“Focus on the core problem your business solves and put out lots of content and enthusiasm and ideas about how to solve that problem.”
Laura Fitton
A content marketing manager plays a pivotal role in your brand building process. They are responsible for crafting innovative and engaging content across various platforms to capture the attention of your target audience.
They create content that is not only valuable but also prompts your audience to take action, like sharing it on their social media and networks.
Having great content is essential for successful marketing, and Content Marketing Managers understand that. They fuel social media marketing, email marketing and lead nurturing efforts with their creative and informative posts.
These managers know how to produce content that attracts, informs, and entertains your audience while also reinforcing your brand’s image.
So, if you want to market your brand and connect with your audience, hiring a skilled Content Marketing Manager is a wise move. They ensure your content is top-notch and aligns with your brand’s objectives and values.
What is a content marketer job description?
A content marketing job description outlines the roles and responsibilities of professionals who specialize in creating and implementing content strategies to promote a brand, engage its target audience, and drive business objectives. A brand and content marketing manager is important for building brand awareness, establishing thought leadership, and nurturing customer relationships through various digital channels.
What does a content marketer do? The key responsibilities of a content marketing manager
As a content manager, your main goal is to publish and promote content that aligns with your business’s content marketing strategy and achieves its goals. You will ensure that your team generates messaging that stays true to your brand’s voice and is valuable to your target audience.
In content marketing, a marketing manager’s responsibilities can vary depending on the company and team size. However, they oversee nine critical tasks in the content production process. While they might not handle every aspect personally, they are responsible for delegating and ensuring the team efficiently completes assigned tasks.
Research and Competitor Analysis
You can’t create a successful content marketing strategy without conducting initial research. This involves understanding your target audience, doing competitor analysis to analyze competitors’ content and distribution tactics, and doing keywords research and keywords analysis to identify trending keywords and relevant topics.
You may also survey current customers, conduct internal stakeholder interviews, and explore content tools and software that aid in content creation and promotion. Through research, you will uncover gaps in the market that your competitors haven’t addressed but that meet your audience’s needs.
Content Marketing Planning
Content Marketing Planning is the next step after initial research. As a content marketing manager, you will be working on one or several content marketing plans, depending on your company’s size and offerings. These plans define your strategy and execution for different brands, business units, or channels.
Imagine a bank with separate plans for consumer and commercial offerings or a software company with plans for generating new business and retaining existing customers. Similarly, content marketing managers have to create different plans for channels or brands.
Now, these content marketing plans should align with your overall content marketing strategy, which you will likely create with your wider marketing team. The key here is to set specific, measurable goals and figure out how to achieve them using content.
As a content marketing lead, your role is to ensure that each plan includes the following:
- Clear goals with a timeline for achievement
- A budget estimation covering staff, creative resources, and paid promotion
- Types of content to create (like blog posts, ebooks, white papers, infographics, etc.)
- The topics to cover and reasons for choosing them
- Content distribution channels
- A plan for paid promotions
- A detailed execution plan, including publishing frequency and production workflow
You might also create individual plans for specific campaigns or certain time frames, like the next quarter or year. The key is to ensure each plan supports your overall content marketing strategy.
Content Publishing Schedule
As a content marketing manager, your role is to maintain a steady flow of content. Once your teams have the content marketing plan ready, you will plot deadlines for creation, publication, and promotion on a content calendar. This way, the entire marketing team can easily see what content is coming up in the coming weeks and months.
Having a visual editorial calendar helps align content publication and promotion with important dates for your business and other marketing campaigns. It’s smart to build some buffer time into the schedule to account for possible delays in content production and seize real-time marketing opportunities.
Now, you will also handle the production workflow. That means setting deadlines for each step and assigning tasks to your team members. As a content marketing manager, you will wear multiple hats, including project management and people management, which may involve using relevant digital tools.
Content Creation
After the team finalizes the content plan and relevant stakeholders give the green light, it’s action time! As a marketing manager, you will put the plan into motion, either creating the content yourself or assigning it to your team of creators, who could be in-house employees or freelancers.
In bigger startups, content marketing managers oversee the whole production process and manage a team of creative minds as a part of the brand development strategies. But, you will still need to have top-notch writing and editing skills because, ultimately, you are responsible for the final content.
It’s not just about writing, though. You should also source photographs and illustrations to go with the content, format everything nicely, and add relevant meta-data. Plus, written content isn’t the only game in town – the popularity of infographics and videos means you will need video production and graphic design skills too. It’s about bringing creativity to life!
Implementing Artificial Intelligence and Automation in content marketing
Nowadays, marketing teams are turning to AI and automation tools to level up their content production process.
