Top Skills You Need For Content Marketing

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What is a Content Marketer?

Content Marketers increase web traffic and brand awareness by creating branded content people actually want, sharing content on the channels they use, and measuring the results of their content marketing activities. Content marketing encompasses blogs, eBooks, videos, podcasts, and more. 

Work Responsibilities for Content Marketing

As a Content Marketer, you will be asked to write, edit, and proofread content and copy. This means that you’ll have a touch in every step of the process; from the brainstorming, to the final checks before it goes live on whatever platform your company uses! 

In those first brainstorming stages, you’ll develop new content in collaboration with growth, customer identity, and product metrics. You may be part of a team or by yourself, but if you are to work with people, it may be the Brand Marketing team or a Social Media/Community Engagement specialist. 

Chances are you will be working with other sections of your company a lot! A content marketer fits into a lot of key processes in a marketing team. Because of this, you’ll need to be able to provide editorial, creative, and technical support to the marketing members and other cross-functional co-workers. In other words, you should make sure that your creative juices are flowing but that you can translate these ideas to others as well. 

A huge portion of this job is assuring that your content is actually reaching the people you want it to reach! Your marketing team will have a way to track this, usually through analytics/data. You or other people in the marketing team will be seeing how engaged people were with your content. For example; if you produce a YouTube video, you might be looking at the ages of the people watching, the genders, how long someone watched before they clicked off, and if people are commenting or sharing the video around. All of these points of data will help you not just decide if this content piece was a success, but how you’ll create your content for the future!

Depending on how well a content piece lands, you might need to review and revise sections of it to better reach the people your company is aligned to. These might be small changes, these might be big changes, or these may be plans for the future. You might even do a second or third content piece of the same kind and compare how well they do stacked against each other. 

If your company has an SEO specialist, they’ll be helping you make sure that your posts are search engine optimized in order to draw in the most eyeballs. If you’re the whole of a content marketing team, or this job doesn’t exist in your company, you might have to do this yourself. Don't worry, it’s not as scary as it sounds! 

You’ll want to make sure that you’re always staying in line with the brand’s message and the product details so you’re not giving future customers bad intel. This means that you should make sure that you are in continual communication with your company’s design and other creative teams or product managers. 

Finally, you should have a grasp on internet and social media usage. Even if there is a dedicated Social Media Manager, this role still may require you to have some knowledge of the social platforms that your company uses. Or, at the very least, you should know the process of uploading your content wherever that ends up being – social media channels, email servers, or web pages are some common places that your content might end up. 

Hard Skills

Below is a list of the hard skills you should make sure that you have in your toolbox if you want to be a content marketer, along with some places that offer courses to gain said skills. A lot of these skills relate directly to the every-day responsibilities that we discussed above.

Hard Skills

  • Data and Metrics Performance Analytics
  • Multi-Content Channel Strategies
  • Photography/Videography
  • Graphic Design
  • Google Analytics/Tableau
  • SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Practices
  • WordPress

Where To Get These Hard Skills:

Soft Skills

Soft Skills are skills that aren’t so easily taught. They certainly can be learned, but they’re usually not the information you’re learning in classes. In other words, soft skills aren’t what you’re doing, but they’re how you’re doing it. 

For content marketing, writing is a necessary soft skill. The ability to write good copy that engages audiences isn’t as easy as it may seem. Having the ability to just write something that sounds pleasing or gets a point across isn’t all you’ll need. You should also have a firm grasp on grammar and editing conventions so that your content is readable. 

You may also need to do some research. This might be simple search engine searches, but for other projects, it might be reminiscent of collegiate finals. If you were the sort of person that loved getting really familiar with lots of data or books, this part of the job will be a breeze!

Even though you are not a business specialist, you will still need to know some basic business vocabulary and the way that your company sells a product. Here’s a list of where you can brush up on the phrases that will be the most used in this career path. 

You should be able to multitask and prioritize in this job and all the tiny moving parts it may entail. This means that you should be able to determine which tasks are the most important to do and sometimes juggle two or three things at one time; such as the ability to be researching your next pitch, editing an in-the-process post, and taking notes on engagement on a previously released content piece all in the same work-day. 

Lastly, you don’t need to be the biggest TikTok celeb on the internet, but as a content marketer, you should know what sort of content does well for your demographics and each location you post. As a hint, search engines like Google tend to like longer-form prose pieces (like this!) where TikTok would prefer succinct bullet-points with a trending sound. 

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Does a content marketer sound like the job for you? Learn more about this job, along with other jobs like it, by downloading the PathMatch app to discover companies that match your interests, strengths, and goals! PathMatch can help find the perfect career fit for you! 

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