What Does it Require to Have In-house Content Marketing?

I always get asked this question by CMO “Chief Marketing Officers” & Marketing Managers. Saher, We know that Inbound and Content Marketing works, but If we want to do all of this ourselves, what kind of skill set and team members do we need to hire, train and run a full in-house content marketing department for our business?

By the way, we get this question all the time. Either you are a B2B company stepping into Inbound Marketing, or a B2C company who is realizing that buying media alone and being on the first page of a search engine by itself does not help in lead conversion.

Related: What is Marketing Automation? and The Five "Whys" of the B2B Sales Process

Here is a high-level overview of who needs to be part of your inbound or content marketing department:

  1. Marketing Product Manager

Whether you are in manufacturing, sell software, are an MSP provider, or provide consulting for B2B larger organizations, positioning products/services the right way to the right people Is very critical. Product Marketer’s create marketing and sales collateral that demonstrates the benefits, features, and value of products/services to your target audience. You need someone on your team who can conduct message testing, competitive research, and position your products/services in a way that effectively caters to your buyer personas. This includes managing all marketing for your various products and service offerings and working closely with the appropriate product managers to launch new products. This also includes creating content that helps articulate the value of your products/services. This is done by working closely with product research, sales, and services teams to gather information about and understand the market needs for the product. It also includes managing the product pages of our website, and providing detailed information, training, and product marketing collateral to sales reps and other departments regarding your products/services.

  1. Content Strategist

Content is the backbone of inbound marketing, serving as the fuel for all your inbound marketing strategies, including email, social media, search, lead generation, etc. Without marketing offers, your website visitors would have no reason to convert on your website and provide you with the contact information you need to segment, nurture, and close them into customers. Marketing offers can include everything from educational ebooks, to webinars, to free trials -- and the list goes on. Designing and creating this type of content is time consuming and specialized. Time to call in a new member of your dream team! The Content Strategist’s responsibilities should be writing instructional content including ebooks, templates, whitepapers, etc. This includes designing and tweaking layouts for ebooks, templates and whitepapers, planning and producing webinars, creating and optimizing landing pages through A/B testing, understanding and creating content that aligns with your buyer personas' interests and needs, and developing new types of content and offers from scratch to address problems or gaps in your content strategy.

  1. Email Marketing Specialist

When it comes to email marketing, there's quite a lot of moving parts. In fact, open and click-through rates saw a decrease in 2015. That’s on top of making sure your emails are CAN-SPAM compliant, optimizing for mobile devices, nailing timing and frequency, segmentation, personalization, and crafting great email copy (just to name a few). You've got quite a few email marketing ducks to put in a row. With so many email obstacles, you need a professional on the job to make sure your emails are being delivered, opened, and clicked on. Or you need someone to figure out why they aren't being delivered, opened, and clicked on. An email marketer will get jazzed up about fixing and optimizing a top-notch email marketing program.

  1. SEO Manager

According to research from GroupM UK and Nielsen, 94% of all clicks in search engines are on organic results. That means keywords are your new best friend – or the right SEO manager. Your future SEO manager should be obsessed with checking and tweaking your keyword strategy. Moreover, they should be able to develop a solid keyword strategy from scratch if need be. They should also be able to execute strategies and tactics to improve your off-page SEO such as building inbound links. A valuable SEO pro will keep up-to-date with SEO blogs and best practices, through resources like SEOMoz and Google Webmaster Tools. 

  1. Social Media Manager

Have you heard? According to the 2012 State of Inbound Marketing, 43% of B2B companies and 77% of B2C companies have acquired a customer Facebook, and 40% of B2B companies and 55% of B2C companies have acquired a customer through Twitter. If you aren't one of those businesses, it's time to ramp up your social media efforts. And to do so, you need a social media manager who not only knows social media platforms like they know the alphabet, but who also knows how to develop strategies for various social networks, track the right metrics, and integrate the best tools and practices on those platforms. This includes managing all social media platforms for the business, creating and evaluating social media strategies, monitoring, responding to, and communicating with the online community, and Developing new methods to engage consumers on social platforms.

Conclusion

Can you have one person with the skill set to perform two or three functions? Yes, but you need to be ready to coach them with a monthly strategy, empower them with marketing automation tools that can help them with all their requirements and make sure that their efforts match the target marketing outcome for you company for the next 90 Days. They need to be able to increase traffic to the website by 20% percent increase Visitors to leads by 10% and increase your Close rate from Leads to Customer by 5%. Now, as a CMO or marketing manger you can show your leadership team the full ROI in building a team for your organization.

If you need more information on how to build a full in-house Inbound Marketing team for your organization, we would love to chat with you.