How To Create A Winning Content Marketing Team?

There is an efficient content marketing team behind all great content marketing efforts.

In my previous post, I wrote about getting started with your content marketing strategy.

In this post, I want to take a step back and share about assembling a winning content marketing team; because however great your content marketing strategy is, you can’t execute on it without a team.

First, let’s understand what a great team is made of. A high-performance team is the one that is not only focused on incremental but also thinks about transformational.

A great content marketing team is not worried about publishing the next content piece but it is focused on creating a bigger and better audience. Publishing in large part is taken care by a well-oiled content marketing machine, driven by solid documentation, processes, project management and aided by technology.

Foundational stuff out of the way - let’s move to nuts and bolts.

A Great Content Marketing Team Starts With The Understanding Of Where It Wants To Go

Remember the post about content marketing strategy, yes that’s what the team needs to refer to; and start with knowing what markets or audiences they want to win and what type of content efforts will help them do it.

A team consists of people, and there needs to be someone who will bring other people along for the journey. This person should articulate the vision in a way that inspires and gets the right type of people to join her content marketing team.

If you are that person then look for people who know to create new and also are ok with taking what is there and creating something new out of it with their passion and skills. If you get this kind of people, who do not only care for content but for business too, they will back you when you need them and take ownership of the tasks that they need to do.

When To Build Your Content Marketing Team

People have different philosophies about this. Some suggest hiring early and often. Others say hire when you have too much on your plate. I’d say it depends on what type of business you run. If you work at an enterprise business and you do not have a full-fledged content marketing team then now is the time to build it. Same is true for a well-funded startup. If you are running a bootstrapped operation and are low on budget then it makes sense to have a small team take care of multiple roles within the content marketing team.

How To Set Up Your Content Team For Success

Proper training documentation is important. Have a clear ramp-up plan that allows 60-90 days for learning the ropes of the business and culture, and for building rapport, trust, and comfort with each other’s way of working.

Make sure that they have everything that they need to succeed.

Also important to understand once you hire a person for a job, stop doing that person’s job. Instead, train and coach that person to do the job well. This transition may not happen in one day but eventually hand over completely.

Gradually hand over responsibilities and then get out of their way. Coach them to get better and work on removing all roadblocks.

Also, build a culture of communication and documentation. Every team member should feel free to communicate their shortcomings, ask for help and share what they know.

There has to be a way to communicate with the team on a regular basis. Good if there is a weekly cadence for this.

During this catch-up, discuss:

• (and revisit the team’s (content) mission
• Short term objective
• What worked
• What did not work? Consider conducting project post-mortems and even if something did not work, it is good to focus on soft positives.
• Also, discuss KPIs for your content, and map your content against them

For effective transfer of knowledge create a culture of documentation. In Work the System, Author, and Entrepreneur, Sam Carpenter shared how he brought everyone together whenever an employee asked him right reply to a customer query, and ask a team member to document his reply. By doing this often he was able to document his replies to almost all customer questions and drastically reduced his time invested in replying customer queries.

I am sure you are wondering about who all you need on your content marketing team to make sure that you win. Here is the answer.

Whom Do You Need On Your Content Marketing Team?

Businesses of all sizes will need following;

1) Content Strategy Lead. A person who guides the content marketing strategy. This can be the chief content officer or director or VP of marketing. This person should have a very good understanding of your industry and business.

Here are a couple of Director of Content Marketing profiles for your reference.

Director of Content Marketing for Slack.

Director of Content Marketing for Lyft.

I encourage you to look for similar profiles on LinkedIn for each of the roles that I have shared below. It will give you a good idea of what these roles entail.

2) Editorial Planner. This person is responsible for management of content through its entire lifecycle. And decides on the topics to cover, what formats are best, what is the process, workflow, also decides what content can be repurposed or integrated to create new pieces of content. She can be called a Managing Editor, content marketing manager or a content strategist.

3) Content Creator. An exceptional person in this role is vital for your content marketing program’s success. For this role, you need someone who has deep expertise in your industry. You should not only be looking at writers but also video producers, and podcasters.

4) Designer. The person in this role is focused on visual branding, creating visual assets, charts, and infographics etc. This person can be called a graphic designer or a creative director depending on the scale of your operation.

5) Editor. The person in this role makes sure that readers do not find typos and grammatical errors in what you publish. A lot of content teams put the responsibility of doing this on the content creator but it is wise to have a different person do this. Creators can focus on creating the best bold content. A good editor also works with the content creator to tell the story in a compelling way. This person can be called a copy editor or just an editor.

The above serves as a base but content marketing team roles do not end here.

Growing companies should also have someone focused on the reach of your content via search, social and email. In an enterprise, there will be different people with titles like SEO expert, social media manager or community manager, and email marketing specialist. In other growing companies these roles will be managed by a digital marketing manager.

Companies that have matured content marketing programs running should have people focused on audience acquisition (usually a director of Audience Development); a marketing technologist to help leverage technology for running an effective content marketing program.

I’ll also suggest having a business analyst on the team to create the original research or collaborate with an external partner to do it.

How To Hire Your Dream Team

Do an assessment of your content marketing maturity stage before you set out to hire the right team.

Reach out to content marketing superstars even if they have not applied. To do it well, you’ll need to cultivate a network. If you do not have it then ask for recommendations. When talking with potential teammates share both good and bad about the role - what are the upsides and what challenges are there.

Hire people that you can respect or love them for something they have (done). It is important because you’ll be working with your team day in and day out so it is good to have someone with whom you’d like to communicate and brainstorm on a regular basis.

Next Steps (Where From Here)

Do not let details in this post scare you. I agree that having a big team helps but there has been content marketing successes that have come out of a small team. Ashish Chopra of ixigo created viral videos that collectively garnered more than 300 million views, all on a small budget and with a small team.

This post is to help you look at the big picture and know how to build a modern content marketing team and while you work on identifying and hiring your team members, you can continue to run your content marketing program with the team you have right now. Chances are that one person will take care of multiple roles in that scenario.

At whatever stage you are - it is ok to start small and then build gradually. It will work fine because there is no point creating a team that you cannot manage.