So, what’s a marketing manager’s role with these AI and automation tools? Well, they use them in various ways to improve team efficiency, streamline production, and simplify their job. But, to make it work smoothly, the content manager has to set up the framework and rules for the content workflow, oversee creators, and establish style guides for each content type. Being comfortable and proficient with computer programs is a must to keep up with this rapidly evolving aspect of content marketing.
Quality Control
Content marketing managers are the gatekeepers of all assets their team produces. They handle or oversee quality control, ensuring top-notch work. Essential skills here include editing, proofreading, and providing constructive feedback.
Maintaining a consistent brand voice can be tricky when multiple creators are involved in the brand building strategies, but a style guide helps keep everyone on the same page. What’s a marketing manager’s role in developing a style guide? They establish parameters for brand personality, writing styles, punctuation and grammar preferences, SEO best practices, and image selection guidelines.
Once everything is ready, content marketing managers make sure each asset aligns with the style guide before publication. Specialized content marketing platforms include the style guide in the mix, giving writers, editors, and proofreaders easy access. And, it’s the content manager’s job to keep these style guides up to date as needed.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial aspect of online content these days. Content marketing managers need SEO skills to ensure their content ranks high on search engines like Google and reaches their target audience effectively.
Companies with a digital marketing team have an SEO specialist on board, or they outsource this to a specialized agency. Even with a dedicated team, content managers must still grasp the basics of SEO to carry out a successful content marketing plan.
Publishing and Promotion
Once an asset goes through the content creation process and gets the green light, content marketing managers take charge of publication and promotion. Their goal? Get the content to the right people at the right time and in the right place.
To do this, they might use manual processes or rely on technical staff to upload content into various platforms like web CMS, email marketing, or social media automation tools.
Once published, the content marketing team, under the manager’s guidance, executes a pre-defined promotional strategy. This could involve automated social media posts and other tactics timed for the best engagement. Such content automation speeds up production without growing the marketing team.
But it doesn’t stop there! Content marketing managers also need to integrate the content strategy with the rest of the business’s marketing campaigns and explore additional promotion channels both online and offline. It’s all about getting the content out there and making an impact!
Analyze content performance
Once the content is out there, a marketing manager’s job is far from over! A crucial aspect of their role is monitoring and analyzing the performance of published content. Keep a close eye on how it’s doing in the real world.
To do this, they rely on content analytics software, which makes the task pretty straightforward. But here’s the thing – they can’t just stop there. Content managers need to invest time in interpreting the data, providing suggestions, and drawing actionable conclusions based on the results.
They are on top of content engagement, responding to comments and questions and noting valuable suggestions for future content. They stay engaged with the audience to understand their needs.
Moreover, they lead content audits to spot changes in engagement over time, uncover new topic possibilities, and identify opportunities to repurpose content. It’s a never-ending process of learning and adapting to keep the content game strong!
What is a content marketing manager job description sample?
Here’s a sample marketing content manager job description you can use the following:
Hey there! We are on the lookout for a content marketing manager to join our team at [Company name]. This role is a mix of strategy and management, where you will be crafting creative content marketing tactics and strategies to help our business grow.
As the Content Marketing Manager, you will be collaborating with the marketing, content, and design departments to plan and execute our content marketing initiatives. This means doing thorough competitive analysis and extensive keyword research to ensure our content drives organic traffic to our website.
Your major responsibilities include setting KPIs for the content team, creating content briefs and other supporting documents, and establishing efficient processes for content submission, editing, and publication. You will be guiding and mentoring junior members of the content team.
On top of your daily tasks, you will also be responsible for generating detailed SEO reports and presenting them to the senior management on a monthly or quarterly basis. Your insights will play an important role in shaping our content strategy and overall success. Sounds like a great opportunity, right?
Responsibilities of a Content Marketing Manager
- You will be in charge of establishing writing guidelines, processes, and strategies for delivering content.
- Managing a team of writers and editors will also be part of your role.
- You will oversee the writing and editing processes to ensure everything runs smoothly.
- Staying up to date with industry trends is essential to keep our content fresh and relevant.
- You will ensure that the branding guidelines of the company/clients are correctly implemented into the content.
- Working with all departments to ensure accurate and appropriate presentation of the product or service in the content.
- Creating content calendars to plan our content strategy.
- Documenting and reporting the progress of the content team and the effectiveness of our content strategy.
Requirements for this position:
- We need someone who can understand the target audience and their pain points to create compelling content.
- A bachelor’s (or higher) degree in English, Marketing, Journalism, Communications, or a related discipline is required.
- You should have at least 5 years of experience in Content Marketing to handle this role.
- Exceptional organizational, analytical, and communication skills are a must.
- Impeccable writing and editing skills to produce top-notch content.
- You should also have the ability to develop, distribute, and update training documents for writing, editing, and creating reports.
