Build A Content Marketing Team Structure: Learn From The Best Brands

Table of Contents

• Content Marketing Team Structure

• Top Brands With a Great Content Marketing Team
• Key Takeaways
• Conclusion
• FAQs

Content marketing is no longer a luxury or an experiment. It has become an inseparable part of the selling process. Even the budgets allocated for content marketing programs have grown considerably over the years. Present-day businesses spend about 25-30% of their marketing budgets on content marketing. And that’s undoubtedly a huge chunk of the total.

However, with a bigger budget comes bigger responsibilities. Modern content marketers are accountable for generating actual revenue. Meaning, it’s imperative for them to have a strong team that can bring results to the table. The team must have an organized structure to help clients realize their marketing goals without internal conflicts. 

If you are a content marketer, then your content marketing team structure can significantly affect the work you do. It can even prove decisive about your campaigns’ success or failure. Although there is no ideal way to structure your content team, there are certain best practices that you can follow. These will work for any business regardless of its size and should be adjusted to match its growth stage.

Below, you find all of these practices explained. Follow them to structure your content marketing department so that you can undertake more revenue-driven content marketing programs.

Content Marketing Team Structure

1. Devise a content marketing strategy

Source

It is important to develop a content strategy before you begin looking for people to write for you. This strategy will guide you in deciding on the type and number of writers to hire. Your content plan will also help you stay focused on your long-term goals, not just on creating content to fulfill immediate marketing needs.

And remember, it’s not a waste of time to create a content marketing plan. Your strategy will determine how your brand communicates with the world, and it’s the foundation on which you build your content marketing team.

2. Undertake the structuring process meticulously.

Source

Your content marketing team structure sends a clear message about your team’s priorities. Hence, it is essential to clearly define all job roles and create a formal structure for your team to function effectively. This will ensure that your team members understand their responsibilities and work according to the project goals.

It’s imperative to have a leader for a team that includes editors, designers, and writers as members. This person is usually your managing editor or content strategist and is responsible for keeping the team’s activities consistent with the company’s growth goals.

3. Hire a competent managing editor

Source

An organization’s actual storyteller is its managing editor. And it’s the managing editor who makes content compelling. Your editor is also the cornerstone of your content marketing campaigns. So, it’s important to make sure you choose one carefully. Look for someone who is organized, pays meticulous attention to details, and can meet deadlines. Also, editing and large egos don’t mix well. Your editor should be able to look at every situation objectively without bias or being unnecessarily critical. Since they are the backbone of your company’s content marketing team, their sense of responsibility matters greatly.

4. Have a content marketing strategist onboard

Source

Content strategists must have strong communication skills to be able to manage conflicting demands from marketing and editorial leaders. The reason such conflicts arise is that content creation is a closed process. Content creators spend all their time brainstorming topics, undertaking research, and writing content. As a result, they often lose sight of the bigger picture of how content marketing is driving the company forward. 

So, a content strategist is an integral part of a company’s content marketing organizational structure. And it’s essential to have a content strategist who understands content and can pay attention to details. They should also have a strong vision for what the future holds and be willing to walk that extra mile to make every content marketing goal a reality.

5. Recruit a highly-skilled designer

Source

For content marketing, visual communicators can be a huge asset. Yes, there are many free tools that you can use to create graphics, but they can’t replace a skilled graphic designer.

Writers may be the essential members of your content group, but 65% of people are visual learners. So, it is imperative to understand and acknowledge the value of visual content creators.

Posts with images on Facebook get 2.3 times more engagement than those with no images. Also, tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than those without images. Hence, it is crucial to have people in the team who can create compelling, high-quality images to resonate with your audience.

6. Look for writers with journalistic backgrounds.

Source

There are various content marketing team roles, but the role of a writer is undoubtedly the most important. It doesn’t matter how powerful your message is; without powerful writing, you won’t be able to get it across. And that’s why you should hire writers with journalistic backgrounds.

Journalists are natural storytellers and can communicate any message in fewer words. They can view an issue from different perspectives and can write objectively. Clearly, they can be a valuable asset to your content marketing team and strengthen your digital content team structure.

7. Look for writers proactively.

When looking for writers, we often focus so much on domain expertise that good writers slip through our hands. A skilled writer is often more valuable for a company than someone well-versed in a specific subject. 

So, look for writers proactively from different content places unless you need technical content or require deep domain knowledge. Evaluate potential hires based on their portfolio and how well they write. For instance, if you have found a marvelous writer with expertise in marketing, consider hiring them. Your business might not be related to marketing, but it doesn’t matter. A great writer will be able to write about any topic by doing the necessary research. Remember, to build a content marketing team you can rely on, you need effective writers and not domain experts with a fondness for writing. 

8. Leverage the power of video

Source

Make videos an integral part of your content marketing plan. Video content can prove incredibly effective in helping people connect with your brand in ways that text and images cannot. And that’s probably why the popularity of video content is growing by the day. In fact, 81% of marketers plan to include video content into their marketing strategies in the years to come.

