If you have created content or worked on digital marketing you may have come across the role of a content marketing manager in your agency. In this post we will share the role of content marketing manager and what he/she can do to grow your business online.
But first it is important to understand how content marketing fits into digital marketing.
How Content Marketing Fits into Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is a channel of marketing to build an online following for your brand on the internet. This could be through website traffic, email subscribers or YouTube channel followers.
Whatever the platform, the aim is to build brand awareness and convert visitors into leads and customers. Email marketing, social media campaigns, content marketing etc. are all part of digital marketing.
Content marketing forms the foundation of all digital marketing, since it is content that gives value to your visitors and converts them into your loyal audience, followers and subscribers. Content consists of text posts, infographics, videos, audio podcasts etc.
No matter what strategy you use digitally, good content is always going to be essential for it to succeed. For example, email marketing will require regular content that your subscribers find relevant and helpful. Without helpful content nobody will open your emails and they might even unsubscribe from the list.
Content marketing manager is someone who creates high quality helpful content with the aim of growing a loyal audience online. There are many activities and processes that form part of creating content. Let’s see what these activities are to understand them better.
Scope of Work
Content creation starts with researching deeply on the target audience. Understanding reader’s pain points and building content around it is essential to create relevant content. Without this, you risk putting out content that no one is even interested in reading.
Content managers can build on it if this information is already available with marketing department in the form of buyer personas and target market studies done. If not, then it is the content manager’s job to find out about their audience.
Converting knowledge gained on target audience into a content strategy is the next step. This involves setting measurable targets (growth in subscribers, increased CTR, increases conversions etc.) and developing a plan to achieve this. There are two parts to this-
1.Content planning – involves building a plan that details what content topics should be covered, in what format and on what channel. For example, a content manager may choose YouTube for educational videos or write a long form content on the blog.
Here the content marketing manager decides everything down to titles for the blog to the timeline for completion of each content piece. This plan has to be flexible enough to change in response to audience, market and competitors.
2. Content Plan Execution – This is the process of executing the content plan. Activities involve writing, video production, social media posting, sending emails and audience engagement. There is team of writers, video production, social media manager etc. that the manager must work with.
Lastly, content marketing manager must monitor content performance parameters and come up with ideas to continuously better the content. Feedback and customer engagement is an important part of successful content strategy.
Roles of a Content Marketing Manager
As you can see the scope of content marketing manager’s role is big. It stretches from research to project management and more. Therefore there are many roles and duties that he or she must deliver on.
- Manage Team
A content marketing manager has to manage a team of writers, SEO specialist, video producer and social media manager. Depending of the size of the company some people may take on multiple roles.
It is advisable to have a team doing all of this as managing all of this by one person is very difficult for a brand. Some start-ups may start with only person for content but if you want to run campaigns that have a big impact then you will have to grow your team.
So he/she must also have management and leadership skills to manage a diverse set of people.
- Content Strategy
As mentioned above setting a content strategy and plan (both are different) is the role of content marketing manager. This strategy must fit well with the overall marketing strategy of the company (offline marketing) and the business goals.
This requires someone who has experience and far sighted vision for the brand. This is why it is advisable to have someone with a good amount of digital marketing experience as a content manager.
- Project Management
Implementing content plan requires project management role. Not everything will go as planned and there might be hurdles like delay in content completion, video production, negative feedback by audience. Content marketing manager has to be quick to make changes in such a case. He or she has to make sure all the projects within the plan are working in coordination.
- Cross-functional collaboration
There are many functions a content manager has to work with. In fact there is no department that will not come in contact with content team .They have to work with products team to understand the product/service, collaborate with marketing team to work within branding guidelines and customer insights.
The more people content marketing manager works with, the better will be the content created.
- Initiating Marketing Campaigns
Marketing campaigns give a boost to your online audience and increases brand recall.
Content marketing manager proactively launches online marketing campaigns. This could be influencer marketing campaign, email campaign, social media giveaways or live webinars. He is responsible for generating new ideas and testing them out too.
Putting It All Together
Content marketing manager is responsible for making a content strategy and executing it to grow online audience. Their role starts from studying the target audience to developing valuable and relevant content for them.
For this they manage a diverse set of team and collaborate with almost all functions to come up with content that converts visitors into leads and customers.
