Once upon a time, in a search landscape long past, all you needed to get a lift in online visibility was a decent writer. You could come up with some topics, target some keywords, write a few blog posts, and you were good to go.
Times have changed.
It’s now the age of content marketing, which has grown into a vast industry all its own. In fact, 61% of consumers say they feel better about a company that creates custom content, while 76% of marketers say they will produce more content in 2016.
Today, writers are only a small part of the composite marketing teams that content marketing requires. It’s not just about writing anymore: it’s about creating and distributing content.
Content Marketing Institute has defined it in a way that shows you the breadth of the industry:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Or as entrepreneur Avinash Kaushik puts it, “Content is anything that adds value to the reader's life.”
Creating really great content is harder than ever because of the sheer volume of content being published today – so much so that some marketers feel we’re hitting a saturation point and content
marketing is no longer effective.
Really though, it’s only ineffective if you don’t work to deliver the highest quality.
You won’t get that quality from hiring just any writer. The days of generic 500-word posts are gone. Now you need to hire a content marketer with a broad range of skills who can craft long-form copy and a variety of other value-based content.
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“Longer posts usually perform better on every level,” says Neil Patel, co-founder of KISSmetrics.
Here’s a list of the 5 essential skills that you should be looking for when hiring a content marketer.
1. A master wordsmith
I should start this list with the obvious and most important skill – the ability to write well.
Writing well, specifically for sales and the web, is not a simple skill. A master wordsmith is someone who not only has an expert-level understanding of grammar, punctuation, and spelling, but who also knows how to write in an engaging way that makes an emotional connection and tells a story.
I’ve met plenty of people with expensive college degrees in writing and journalism who couldn’t produce an engaging piece of content to save their life. I’ve also met writers with little more than a high school diploma who have created pieces that went viral.
There’s more to mastering the writing side, including:
- Crafting easy-to-digest content
- Simplifying complex topics
- Creating perfect transitions and compelling conclusions
- Understanding how to write for a specific audience
- Knowing how to map content to a specific part of the sales funnel
That last one is really important, because it leads to the next critical skill:
2. Knowing how to sell
A content marketer who is keenly aware of the role that content plays in selling understands how to craft content that creates the most engaging user experience. That user experience is the heart of conversion optimization.
The user experience is how someone interacts with, feels about, and uses your website and your content. While it’s broader than just the content, your content is a huge part of that experience.
While most of the work done by a content marketer is value-based, it’s constantly and subtly converting the reader and moving them through the sales funnel. If the person creating the content doesn’t know how to sell the benefits/value and drive a conversion, then what you’re left with is poorly-crafted content that might (emphasis on might) bring you top-of-funnel traffic.
It’s certainly not going to nurture leads or push your leads down into the bottom of the sales funnel.
The format, the type, and the tone of content it uses all change based on the sales cycle to which it aligns. Knowing how to sell, and understanding how to position content for a specific audience at each phase, is a critical skill in content marketing.
3. Being aware of the scope of marketing
A content marketer should always understand that they are part of the marketing industry as a whole. When you hire a content marketer, you’re looking for a T-shaped employee – one who has cross-discipline competence.
A writer or content marketer is often highly-specialized, with a strong expertise in creating content. That’s the vertical line of the T. Across the top of the T are other marketing disciplines like technical SEO, UX, PR, communication, and analytics. Those are more shallow. Stack those across the top of the deep expertise in content production, and you have the T.
“Content is king, but marketing is queen and runs the household,” says Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of Vaynermedia.
When a content marketer realizes that their role fits neatly within the broader realm of marketing, it helps them produce far more compelling content as part of a much broader strategy.
4. Specialization in certain industries
I’ll be the first to admit that there are skilled writers and content marketers out there who can quickly learn about an industry and produce amazing, value-driven content. But that’s not typically the case. The days when a freelance writer could deliver maximum-value content in any industry at the drop of a hat are pretty much long gone.
To create content that is 10x better than what is already out there, a successful content marketer often specializes in one or a few niches in order to become an expert.
For example, you wouldn’t hire a general freelance writer to produce high-level articles on advanced topics in the SaaS niche. You would want a content marketer with a mass of experience in MRR churn, LTV calculations, and CACs specific to the industry. Without that, you’re severely limiting the value of the content, and the audience will see through it.
A skilled content marketer has experience and a specialization you can leverage.
5. A creative flood
The most successful content marketers know that it’s not just about writing. While writing is at the heart of a lot of what you do with content (like script production for videos), other creative aspects need to be involved.
That means being able to visualize graphics and design for things like website user experience, as well as infographics, print pieces, and digital media kits. It also means having a creative producer mindset for developing video and image concepts to supplement the creative and compelling writing they do.
At the same time, a creative content marketer is able to look at the big picture in order to develop a documented content strategy that defines goals, sets milestones, establishes KPIs, and looks at all the types of content you can leverage over the next 8-18+ months.
Each of these skills is nice to have on their own, and you’ll find some measure of success if you have a writer or content marketer who has one of these, or a few. Tie them all together, though, and you now have a valuable asset that can propel your business into the view of your audience and maintain dominant market share.
Content marketing has changed. With that change comes the need for content marketers with a much broader skill set like those listed above. Simply hiring a writer is no longer good enough to gain and hold visibility. The greatest success will come from a content marketer with a skill set resembling a Swiss Army knife.
What skills did you look for when hiring a content marketer? Share in the comments below.