Thankfully, it’s possible to produce high-quality video content at minimal marketing costs. Refrain from hiring a full-time animator or videographer. Resources like Fiverr and Upwork allow you to hire freelance animators, scriptwriters, designers, and voice actors without burning big holes in the pocket.

9. Try having diverse talents in the team.

Source

Writers have their own strengths and weaknesses. Some writers are excellent at writing technical blog posts but have trouble writing humorous animated explainer video scripts.

Similarly, some marketing teams prefer to reach out to influencers for brand promotion, while others choose to stay focused on content.

But if you want a well-rounded marketing department, you must have a wide range of skills within your team. Usually, hiring freelancers for specific projects brings more efficiency to the table than hiring full-time staff. With freelancers, it’s easier to match the right skill set to the right project. Trust us, a team of freelancers is infinitely scalable and will strengthen your content marketing team.

Top Brands With a Great Content Marketing Team

John Deere’s The Furrow

Source

The Furrow is a well-known example of how to do content marketing right. John Deere released the first edition of this publication in 1895. It was intended to assist customers and showcase the company’s expertise. The launch edition was so successful that the publication is still available online, 120 years after its launch. 

But why was Furrow a hit? Well, your ability to present yourself as an expert in your field is a way to earn your customer’s trust. So, find out what your customers are searching for and map out your content strategy. Then, provide relevant content to answer every question.

Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign.

Source

You’ve likely been living under a rock if you haven’t heard or seen this campaign. Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign allowed everyone to personalize their favorite beverage. When the campaign was launched in Australia, the country’s 150 most well-known names were taken and added to the bottles. It was a huge success, and people loved it! Everyone was talking about Coca-Cola. The campaign has been widely spread since then.

Now, the question is: What caused the campaign to become so successful? The answer is personalization.

Coca-Cola didn’t use any magic trick; they just focused on the most important aspect of an individual’s personality: their name. After all, who doesn’t love to see their name in print? Coke changed the way people viewed their product by asking them to “share.” If you want to make someone pay attention to your product, this is how you do it! It was a powerful campaign still remembered for its unusual way of enticing customers.

Our food, your questions by McDonald’s

Source

Have you ever wondered what goes into the patty that comes sandwiched inside your favorite burger? Generally, food joints don’t reveal such secrets, but McDonald’s set itself apart by choosing to be more transparent about what they put on their customers’ platters. McDonald’s Canada realized that there were many myths and misconceptions around its packaging, product launches, as well as the quality and preparation of its food. To tackle the problem head-on, the company launched the “Our food, your questions” campaign in 2012. Under the campaign, the company decided to answer customers’ questions.

So, McDonald’s went beyond the corporate walls and shared the facts. Their transparency was a big hit with customers, and this content marketing strategy indeed changed public perceptions using honesty. By answering over 10,000 questions, the company built stronger relationships with its customers.

This initiative also established McDonald’s image as a “caring” company that wants to offer superior customer service. The message they conveyed was loud and clear: if you want to engage with your customers, you will have to do it at their level.

The bottom line is that you can turn even a bad reputation around with the right content marketing strategy.

Shopify and its e-commerce glossary

Source

Who would have thought publishing a glossary or encyclopedia could be an effective content marketing technique? Well, Shopify proves that establishing expertise in any manner can work wonders for a business. With something as simple as a glossary of words, a company can boost its brand awareness and drive organic traffic. Shopify’s Business Encyclopedia serves as a great example here.

Each Shopify web page has definitions, in plain English, with very few additional details. Their merchandising page, for instance, has simple definitions and bullet points about merchandising strategies. It’s only a one-minute read, so it doesn’t even take a lot of the visitor’s time, but what it offers is profound.

This small move proved so effective that Shopify could rank for hundreds of high-competitive terms simply by creating quality definitions. Every month, an estimated 106,000 people visit the encyclopedia. They are all interested in e-commerce topics and could be potential Shopify customers.

Definitions can also be beneficial for link building with content. Shopify’s glossary can also be used by those who need to cite a source of authority to define an e-commerce term.

Key Takeaways

• Content marketing has become an integral part of the selling process.
• When building a content marketing team, it’s important to focus on the structure.
• Your digital content team structure plays a decisive role in the success or failure of your marketing campaigns.
• To structure your content marketing team the right way, you need to plan a content marketing strategy, hire a managing editor, a content marketing strategist, a designer, writers, and other specialists based on your needs. It’s important to have diverse talents in the team, and the hiring should be done meticulously.
• A lot about content marketing can be learned by studying successful marketing campaigns by brands. 

Conclusion

Your content marketing team structure has a direct bearing on your performance as a business. While a poor team structure can hinder your content efforts as well as your ability to generate qualified leads and sales, a well-designed structure will ensure that every piece of content you generate can produce ROI. A good structure also ensures no one on the team is doing tasks that they don’t enjoy or pressing themselves too thin.

For a good setup, all you require is to follow the content structuring techniques dished out above, down to the tiniest detail. Later in the article, we discussed some great examples of brands with successful content marketing teams and their most power-packed campaigns. The campaigns demonstrate that by telling powerful stories, being open and honest, personalizing appropriately, and establishing expertise, you can emerge as a clear winner in the world of content marketing.

FAQs