marketing strategy.
When HubSpot asked marketers which media formats they are using, half of the respondents said they are using videos, 47% are leveraging images, 33% are posting blog articles, 30% are posting infographics, and 28% are leveraging podcasts or other audio content to reach potential customers.
Another study by HubSpot shows that companies that blog have 55% more visitors and 434% more indexed pages.
Content is essential in B2B buyer decision-making. Demand Gen Report found that 73% of survey respondents typically consume between three and seven pieces of content before speaking with a salesperson. The two most valuable types of content for decision-makers are case studies and webinars.
Content Marketing Help For Growing Businesses
Our marketing team tailors our content to each client’s buyer persona. We develop an individual strategy for each client that incorporates blog articles, images, videos, and social media posts best suited for their ideal customer. We constantly measure our marketing campaigns using sophisticated web analytics. All our content is SEO-optimized and created to reach our clients’ goals and KPIs. Learn more about how we leverage content to help business growth in our free ebook, The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing for Business Growth.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in March 2019 and has been updated with fresh content.