The salary ranges for Content Marketing Managers:
The salary can vary depending on factors like the content niche, scale of content operations, location of the company, and the manager’s experience.
According to Glassdoor, content marketing managers across the United States earn varying amounts per year.
But here’s the estimated pay for a Content Marketing Manager:
The estimated total pay for a Senior Content Marketing Manager in the United States area is around $122,426 per year. On average, they can earn about $105,319 per year.
These numbers are based on salaries collected from Glassdoor’s users and represent the median, which is the midpoint of the salary ranges from their Total Pay Estimate model.
There’s an estimated additional pay of $17,107 per year. This additional pay could include cash bonuses, commissions, tips, and profit sharing.
When to Involve a Content Marketer in Your Strategy?
Your online content marketing strategy encompasses various aspects. You might have a blog, use email marketing, and leverage social media, or even all of them together. And the goals behind creating digital content can vary.
Some organizations use tools to boost brand awareness, while others focus on customer communication and sales. Then there are those who prioritize SEO to rank higher in organic search results.
No matter your organization’s objective, you need someone who can craft and plan your content marketing strategy with a broader vision!
A dedicated content marketer collaborates with your marketing team to execute a cohesive brand strategy across different channels. If your business is growing and you want to reach a new audience or stay relevant to existing customers, having a content marketer can be incredibly valuable.
Moreover, a content marketer analyzes your organization’s various content efforts and shifts the focus to the channels that perform well. This laser-focus approach helps maximize your impact and drive better results.
When Should You Hire a Content Marketer?
This question really depends on a few factors. If your marketing is heavily focused on the online aspect, you should bring in someone who understands online platforms. On the other hand, creating blog articles, white papers, videos, etc., requires a different set of skills.
When you reach a point where you want to implement a comprehensive content marketing strategy that goes beyond just posting on social media, that’s when hiring a content marketer makes sense.
A skilled content marketer knows how to engage existing clients better and attract new customers through creative content.
They can oversee a cohesive strategy to ensure consistent messaging on your website and social media channels. Additionally, they can bring in freelance specialists to create unique content when needed.
Not everyone is a great writer capable of creating blogs that attract backlinks. So, a content marketer is like a conductor in an orchestra. If you feel your business needs an orchestra to communicate effectively, now is the right time to hire a content marketer.
How do content marketing roles contribute to overall marketing strategies?
Having a talented content marketing manager on your team is very useful for your content marketing strategy, even if you are a great writer and understand your audience well.
Here is what does a content marketing manager do and some situations where a content marketing manager can elevate your content marketing strategy:
Exceptional content creation
To make your online content marketing strategy effective, you need outstanding content with a clear and consistent message that resonates across all platforms. Why is this important?
With each new algorithm update, Google strives to weed out low-quality content to improve user experience.
A skilled content marketing manager can help you with the following:
- Publishing original and engaging content throughout your website.
- Incorporating keywords naturally without keyword stuffing.
- Crafting long-form articles that provide value without any unnecessary fluff.
- Ensuring your content is well-structured and tailored to your target audience.
Regular content creation
Regular content creation is a vital aspect of a successful content marketing strategy. A skilled content marketing manager can create appealing and consistent content that aligns with your brand.
Content marketing is a gradual process, and it requires dedication and persistence to achieve success. While it may take some time to see significant results, the returns can be substantial. Over time, as your content marketing plan gains traction, you will experience growth and increased returns on your investment.
Consistency is key in online content marketing. A content marketing manager can help you build credibility, trust, and a strong brand image. Whether you post blogs consistently or once a week, sticking to a schedule is essential to keep your audience engaged and avoid confusion.
Moreover, consistent content publishing directly impacts your visibility on search engines. By regularly posting new content, you train Google’s algorithm to index and display your pages more frequently, leading to quicker appearances on search engine results pages.
Coherent messaging
Having a coherent messaging strategy is important for your brand’s success. If your website, blogs, and email newsletters have different writing styles, it can create confusion and mistrust among your audience.
While some inexperienced content creators may resort to posting the same content everywhere, it often leads to low-quality content that does more harm than good. A skilled content marketing manager, on the other hand, understands how to use consistent language and brand elements to create a coherent content marketing strategy.
They customize each message to resonate with the intended audience, align with the brand personality, and ultimately help achieve the business objectives. With a content marketer’s expertise, your messaging will be clear, consistent, and tailored to engage your audience.
Tactical content creation
Tactical content creation is both an art and a science. Creating content that engages your audience and conveys your marketing messages requires a clever and inventive approach. A skilled content marketing manager knows how to create meaningful messages in a convincing, creative, and exciting way.
On the other hand, the science aspect involves monitoring analytics and refining your content marketing strategy. A top-notch content marketing manager analyzes your brand’s data, identifies the types of content that resonate with your audience, and then develops content accordingly.
