A content marketer’s goal is to attract and convert prospects into customers by generating, planning, and distributing valuable material. Same application as John Carlton’s view on copywriting. He is copywriting legend, who once advised that the greatest copywriters understand their field and related areas such as marketing, negotiation, and SEO
A content marketer is a jack-of-all-trades. But precisely what does that imply? What sorts of skills and talents are we talking about? And what kind of knowledge and expertise is required to be a content marketer?
Before I explain what a “content marketer” is, I’ll define it here in general terms.
Then, I’ll show you how I found the five fundamental talents of a professional content marketer.
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A Working Definition of “Content Marketer”
A content marketer creates, distributes, and promotes useful material to attract and convert prospects into consumers. The type of material the content marketer promotes is dependent on what they sell. To put it another way, they inform people to understand, like, and trust them enough to do business with him.
- Identify, choose, and create a product.
- Set the price to a specific number.
- Select the distribution channel to reach the customer where she is (place)
- Develop a promotional plan and execute it.
The product is the content in this instance, according to the model. Payment for access to a blog or other type of content library, ebook, or online training course might be offered at various prices.
You’d use a landing page to direct people to the actual product, which they would interact with or try out. A landing page is a web page designed to entice visitors to get information about it and then sign up for your email list or join your social media community.
A content marketer is a specialist who knows how to position and advertise materials to appeal to the widest audience and persuade those people from prospects to subscribers.
Now, the art of content marketing has been around for some time, but there hasn’t yet been a real-life content marketer.
I had to draw from my own experience, the knowledge of content marketing authorities, and even review a dozen job descriptions for content marketing jobs to construct this list.
Let’s look at five essential marketing skills.
1. Storytelling
A content marketer’s first and most important quality is her nose for a great tale. She understands that a good marketing narrative must include a hero, mentor, objective, obstacle, and lesson. She can also help other companies find their own stories — and even assist her own company in doing so.
This is critical since, as C.C. Chapman and Ann Handley state in their book Content Rules, “[Good content] create value by positioning you as a reliable and valuable source of vendor-agnostic information.”
When content marketer creates written pieces, they understand how to take people out of their normal daily lives and lead them on a journey that will eventually result in a transaction by studying the storytelling methods employed by movie screenwriters, novelists, and short story writers.
The Hero’s Journey is one of our favorite storytelling techniques here at PUMP. It’s content marketing that uses the narrative arc to educate your viewers.
2. Strategy To Apply As A Content Marketer
A fantastic content marketer is also organized: she understands and conveys an organization’s overall content marketing goal.
A content marketer will also establish editorial objectives. For example, she might do any of the following:
- Consider these 13 questions as an exercise.
- Make a visual representation of the people and issues you want to address.
- Make a customer journey map.
If required, the content marketer will develop buyer personas and provide them to the team.
She’ll be able to audit a website to clean up any broken, outdated, or neglected content. And let’s not forget that all content marketers have strong research abilities.
Do you want to examine that last point in further detail? For example, in her book Everybody Writes, Ann Handley says:
“Before you ink, consider carefully. To find your key point, three questions should be asked about every piece of material you produce.
- Why am I putting this together?
- What am I trying to communicate with this essay?
- “Why should the individuals I’m aiming to reach be concerned about this?”
I’d like to add a fourth point: Who are you writing to? Have a basic understanding of your readers. That is the essence of research.
An adept content marketer can also oversee a content project from start to finish, including planning to execution to promotion, while it will not be her primary skill set.
She also relies on her people skills, such as listening, empathy, storytelling, and bargaining.
3. Creating Text Is One of the Most Time-Consuming Parts of Any Project
Blogs/websites, ebooks, and infographics are all popular destinations for text.
It’s in your best interests to be a great marketing writer — someone with such features as:
- Average understanding of SEO
- Usability knowledge
- Exceptional social media knowledge (see skill number four below for further information)
- Excellent grasp of copywriting (no, content marketing and copywriting are not the same).
This is significant since she will most likely write articles for other websites as a guest posting technique.
A content marketer understands how to write catchy headlines, find old material to update and republish, and reverse-engineer old material into new forms (such as converting an infographic or blog post into a SlideShare).
4. Social Media Skills To Use As A Content Marketer
Understanding social media is a necessary skill for digital marketing professionals.
Many content marketers are becoming more specialized, supplying the growing number and variety of platforms. However, most content marketers excel at one or two platforms and have a basic knowledge of others.
View, a content marketer is always experimenting with the newest shiny social media gadgets. This allows her to assess a new platform’s potential and translate it to the appropriate client.
She’ll know which type of content performs best on each platform. Twitter is ideal for promoting new material, while Facebook is better for engaging your audience in discussions and surveys. Pinterest is great for sharing photographs.
Of course, a savvy content marketer is also aware of the perils of digital sharecropping — and unwilling to keep quiet.
“Don’t spend your time delivering content where your audiences don’t want you to be,” write Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach, authors of Content Strategy for the Web.
Find out where your target audience hangs out. And ask for their consent to communicate with them.
5. Subscription Assets
Affiliates are the lifeblood of many businesses. You and I both know that there would be no way for you to make money from your efforts without affiliate commissions. So the question is: What makes a good affiliate program?
Not only will they be in charge of creating the content for these subscription models, but they’ll also need to understand how each one works — or even have the ability to manage, measure, and monitor them.
For example, a small firm might entrust the job of writing, uploading, monitoring, writing, and measuring their email marketing campaigns to only one content marketer.
As a result, dear content marketer, choose carefully. Otherwise, you’ll end up spreading yourself too thin.
Stay one step ahead of your customers’ demands by anticipating their needs.
Let me conclude with a quote from Catherine the Great, who seized control of Russia in 1762 and deposed her husband, Emperor Peter III:
While Catherine the Great discusses governing citizens, the underlying idea here is leadership. As a result, I believe this advice is equally valid for content marketers, who are, in essence, leaders of content in a sense.
She must champion the content cause as a boss, then rally resources to create it — and, in the end, create content that her audience wants.
Do You Think You’re up to the Task?
Keep this in mind, content marketer: we must be one step ahead of our customer’s expectations by creating an audience before developing a product.
We must also develop mastery of empathy, which means comprehending their expectations and concerns to better relate to them. Taking a position in their shoes.
Are You Up to the Task?
By the way, what characteristics of a content marketer do you think would be on this list?