What does a content marketer do?

“Content is anything that adds value to the reader’s life.” Avinash Kaushik: Author, Web Analytics 2.0 & Web Analytics

In a nutshell, a content marketer uses content to market a particular product and/or service. The type of content that a content marketing professional is not just text based. Although written content – such as blogs and whitepapers – form an important part of content marketing, content marketers also use videos, infographics and memes or GIFS as part of their process.

So, if you’re thinking of becoming a content marketer before you decide to take the leap and do an accredited Digital Copywriting and Content Marketing Course – which is the first step to becoming a first-rate content marketer – you need to read this article first to find out what a content marketing professional does, on a daily basis, to see if this is what you can see yourself doing day in and day out!

The tasks of a content marketer

Developing a Content Marketing Strategy

The content marketing manager (if it’s a smaller organisation, the content marketer will be responsible for this) is accountable for developing a content strategy. What this means is that he or she will be responsible for devising how content is used in order to drive leads for the organisation in order to deliver to the sales team that they may follow up on these.

When developing a content strategy, the content marketing manager will go through the following 11-step process:

• Step 1. Put In Place the Company’s Mission and Goals
• Step 2. Ascertain The Company’s KPIs
• Step 3. Get to Know the Audience
• Step 4. Figure out what the Company’s Current Position is
• Step 5. Determine What the Best Content Channels Are for the Business
• Step 6. Make a decision on Content Types
• Step 7. Pinpoint and allocate Resources
• Step 8. Design a Content Calendar
• Step 9. Generate Content
• Step 10. Disseminate and Promote
• Step 11. Calculate Results

In point 9, the content marketing manager may find that they have to use freelance content creators (such as writers, graphic designers, illustrators and/or videographers) in order to help them generate the content. This will depend on the amount of work that comes into the business.

Monitor results

As with any digital marketing strategy, the results of content marketing need to be thoroughly measured. This is so that they can see whether or not the content that they are putting out into the marketplace has the desired results of pushing traffic to the client organisation’s website.

The way in which you’ll monitor the results of content marketing is by using Google Analytics which you should have installed on your website. Specifically, there are two reports that you need to be looking at:

• Acquisition
• Content drilldown

The acquisition report will tell you which content channel drives the most traffic to your site. So if you’re running a paid promotion on Facebook, for example, you will be monitoring how much traffic you generate from this channel to your website. If there’s a great amount of traffic, you will know that Facebook is a great channel for you to conduct social media marketing on. However, if the traffic is not that great, you know not to invest a lot more time here and to carry on with the next digital marketing channel.

In addition to having a look at your acquisition report, you also need to be keeping a close eye on your content drilldown report. This is so that you can see which types of content that you’re putting out are resonating with your audience and are causing them to click through. So, if you see that a certain type of content is providing you with a great amount of traffic to your site, you know that you need to keep on creating this genre of content so that you can keep on getting these numbers.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

If you are passionate about writing, just because people are consuming more content online doesn’t mean that your skills are null and void. Good writers are in hot demand as people are looking for content to be created for their websites. Are you one of these passionate writers? If so, then you need to get into the world of content marketing! The Digital School of Marketing’s Digital Copywriting and Content Marketing Course is the perfect qualification for you to make this leap! For more information, follow this link.