As a consumer, there’s no doubt you’ve been exposed to content marketing in one of its many forms over the past few years. The American Express OPEN Forum, infographics on calculating your hourly rate as a freelancer, and 4,000 word blog posts about launching a business while working are all examples of content marketing at work.
Chances are you’ve admired the length at which more and more people and brands are willing to go, in the name of building a long-term relationship with their potential customers.
Earlier this year, the Harvard Business Review proclaimed that marketing is dead, and that loyalty killed it. But what does that even mean for those looking to forge a career in the field of marketing right now?
We are all frequently seeking solutions to our problems. Often, the first destination we go to is Google. The odds are in our favor that we’ll be able to find multiple possible solutions just from running a simple search in a few seconds. These solutions often come in the form of online tools that make us more productive at work, products that make our lives easier, and experiences that help us grow in both our personal lives and careers.
This means that the tools, products, and brands that are willing to offer as much value as possible to their prospective customers—without requiring them pay or sign up for a seven-day trial—are going to build the most meaningful customer relationships.
As an active consumer and experienced content marketer myself, I can attest that establishing genuine, value-driven consumer relationships is how today’s smartest companies are seeking to grow their influence and business.
In order to fit the new mold for becoming a relevant marketer today, your focus and skill sets need to reflect your ability to build engaging, powerful consumer relationships with your users.
Here’s what it’ll take to land (and excel at) the perfect content marketing job.
Organizational skills
Central to scaling your success as a content marketer is having the ability to outsource content creation of blog posts, eBooks, infographics, and case studies to a pool of freelance contributors. Depending upon your content production benchmarks, you could be responsible for delivering anywhere from two to 10 high-quality blog posts per week, an infographic or two per month, an eBook every month, and a case study each quarter.
To help stay on track, I personally manage several freelance writers and keep them stacked up with at least two posts at all times, so they can keep working on new topic concepts that we either pitch them or they bring to my attention.
As a content marketer, you’re going to be juggling a lot of different tasks, external communications, relationships, contributors, and content initiatives all at the same time. To stay sane, you’re also going to need to enlist the help of task management apps that can keep your daily, weekly, and monthly deliverables on track. I prefer Trello for keeping my personal task management on track.
Communication skills
There’s still no way around it: you need to be a master at communicating, sorting, and managing a growing Gmail inbox as a content marketer. Even if your company uses an internal chat platform like Slack to cut down on email volume, your primary contact medium with the outside world will be email.
Take some time to familiarize yourself with Gmail’s Rapportive and Boomerang extensions for Chrome. Rapportive scans all email addresses in your inbox, and when you hover over one within a conversation, it provides you with information about the contact, pulled from their LinkedIn profile. It’s an amazing tool for guessing email addresses and getting informed about who you’re reaching out to. Boomerang allows you to schedule personalized emails to send at a later date, and also lets you trigger emails to resurface in your inbox, for a reminder to follow up with a contact.
Technical skills
In content marketing, it’s critical to be able to communicate the effectiveness of your content to fellow co-workers and executives. There’s an art and science to learning how to accurately track how much traffic your content drives, where your visitors are coming from, how many leads you’re capturing, and if you’re generating revenue from your content. By using a combination of Google Analytics and Mixpanel or Kissmetrics, you’ll be able to piece together all of the metrics that’ll help support your cause and show you the types of content that perform best with your audience.
Unless you know that the company you’re targeting for your dream job is using a CMS platform other than WordPress to power their blog and content engine, it’s safe to assume they’re on WordPress. The best way to build your skills with WordPress is to start your own blog and install WordPress as your CMS. Check out this in-depth guide for getting started with your own WordPress blog, if you need the practice.
Photo credit: Lauren Kallen