A 10-Step Guide to Building a Strong Content Marketing Team

Having a strong content marketing team is the first step towards launching a successful content marketing campaign and achieving the goals you set for your promotional efforts.

However, not every company has a strong team like that. Moreover, not everyone knows who a content marketing team should consist of and how it normally functions. Without further ado, here are the steps that  you need to take as you gather a strong content marketing team for your business.

1. Choose Your Hiring Criteria

First and foremost, you need to choose the criteria you will be using to hire people for your content marketing team. Having specific hiring criteria will help you find the most qualified and “right” people for your content marketing team. Once you have a list of your criteria, it will be a lot easier for you to define your hiring workflow. Mapping out your hiring process can help you make sure that you are maximizing your tools and resources as you start building your own content marketing team. Here are three things you must take into consideration as you hire your content marketing team members:

• Education – Whether they have relevant education (though this is usually less important than expertise and experience).
• Expertise – Whether they have relevant knowledge and skills to perform their respective tasks.
• Experience – Whether they have relevant experience that could guide their decisions and choices.

2. Start from the Chief Content Officer (COO)

Before you hire most of the specialists for your content marketing team, you should first hire the Chief Content Officer or COO. This person will be in charge of everything your content marketing team does.

Essentially, by hiring the COO first, you can discuss their vision for promoting your company with content marketing. You can also discuss in more detail what kind of professionals they would like to see on their team to achieve the goals you and they want to achieve.

3. Find a Content Marketing Strategist

Speaking of goals, the next person you need to hire is a Content Marketing Strategist. This person will help you set objectives for your content marketing activities and innovate your strategy over time.

This specialist is particularly important for your team because they will help you evolve. It’s good to find what works for you and stick to that, but you should also be able to try new things in content marketing – and that’s what a strategist is for.

4. Hire Writers and Editors

Next, you will need to hire people who will be creating the content itself. These are writers and editors. If your company is relatively small, you may not need many writers and editors (but you can still expand your team in the future).

This way, you can cut down on expenses while producing consistently good content.

5. Add Designers to Your Team

In addition to writers and editors, you will also need to find designers. These could be illustrators, graphic designers, and other kinds of professionals who specialize in visual content creation.

Designers are particularly important for maintaining your visual branding. Writers and editors take care of the stylistic and tonal choices in text, but designers are the ones who use visual content to “show” your brand to your audience.

6. Look for Relevant Specialists

In case you decide that you need other kinds of professionals for your team, you can continue looking for relevant specialists. For instance, you may want to hire video editors or podcast hosts.

Just make sure that you have enough resources for a bigger content marketing team. Not every company has a big enough budget to be able to pay all their employees fairly and expect good work from them.

7. Onboard and Train New Hires

Once you have hired all kinds of specialists for your content marketing team, you will need to onboard and train them effectively. Of course, if you already have a marketing team (that doesn’t work with content marketing), you can let that team and your HR team handle the onboarding and training. To make your new hire onboarding more efficient, you can setup a new hire preparation Kanban board.

Your content marketing team members need to understand what your business stands for (vision, mission, values, company culture) and what their responsibilities will be. In other words, how do they fit in? Additionally, you will also explain what you expect their setup to be (i.e. how they work with the main marketing team and other departments and how they function as a team of their own).

8. Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Now that you have a team of professionals, you can work with them to create a content marketing strategy for your business. Make sure that your content marketing plan includes:

• Objectives – These are your marketing goals, both short-term and long-term ones. You can also define individual and more specific goals for each campaign.
• Standards – These include content quality and topics, branding requirements, and even internal and external communication policies.
• Resources – These are the tools you will be using to create and manage your content as well as the budget you have for your content marketing needs.
• Schedule – This is the content calendar you will be using to publish your content consistently across multiple platforms.
• Documentation – These are the documents that have all the information regarding your content marketing and everything related to it.

Leveraging Kanban for Your Marketing Strategy

Kanban is a project management tool that can be extremely helpful for you in terms of content marketing. For instance, you can use it for tracking your publishing and editorial tasks by setting up an editorial calendar board or a content creation board. You can use Kanban for all kinds of marketing-related purposes, including scheduling, planning, and more. If video marketing is a part of your strategy, you can also create your own Kanban board for video production and promotion.

9. Plan Out a Path for Promotion

There will be employees on your team who will want to ascend the career ladder over time. For these employees (and for everyone else on your content marketing team), you will need to plan out and offer a clear path for promotion. By incorporating strategies for promotional marketing into your career development framework, you can ensure that there are structured opportunities for growth aligned with their aspirations, fostering both loyalty and motivation among your team.

By showing that you value their abilities and ambitions, you will encourage them to stay at your company and long for you long-term while reducing your turnover rate. Loyal employees who gain experience working for you and then implement it to improve your content marketing campaigns are some of the most valuable professionals that you should always aim to keep.

10. Diversify Your Team If Needed

Last but not least, don’t be afraid to update your team with more employees if you see that it would be the right thing to do (whether before you launch your first campaign, during it, or after). This is particularly important for diversifying your team.

A diverse team with professionals coming from different backgrounds will help you understand more types of potential customers as well as brainstorm ideas more effectively. You will have more opinions and perspectives on the same topic which will enable you to see almost every aspect of the said subject matter.

Conclusion

All in all, creating a truly strong content marketing team may take some time because you will need to find the right people, train them, and create a marketing strategy with them. However, it will all be worth it because a good team can properly promote your business and take your brand to a new level.