TL;DR
- Content marketers are creatives who can do math—and boost the bottom line
- The best content marketers are writers or creatives first
- You need a content marketer who doubles as an expert in your field
So your business—perhaps a web3 or blockchain company? 😅—needs content. That’s understandable. You have many options to meet your content marketing needs, ranging from hiring in-house staff to commissioning an agency to working with yours truly (ahem, a content marketing consultant).
No matter how you choose to meet your organization’s content needs, you require content marketing talent that puts you ahead of the competition. Ideally far ahead. But what constitutes an exceptional content marketer? Keep reading to understand six ways that your content marketer needs to rock.
1. Your content marketer aligns content strategy with key business objectives
What matters most to your business? That’s the first thing that savvy content marketers want to know. A content marketer who clearly understands your business priorities is best equipped to map a content strategy to those objectives.
How can a content marketer learn about your business to create a tailored plan? Here are some tactics that content marketers use to produce relevant content strategies—
- Conduct a content audit: Completing a content audit is usually a content marketer’s first step to developing an impactful content strategy. A content audit is a lot like a wellness check for the content on your website and other digital platforms.
- Identify available resources: Effective content marketers seek to match content strategy output with the available human, time, and financial resources. Getting clarity on the resources available is crucial to creating a content strategy that can be successfully executed.’
- Define the target audience: Who’s your tribe? Another early and important step for content marketers is to define your target audience—the group of people who most benefit from your product or service.
- Meet the team: High-EQ content marketers know the importance of face time—or, let’s face it, Zoom meetings—and want to meet your team! Synchronous meetings with engineers, product managers, community builders, and other marketers are all important as primary research for a content marketer.
- Research your competitors: Who are your primary competitors? Content marketers always research your competitors—both the business and digital kind—to guide the development of your organization’s content marketing strategy.
- Listen to your users: What are your users saying about your service or product? What pain points do they have? Empathic content marketers hang out on all the right platforms to learn what your users need.
As your business evolves, so should your content strategy. Your shrewd content marketer updates your content strategy to constantly match the most important needs of your business.
2. You want to read what your content marketer writes
What’s the last enjoyable content that you consumed? When’s the last time that you read something especially informative? You need a marketer who produces content that genuinely educates and entertains your target audience.
Let’s look at some examples of content marketing done right—
- Chainlink: The decentralized blockchain oracle network uses a tone that is informative and also slightly silly. Case in point—a 2022 blog explains the “reason why your grandma is probably not yet an active Web3 user.”
- Nexo: This crypto exchange and lending platform has content marketing on lockdown, using a tone for its newsletter that makes it hard to stop reading. The company describes itself as “disrupting the financial system, one bit at a time.”
- Slack: You may live on Slack all day, but do you ever read the platform’s blog? The Slack team uses content to show that, professionally, they’ve got your back. A February 2023 blog (for example) commiserates that “a meeting is just as likely to be a total time suck as it is to be a productive gathering of the minds.”
3. The bottom line matters—a lot!—to your content marketer
Your exceptional content marketer is committed to using content to maximize the profitability of your business. Content marketing can be fun—it usually is!—but ultimately is a business function like any other of your professional activities.
How can a content marketer show that she cares about your return on investment? Check out these tactics that marketers can (should!) use to maximize your content ROI—
- Choose content types carefully: Some types of content—like email—have historically high ROIs. Other types of content—like short-form video—have historically high engagement rates with certain user demographics. You can choose to produce only the most cost-effective types of content that are best suited for your audience in order to maximize your content strategy ROI.
- Prioritize distribution channels: Just like with content types, some digital platforms and channels are more cost effective than others—and your audience doesn’t hang out everywhere. Meet your audience where they’re at (only there!) to maximize the profitability of your content.
- Repurpose and refresh: Your content, especially evergreen content, can have a long shelf life and grow your business significantly over time. Content marketers can stretch your marketing dollars and boost ROI by repurposing and frequently updating your existing content. This tactic is especially important as your content strategy matures and your mountain of content continues to grow.
You care a lot about your bottom line—so hire a content marketer who does, too.
4. Your content marketer can do math
You might love the creativity and style of your content marketer, but how strong are his quantitative skills? You can hire a content marketer with robust analytical capabilities to ensure that the impact of your content marketing strategy is being thoughtfully measured.
What does it mean to thoughtfully measure and analyze a content marketing strategy? You need a content marketer who can—
- Get data: Is your content marketer a master of Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and at least a few SEO tools? Your content marketer’s first quantitative strength should be procuring relevant data.
- Analyze the data: Analytical content marketers review data, often from multiple sources, to identify content gaps, content strengths, SEO issues, and other focus areas for your content strategy.
- Ask questions: A good content marketer can gather data and use it to make a decision—but a great content marketer understands the “why” behind the data. Ask questions until you understand the why.
- Make data-driven decisions: Your numbers-loving content marketer is comfortable with—and even prefers!—using data to help drive business and strategy decisions.
5. Your content marketer doubles as an industry expert
Is your content marketer an industry professional? Many—not all—content marketers have a niche, which often coincides with their professional work history. You can hire a content marketer who already knows a lot about your business, boosting the odds of your company benefiting from a content marketing strategy.
What’s so great about hiring a content marketer who body-doubles as an industry expert? Let’s take a peek—
- Total know-it-all: Your content marketer a.k.a. former industry professional understands many nuances of your highly technical business. She relishes in producing factually correct content that hits all the right angles throughout the buyer journey.
- Known by all: With so many years of experience in your industry, your content marketer is known (and valued!) by many. This social capital is what you need to get valuable backlinks and find guest blogging and podcast opportunities.
- No shortage of ideas: A good content marketer develops a strategy—but a great content marketer devises many. A marketer with extremely deep industry knowledge can develop a customized content strategy that’s well suited to meet your specific business needs.
6. You feel cherished by your content marketer
Are you getting undivided attention from your content marketer? Content marketing is important to your business, not to mention expensive—meaning that you deserve the best from your content marketing provider.
What are some ways that a content marketer can show the love? Let’s name a few—
- Allocate top talent: Your content marketer may be a team of one, or perhaps operates as an agency. Whatever the organizational structure, you need top talent devoted to the success of your content marketing strategy.
- Prioritize deadlines: A content marketer is only as good as her last deliverable. You need a content marketer who never (ever, ever) misses a deadline.
- Communicate well: In good times and bad, your exceptional content marketer stays in contact. You need a content marketer who excels at communicating as much as she thrives on producing great content for your business.
And the best way to show the love—show results. What better way to feel cherished than by getting what exactly you need from your content marketer? Your go-to content marketing wizard knows just how to uplift your business, again and again.
