The recurring themes you see when talking about successful content marketing is people, their skills and specifically teamwork.

With this in mind, we wanted to share how you’d make sure you recruited the right and best content marketers for your company or at least reduce the risk of making poor choices.

We also wanted to think about the Content Marketer being recruited, how would you ensure you’re prepared for an interview, what might you be asked and what might you want to know about the company you’re thinking about joining?

We’ve broken our advice into four parts:

- Knowledge and experience
- Personality fit
- Interview and test
- References

Content marketing knowledge and experience

We know what we want from our team but wanted to cast the net further out to see what was typical for a Content Marketer. To help we have taken a look at Job Descriptions and LinkedIn profiles at the skills that are required and declared. There are recurring themes in Content Marketing around:

Content strategy and planning: It’s an obvious a big part of the job whether acting as a project lead or team member. This means a comprehensive understanding of the content marketing channels is essential along with tools and data.

SEO: Knowledge and experience of SEO concepts, tools and data are a core theme, which given the consumer demand for content that captures organic search demand and the ROI, it’s unsurprising. There are also a lot of SEO’s that have moved to become Content Marketers.

Social media: The channels, data and opportunity for earned and paid media is a significant part of the Content Marketing mix and social has a significant part to play in keeping a company’s brand and product ‘front-of-mind’.

Copy/proofing: The written word is central to all content marketing campaigns, which means you’ve got to love all forms of copywriting and have an ability to manage the sign-off process from brief to sign-off, including proofing.

Visual design: Pictures, graphics, and video in addition to having a grasp of how good visual design works generally.

Brand design: The bigger the company the more guidelines there are that define and provide a framework in which content needs to be produced.

Research: Before great content, there’s often great research, where finding the audience, demand, traffic potential, hooks, detail and angles that can focus energy, spark and fuel ideation is as important as the final output. This for the content marketer often means being comfortable around data and software like Excel and Sheets.

Content briefing: Good brief writing takes skill and should not be considered a low-level skill.

Without the brief there is no content. The better the brief the more likely the creative will return content back that meets your objectives.

Outreach: Publish and they will come is obviously not often true and the ability to identify your most effective channels, media and people to engage with is part of the content marketing process and a skill that can be refined through time.

Measurement: For too many, this is an Achilles heel. Without it though you’re facing a world of professional misery. It’s essential to know what to measure, how to measure it and what the data means.

Internal communications: Content marketing is a multi-person / team enterprise, spanning the whole marketing organisation. Then, of course, there’s the small matter of communicating with and supporting other departments. Being able to communicate professionally and be a great team player is a given for a content marketer.

Platforms, tools and data: All the way through the plan, create, promote and measure cycle there are content marketing software platforms, tools and data. A content marketers familiarity, and depth of experience with marketing technology is an essential part of the job. Not only is it useful that they can use your technology, ideally they’d make you aware of opportunities to evolve or solve specific current challenges with software.

Internal reporting: How are we doing? Everyone wants to know and will expect to be informed in an appropriate and professional way.

That’s a diverse spread of capabilities. Have we missed anything? Knowing what you’re looking for if you’re recruiting and what your strengths and weaknesses are if you’re being recruited is a great start to building an amazing team.

See the full guide on Molecule

 

By Collette Easton, founder and Molecule Agency

 

 

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