For some time, content earned a prime spot in the marketer's playbook, and content marketing management skyrocketed in importance. Content marketing became essential in creating content, coordinating its production, and measuring its value.
However, content marketing management has also become quite complicated. Marketers are often faced with managing several unintuitive tools and processes apart from the core marketing activities.
This article will highlight the effective management of content marketing by building a strategy. You will also know in detail about the crucial role of a content marketing manager.
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The Emergence of Content Marketing Management
There is no doubt that content marketing is an indispensable part of a brand's marketing and advertising strategy in the digital era.
The traditional forms of advertising are no longer as effective as they were because of the decreasing popularity of the old-school media.
While digital marketing and advertising enable companies to target potential customers with precision, consumers are growing indifferent to ads. An entire quarter of the US population uses an ad blocker.
In such a situation, content marketing management has become essential to break through the noise and ad blockers and reach new customers.
Today, a content marketer's role is more demanding because of the value of high-quality content. Managing content marketing involves conceptualizing a strategy, conducting keyword research, producing great content, publishing, promoting, and proving ROI while managing every step of the complex process.
What is a Content Marketing Management Strategy?
Content marketing is a way of growing your business through audio, visual, and written content.
A content marketing management strategy is a roadmap for reaching business goals through content. Experts recommend spending as much time as necessary to formulate this roadmap because content marketing becomes easier when planned.
A content marketing strategy is also an organized effort to create and distribute relevant, consistent, and valuable content. The goal is to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and drive profitable customer actions. You can generate leads, boost SEO, and improve conversions with a well-delineated strategy.
Further, a strategy defines your goals, audience, and unique values so that your team can create more compelling content on every channel.
Depending on your business requirements, the strategy can focus on either one form of content, such as blogs or videos, or merge different content formats into a single design.
Despite the modern times, 63% of organizations still do not have the tools and processes to create and implement a content marketing management strategy.
Organizations can seek professional content marketing services if they are a startup and lack the budget to invest in such services. In the next section, we detail how to create a content marketing strategy in a few easy steps.
5 Steps To Creating a Content Marketing Management Strategy
You can start with the following steps to create content that connects with the audience and converts:
Step 1: Define the Marketing Goals
It is necessary to determine what your content should achieve for your company. You must choose specific goals and objectives that reflect your business realities. This also helps in the personalization of the content.
Step 2: Research Your Target Audience
You must study the audience demographics and determine their values and pain points. Most content marketers say that connecting with the audience on these issues drives the success of their strategy.
Step 3: Select the Content Formats and Distribution Channels
Will you be using visual or written content or both? Also, determine whether your audience finds your content through organic, social media, or search. Once decided, focus on the content type that will genuinely resonate with the audience.
Step 4: Perform a Content Audit
The next step is to compile a list of content assets you have and whether they will help you reach your marketing goals. Content that does not support it should be refreshed and repurposed.
Step 5: Build an Editorial Calendar and Action Plan
The last step in building a content marketing management strategy is to use the information you’ve gathered to schedule content 3 to 6 months in advance. You can then begin listing tasks and assigning work to your team.
What Are the Responsibilities of a Content Marketing Manager?
With the rise in the demand for content marketing for startups and established organizations, the role of a content marketing manager is more valuable now than ever.
Here are some of the primary responsibilities of a content marketing manager:
1. Research and Competitor Analysis
The content manager’s main responsibility is to publish and promote content that achieves the goals set out in the content marketing strategy.
It’s essential for content managers and creators to conduct research before launching a campaign. This helps marketing teams create more effective content by giving them a better understanding of their audience. This research involves:
- Competitor analysis. Examine other brands’ content and strategies.
- Target audience research. Define your target demographic, their interests, and behavior.
- Customer surveys. This helps you understand what works in your strategy by looking at their level of engagement and satisfaction.
- Internal stakeholder interviews. Helps identify other opportunities by talking to subject matter experts.
2. Preparing Content Marketing Plans
After initial research, the content marketing manager can start working on one or more content marketing plans. Depending on the company's size and scope of its offering, you will often need multiple content marketing plans to define the strategy and tactical execution for individual brands, business units, or channels.
Content should be an extension of your marketing strategy. With the help of your marketing team, the plan should define what you want to achieve and how you'll do this with content. Creating an Editorial Calendar
Once a content marketing plan has been created, content marketing managers can begin working on the editorial calendar. This is where they can set the schedule for creating, publishing, and promoting content, letting every relevant member of the team keep track of their tasks and goals per week or per month.
A visual editorial calendar helps your content manager align content publication and promotion with critical dates important to your business and other marketing campaigns. It’s also essential to build slack time into the schedule to allow for any content production delays and for last-minute, real-time marketing opportunities.
3. Content Creation
After the content plan has been created and approved by all relevant stakeholders, it’s time for the content manager's primary responsibility– to create the content.
Not all content managers are writers and editors. Some delegate the production of their content to others, while other managers may monitor the work of a team of writers and editors. Nonetheless, your content manager must be able to write and edit well as they are ultimately responsible for everything that gets published online.
4. SEO
Online content is not enough to read well and be free of spelling and grammar errors. Content marketing managers must also have search engine optimization skills to ensure that web searchers can find their content and that it appears on the first page of Google and other search engines.
If you have an entire digital marketing team at your disposal, you may have already employed an SEO specialist. Alternatively, you may be outsourcing your SEO needs to a specialist agency. Despite this, it’s still crucial that your content marketing manager understands the basics of SEO to carry out an effective content marketing plan.
Takeaways on Content Marketing Management
Content marketing management is indispensable, and creating and managing a content marketing strategy requires considerable planning and collaboration.
Businesses should seek the professional guidance of a content marketing agency to be successful and in the right direction.