The key lies in understanding the correlation between craftsmanship and science in your content marketing plan. When you dive into analytics, it’s important to focus on the right data and draw actionable insights from the numbers.
While many individuals can write, consistently evaluating insights and using them to improve your online content marketing strategy requires experience and training. A seasoned content marketing manager is well-equipped to deliver results that drive your brand’s success.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is an important topic we discussed earlier, and it’s worth emphasizing again.
You see, it’s not just about creating content that your audience enjoys; it’s also about ensuring they can easily find it. Sometimes, that means encouraging them to follow your social media accounts or subscribe to your newsletters.
Other times, it involves convincing search engines to rank your website higher, so your blog posts are effortlessly discoverable by users.
Not every subject-matter expert knows how to craft content that adds value to readers while also boosting search engine rankings. That’s where content marketers shine. They understand the intricacies of creating SEO-friendly articles and visuals that your audience can rely on.
When you focus on data-driven decisions and learn from your competitors, content marketing becomes a great medium to grow your business. Success awaits when you prioritize both creativity and optimization.
What are the day-to-day tasks and responsibilities of a digital content marketer?
Imagine a day in the life of a content marketer – it’s filled with exciting responsibilities that contribute to creating a top-notch digital content marketing strategy.
Client research: You will be compiling survey inquiries and having face-to-face or phone conversations with clients to understand their pain points truly. It’s about getting inside their heads!
Content ideation: You will take all that valuable research and transform it into content ideas that will captivate the right clients. It’s like turning insights into action!
Content advertising: You will strategically direct traffic to your content through various networks and influencers. It’s about getting your content seen by the right people.
Monitor analytics: You will keep a close eye on the digital content marketing strategy, evaluating analytics to ensure everything runs smoothly. It’s about staying on top of things!
Create a content marketing strategy: You will determine short-term business objectives and craft an editorial calendar to stay organized.
Carry out content marketing campaigns: Then, it’s time to put those plans into action! You will carry out content marketing campaigns, working hard to achieve those business goals. It’s about getting results!
Collaboration: You will team up with design and writing experts to deliver top-notch content. It’s about bringing different skills together.
Maintain Consistency: You will deliver high-quality content regularly, inspiring your colleagues along the way. It’s about keeping the momentum going!
Grammar skills: Your grammar skills will come into play as you edit and refine the content. It’s about getting that perfect piece of content out there.
SEO skills: You will create a content marketing plan that aligns with the best SEO practices. It’s about boosting visibility!
Share content: You will publish your content on various platforms, ensuring you have a strong online presence. It’s about reaching as many people as possible!
Ideation: You will seek client feedback and come up with ideas that boost customer engagement. It’s about keeping things fresh and exciting!
Abilities of a Content Marketing Manager
As a content marketing manager, you will need a diverse set of skills to excel in your role. Here’s what you should know how to do:
- Familiarity with CMS: As a content marketing manager, being well-versed in using tools like WordPress for content management and publication is crucial.
- Social Media Savvy: Understanding various platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter is vital for engaging with the audience.
- Managing Mailing Lists: Handling mailing lists and client databases is part of the routine to keep the audience engaged and informed.
- SEO Optimization: Implementing SEO techniques, such as using keywords, hashtags, and images, is essential to ensure content is discoverable.
- Customizing Content: Tailoring content for different platforms and target audiences is a must for better audience connection.
- Staying Updated: Being up-to-date with new trends enables content managers to create relevant and trending content.
- Audience Understanding: Knowing the audience’s needs and addressing their pain points is essential to provide valuable content.
- Analyzing Metrics: Content managers analyze web metrics to measure success and ensure timely delivery of content.
- Website Management: Being ready to recommend changes to the organization’s website when needed shows flexibility in the role.
- Swift Adaptation: Responding swiftly and adjusting content marketing plans as necessary is crucial for success.
- Resourcefulness: Finding ways to reuse content across channels to maximize impact showcases resourcefulness in the role.
- Versatility Matters: Being versatile is essential for a content marketing manager, considering the dynamic nature of the job.
Conclusion
To perform all the tasks we discussed earlier, a content marketing manager needs to be a great team player. Adapting to the ever-changing landscape of the internet is crucial, as search engine algorithms, like Google’s, are always evolving. What works today might not work tomorrow.
Listening is another essential skill for a content marketing manager. They need to understand their customers’ needs and also be open to communication with their team members. Effective dialogue is key to success in this role.
A skilled Content Marketer holds the power to elevate a brand’s identity, engage its audience, and drive conversions. They are the architects of brand storytelling and the conduits of brand success.
Whether you are considering a career in Content Marketing or seeking to optimize your marketing strategies, understanding the responsibilities and skills of a Content Marketer is an investment in the future of marketing success.