With so much noise, both online and offline, every company needs a stellar content marketing strategy in order to be heard and noticed. A strategy, unfortunately, rarely springs out of thin air, so the first order of business?
Build a team that will help your content marketing game soar.
Let’s cover some of the key steps you should take in order to assemble a winning team for this particular department and leverage their expertise to your brand’s advantage.
Jump to:
- Make Sure You Have a Collaboration System
- Make Your Offer Worth Their While
- Hire or Outsource?
- Written and Visual Experts Matter
- Training and Growth
- Set Clear Expectations
- People Skills Matter, Too
Define Your Goals
Even though content marketing is vital, not every company can apply a cookie-cutter approach to hiring content experts.
You need to align your hiring initiatives with your general objectives. Here are a few questions to answer internally before you start your hunt for talent:
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Who will manage your content marketing team?
If your company is relatively small and people wear multiple hats, chances are that you or your marketing director can take on this role, as well.
For larger organizations, however, you might need to start from the top, and first hire someone who will set up the team structure and help with the hiring, too.
Once you have your Head of Content Marketing, you can move on to the next set of challenges.
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What will your content marketing strategy contain?
Think of it as a puzzle in which you first need to identify the pieces. Do you plan to have a dedicated social media person for all your accounts, or will you have one customer support person tackle that?
On the other hand, do you plan to outsource some of your content creation to expert teams or freelancers (both fine options if you have someone trustworthy in mind)?
How will you be collecting and leveraging user-generated content for your website, socials and other marketing channels?
There are many different options depending on your priorities. Define what your key content elements will be, to be able to narrow down your search for the right fit.
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What’s your budget?
Last but certainly not least important, you should be mindful of your financial limitations – if any.
To hire the best, you need to be willing to invest a solid portion of your budget into salaries and hiring the finest people in the industry.
In case you have restrictions, it might be smart to see where you need to invest the most of your budget and where you might be able to “cut corners” and perhaps hire a contractor instead of a full-time employee.
Make Sure You Have a Collaboration System
It’s one thing to hire the finest people, but if you bring them into a mess of a department without a clear structure on collaboration, you won’t be able to make the most of them.
This is where all the little things make a huge difference: the choice of project management tools, the decision to set up a hybrid or fully remote workspace, the choice of cybersecurity measures, etc.
Believe it or not, even the way you conduct your meetings is important. Using a manual like Robert's Rules of Order will help make a difference.
The same applies to your ability to help remote teams use remote desktop software and work virtually on-site even when they’re not able to come to the office.
Does anyone on your content team need something fixed or set up? Someone from your remote IT team can use the remote tools to jump in and help.
Make Your Offer Worth Their While
Great people aren’t easy to come by. Competition is fierce, and chances are other companies will reach out to them with a similar offer.
For starters, you need to be as transparent as possible with your processes and the offer itself.
Your candidates need to know what you bring to the table and how you’ll make it easy for them to leverage the perks you’re providing, and to grow in your organization.
For example, is your payroll software set up in such a way to automate payments and minimize effort on the part of your employees? Can they also easily find what they need, like pay stubs and tax forms?
Make working in your team a hassle-free process; communicate that to your candidates so they know how you’ll empower their professional growth and you’ll attract the best of them.
Make it easy for them to track their PTO, bonus payments, team holidays, retreats, and any other perks you may have.
Hire or Outsource?
Not every business has the time to look for people, vet them, onboard them, and risk losing them months into the collaboration because something came up.
It’s important to evaluate whether or not it’s more efficient for your company to hire individuals and run the entire team in-house.
If that’s not the case, you can also research trusted content marketing agencies that have entire teams available to dedicate to businesses like yours.
In that scenario, they’ve done all the vetting and hiring, and you can rely on their internal expertise to take care of your content needs.
If you decide to take the hiring route, on the other hand, make sure that you vet people properly, as that will help you reduce the risk of churn.
Written and Visual Experts Matter
Content trends change constantly, but a general rule to keep in mind is that various formats of written and visual content will always help your brand thrive.
Striking the right balance will help you stay at the forefront of content marketing shifts, so it’s crucial to look for people that can create versatile content for your brand.
For example, video content has taken over the world by storm, and social media is packed with short, engaging videos made by influencers, brands, agencies, you name it.
It’s crucial to have a person on your team that can create impactful videos for your organic and your paid media campaigns.
By the same token, you’ll still need strong blog content for smart SEO purposes, but also to keep engaging the part of your audience that enjoys reading – still plenty of them around.
Great blogs can help you educate people, but also generate leads, and support your email and social media efforts. Make sure that your team, be it fully in-house or outsourced (or a mix) can provide content in various visual and written formats.
Training and Growth
Sometimes, even the most experienced, well-versed content marketers need a bit of training to understand your brand and your organization properly.
Before you start bringing in new people to your team, make sure your HR team has already set up proper onboarding procedures – and training should be included.
Have a manual ready as well to provide your new content marketing experts with all the brand essentials.
From your logo, font selection, to your brand colors and tone of voice, you’ll help them stay consistent and avoid unnecessary frustrations in the earliest stages of their work.
Preparing and training your new team for on-brand content creation is the same as training language models for content creation and generation in general - these people need all your crucial documentation and guides to deliver on-brand content.
Pro tip for career advancement: communicate their growth path with your new team. Ambitious people want to know how they can evolve within an organization.
If you provide them with options, you’ll understand their goals better and be able to reduce the risk of churn.
Set Clear Expectations
As much as you need to make your offer competitive and your work environment efficient, you also need to be honest from day one.
That means, there is no room for overpromising.
Make sure that each role you’re hiring for is clearly defined in terms of workload and responsibilities, and the key stakeholders people need to report to.
Communicate to your newcomers how they should tackle specific setbacks – if you have a FAQ for internal use, that can be a great resource for new employees.
Let your content marketers know what other resources they have at their disposal.
For example, if you’re using any particular apps and tools that can boost productivity for them, they should have access from day one.
Video marketers, for example, often have a preference as to the right editing/production tools, and social media creators perhaps like a specific way to track metrics.
If they have a say in the selection process, all the better – be sure to communicate that, as well.
People Skills Matter, Too
Of course, you should focus on skills-first hiring when you’re choosing your content marketing team.
This is a very effective way to eliminate bias from the hiring process and to make sure you truly land on the best candidates for the job.
However, the job itself has nuances.
Your content marketers need to have decent people skills, such as the ability to provide constructive feedback, accept criticism, and navigate complex creative projects with care.
They need to be reliable: are they able to meet deadlines, in addition to always delivering brilliant content?
Because, if you cannot rely on them to have their work ready in time, chances are that the rest of the team will suffer.
Over To You
Content marketing remains one of the pillars of business growth this year as well, but that will depend heavily on the people in charge of that portion of your business.
One final piece of wisdom: while there’s always a period of adjustment for new people on your team, you also need to be keenly aware that mistakes are always possible.
If you do make a poor hiring decision, it doesn’t have to be the end of the world as long as you can remedy it quickly.
Do you have any specific hiring strategies that have helped you find and hire brilliant content marketing folks for your organization? Feel free to share your ideas in the comments below.
