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Role of a Content Marketing Manager Demystified

Content marketing manager

A Content Marketing Manager plays the captain of the ship for all the Content Marketing activities in a business. The role includes everything from developing a Content Marketing Strategy for a business to getting it executed and tracking the results. As a Content Marketing Manager, you’ve got to have an understanding of the overall Digital Marketing strategy within the organization and drive Content Marketing Campaigns that would fetch the best business outcomes.

Let’s now look at some of the key roles and responsibilities of a Content Marketing Manager.

Role of a Content Marketing Manager

#1 Develop an Audience Persona

First and foremost, as a Content Marketing Manager, you need to build an audience persona for your business. This will help you to understand your target audience. It is your responsibility to pass on the understanding of your target audience to your team. Your persona should include the character sketch of a fictitious person from your target group. Create a few slides on the demographics and psychographics of this person and present it to your team. Give them deeper insights into the behavioral patterns of your audience. Your training session should enlighten them on the challenges and preferences of this person. Finally, you should be able to convey to your team, on how to create content that would appeal to this and similar individuals.

Content marketing manager
Target audience meme

#2 Defining Goals of Content Marketing

The next step is to define the objectives of your campaigns. Some of the objectives include driving more traffic to your website, getting more engagement on social media and so on. As a Content Marketing Manager, it is your responsibility to drive results from each of the Content Marketing Campaigns. It is therefore essential to define your goals on campaign level as well as periodically. Use your past goals, budgets and competitor campaigns as benchmarks while adding goals to your Content Marketing activities. Suppose you are running a contest on Facebook and you have a daily budget of Rs 500 to run a Facebook ad on the same. Considering that you wish to get more participation in the contest, you can add a tentative figure on the number of engagements(likes, comments, and shares) your campaign will fetch. Similarly, you can add the number of conversions you are expecting from each of your Content Marketing activities.

#3 Building an SEO Strategy

Content marketing manager
Search ranking meme

Content Marketing is about solving problems that your target audience is facing. As a Content Marketing Manager, you also play the role of an SEO strategist. Your Content Marketing Plan would stem from your keyword research. You must have an understanding of the different stages of the buyer’s journey. Do your keyword research for each of the stages and create a bucket list. A Content Marketing Manager must have an understanding of keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest. It is his/her responsibility to refresh the keyword list on a monthly basis.  It is the Content Marketing Manager’s responsibility to create a guest blogging and digital PR plan for the brand. The strategy is the key driver for getting quality backlinks and brand mentions much needed for search rankings and brand building.

# 4 Creating a Brand Strategy

As a Content Marketing Manager, you are also the brand strategist in your company. It is your role to understand your brand and its values. These values should come across in your content. Your campaigns should etch an image of your brand in the hearts of your audience. You need to create content guidelines that your team can follow. These would be relevant for all consumer touch points and campaigns. These guidelines include the content tone, the type and color of the images and your brand values. As a Content Marketing Manager, you must have a vision for your brand and how you wish to take it to the next level.

#5 Developing a Content Calendar

A content calendar is at the heart of your Content Marketing activities. It is the role of a Content Marketing Manager to build up a weekly and monthly calendar, and refresh it once it’s executed. It flows chronologically and includes important dates, events, and festivities around which some of your key campaigns will be conceptualized. It includes the campaigns and the content pieces you are going to produce during the coming weeks and months. A calendar works as an action plan for you and your team to implement in each subsequent period. 

#6 Leading the Content Marketing Team

It is a role of the Content Marketing Manager to build up and lead a team of writers and SEO strategists within or outside the organization. You need to train the team on the latest trends in Content Marketing. As a team leader, you need to develop systems and processes for your team. You need to appoint specialists for content creation, editing, content posting and promotion, keyword research, SEO analysis and image creation respectively.

#7 Defining Key Metrics and Measuring the Results

Content Marketing Managers must ensure results. You can have monthly meetings to track and analyze the fruits of your efforts. Have a brainstorm on what worked and what did not. Revise your strategies from your learnings at each step. You need to track your key metrics using tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, and Hubspot etc. The results of each of the activities are measured using different metrics. Let’s take a look at some of these:

  1. Blog content: website traffic, rankings, content shares, blog subscribers, conversions
  2. Social media campaigns: reach, engagement, clicks, followers, conversions
  3. Email campaigns: open rate, clicks, conversions

Compare with previous campaigns to ensure improvement in the results.

#8 Co-ordination with Other Teams

It is the responsibility of the Content Marketing Manager to coordinate with other departments like web development and email marketing. You need to provide them with the content they require for developing website pages and newsletters. Content Marketing Managers work closely with sales teams for getting customer insights and ideating relevant campaigns. They also interact with the sales team to create testimonial content for the business. 

#9 Edit Content

Content marketing manager
What? Typo? Meme

As a Content Marketing Manager, you should be able to create and edit content when required. You must work towards improving the final quality of content that is being published or being sent out to guest blogs. Content Marketing Managers are diligent editors and also have a basic understanding of different writing styles. They are expected to possess basic graphic designing skills as well. 

Qualities of a Good Content Marketing Manager

A good Content Marketing Manager excels in both strategic as well as storytelling skills. Content Marketing Managers are skillful project managers and proactive team players. They are constant learners and keep themselves abreast of the latest trends in their niche as well as in Content Marketing. Besides being clever wordsmiths they have an understanding of human psychology and customer buying behavior.  They are always on the lookout for trends, news, and collaborations that could help them create outstanding content campaigns. It is their duty to empathize with the audience and help them through useful content. Expert Content Marketing Managers have journalistic as well as copywriting skills to work to their advantage.

Content marketing manager
Key skills of content marketers

Over to You

As a Content Marketing Manager, you have to have multiple skill sets. You need to simultaneously work as a content strategist, an SEO strategist and a brand strategist. As a driver of content campaigns in your organization, you have a challenging job of ensuring quality as well as results. You need to stay hungry and updated on the campaigns and brands that are winning the game in your industry. You need to strive to create strategies and campaigns that leave a mark. You need to be good with budgeting and ensure that you push those activities that get you the best overall ROI. You should work closely with your team to get the best out of them. Make sure you are giving them enough time and flexibility to let their creative juices flowing. Be emotional about your brand, dive deep into its values and you will be able to produce a distinct voice and language for it.  Have a conviction about your vision and get consensus for it from your leadership team. Be persistent and don’t hesitate to take a step back and apply your learnings to get even better.

The demand for able Content Marketing Managers/Specialists has been growing over the past few years and the trend will continue in the years to come as well.

75 percent of companies are either “increasing” or “significantly increasing” their investment in content marketing. Curata

Content Marketing Managers have tremendous opportunities to take up senior roles in Content Marketing and Digital Marketing. With experience, you also have the option to set up your own Freelance Content Marketing Business.

If you are passionate about Content Marketing then this is the right time to acquire the skills and get going. Looking to get in-depth knowledge of Content Marketing for career growth? You can enroll in our Certified Digital Marketing Course.

Avatar of abhishek talreja
Abhishek Talreja
Abhishek Talreja is curious about everything content and marketing. He loves to keep it short, simple and meaningful. He has been published on sites like MarketingProfs, SitePoint and SEMrush. He is the founder of Prolific Content Marketing.

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