What do content marketing specialists do (and how does it generate results)?
Image: Content marketing is like an iceberg.
Key takeaways
Content marketing specialists make businesses more money by creating owned media. This is opposed to paid media (which runs out) or relying on earned media (which is harder to influence and control).
Owned media is designed to consistently bring in new sales leads, indefinitely, and across a range of platforms.
They do this through thorough research, strategic planning, constant review, experimentation, and optimisation.
Content marketing specialists make businesses more money.
And save them money too.
In fact:
Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional methods
And almost 70% of marketers are investing in it
Content marketing specialists do this by creating owned media.
In other words, promotional or educational content that a business owns and won’t “run out” or “expire” with an advertising budget or influencer endorsement.
Instead, it carries on attracting, nurturing, and converting customers automatically and indefinitely.
How?
That’s what this article is all about.
In this guide to content marketing specialists and what they do:
What’s the point of content marketing?
How does content marketing work?
What content marketing specialists do
What great content marketing can achieve
Is a content marketing agency right for me?
What's the point of content marketing?
“Approaching someone who barely knows about your product and trying to get them to buy right away is weird!”
The point of content marketing is to nurture relationships with your customers organically, at scale, and online.
What does this mean?
Take a retail store.
If a customer walks in, you can take the time to build a rapport with them before recommending a product.
It can be effective, but time-consuming. And it’s all 1:1 which isn’t very scalable.
By creating digital assets to build rapport with lots of customers at once, you can automate this process. Invest in creating the content once, enjoy ongoing results over time.
That’s the point of content marketing.
How does content marketing work?
Content marketing specialists plan what assets to create by mapping out a typical journey that a customer takes when getting to know a brand.
This map is called a marketing funnel.
It details the journey from “stranger” to “customer” to “brand advocate”.
By articulating this, marketers can design appropriate content to suit people at each funnel stage and nudge them onto the next one.
Top of Funnel (TOFU) content: This content is talking to strangers. It’s not a sales pitch, it’s much more subtle.
Its goal is to introduce a brand to a potential customer but not necessarily ask them to buy just yet - maybe just to read more content or sign up for an email newsletter or lead magnet.
This blog is an example of TOFU content.
Middle of Funnel (MOFU) content: This content is talking to acquaintances.
They know the brand a little and might be considering making a purchase. It might ask them to get in touch to discuss services.
MOFU communications are often done via email, advertising, and website content designed to build trust such as case studies.
Bottom of Funnel (BOFU) content: This content talks to a potential customer with the goal of converting them into a buyer.
These people know the brand and its offerings and are at the final, action phase of the journey.
This content might be a sales page that offers a free trial or a discount for a first purchase to try to convert a sale.
Think of the BOFU stage as where the 'selling' happens.
The journey is called a funnel because not everyone that starts at the top will end up buying at the bottom.
But the better the funnel and the content are, the less drop-off there should be along the way.
This is how content marketers build relationships with people without acting weird.
This slower-burn, more resilient approach is much better at getting long-term, higher lifetime value customers.
The types of questions that need to be answered when doing content marketing:
What types of content will you create and why?
Where does it fit into your brand’s marketing funnel?
What value will that content provide to your audience?
Will the content stand out from competitors? If so, how?
How will you promote the content?
What next step do you want someone to take after looking at your content?
What does “success” look like for that piece of content?
How will you measure that success?
What’s the wider strategy for your content and how does that relate to your business goals?
…the list goes on.
So content marketers are word nerds, number nerds, obsessive planners, analysts, and researchers.
They strategise, plan, create, analyse, collaborate, review and relentlessly improve. All so you don’t have to.
And boy, does it work.
In 18 months, we increased one of our clients’ web traffic 10 times over with content.
What content marketing specialists do
Content marketing specialists create and promote content based on audience insights, brand goals, and online search behaviour.
They should be looking both at creating new content and improving what already exists to boost the visibility of a brand and generate more leads or sales online.
“Content marketing is becoming a bigger priority for brands across the board. With the rise of more searches for content marketing-related topics, including content marketing salaries and job descriptions, this may indicate that companies are ready to invest.”
What makes digital marketing and content marketing unique and attractive?
Probably the data.
Content marketing specialists have access to so much information about performance and customer behaviour that some companies have entire teams of analysts there to interpret what matters.
The vast majority of businesses don’t need all of that.
A content marketing agency will know the key metrics to take notice of that are unique to your brand and its goals.
They’ll not only plan and create content, but they should also be measuring its performance, analysing patterns, and looking for ways to improve. It’s a one-stop shop.
Here’s an overview of what the best content marketing specialists actually do.
Under each heading, you’ll find the skillsets at play and the considerations for each phase.
They learn: the brand and its goals
Considerations: industry, brand, brand goals, brand tone of voice, key performance indicators (KPIs).
The first role of a content marketing specialist is to know the brand in question inside out.
At Paste & Publish, custodianship is one of our core values.
It’s our responsibility to treat client brands with care, understand their wider objectives, and how marketing activities will contribute to these.
Once we have a handle on this, we can strategise the types of content that should make a splash and generate a return on investment.
Goals of this step: To get to know the client’s brand, industry, and what success looks like to them.
2. They research: the audience and its interests
Demographics, keywords, search intent, popular and emerging topics, industry sentiment.
Next up, we need to understand who this brand is targeting.
We need to know what kind of people they are, how they feel about the brand and industry, what they were talking about yesterday, are today, and might tomorrow.
We find out what they’re using search engines for, and the types of questions they ask that are relevant to the brand.
What needs are these people displaying that the brand can fill?
The deliverable of this research step is keyword lists and clusters. In other words, the phrases that ideal customers are searching to find what they’re looking for.
These form the basis of further investigation and eventually, content creation.
Goal of this step: To find out what the audience is interested in and the keywords they use online.
3. They investigate: competitor content
10x strategy, high-ranking competitor pages, and successful examples of similar content.
Once we know what the audience is interested in, we need to see what others are offering in the same space.
How can we take inspiration from their work but do better?
The Moz 10x strategy is one we use often.
It involves looking at the top-ranking pages for the keywords being targeted, taking the best from each, and creating something new.
It’s not about copying. It’s about levelling up to something 10x better - something that’s hard for your competitors to beat.
We want to put a fresh and original spin on a topic that’s proven itself popular.
Goal of this step: To define what others are doing and how we can do better.
4. They strategise: a content plan
SEO, multimedia, structure planning.
By this stage we should know:
The brand and industry in depth.
Its audience, their interests and needs.
The terms they use to search for relevant information online.
What competitors are doing that works.
We can now use all of this information to lay out a structure for our content. The deliverable of this step is a written plan.
If it’s an article or blog for example, we’ll want to:
Bring the best information from the top-performing competitor blogs out there into one place.
Take it three steps further and build on what they’ve already done. What other keywords are the audience searching that we can discuss?
Plan the headings and subheadings based on keyword data.
Look for multimedia opportunities and places to create our own graphics.
Ensure we include any internal links that make sense (relevant content within the brand’s own website), as well as plenty of authoritative external links (great quality, high-ranking content on other websites). This is good for SEO.
To plan our CTA. What action do we want the reader to take after consuming this content?
Goal of this step: To combine all of our research and planning into a winning content structure.
5. They create: writing the piece
Copywriting, great user-experience (UX), marketing goals, CTA.
With all that planning and preparation, this is often the easy part!
We create something fresh and new based on what’s proven to be working.
During this step, we want to make sure that the piece:
Is interesting, informative, and relevant.
Meets the brand’s guidelines and tone of voice.
Is appropriate for the audience and where they are in the sales funnel.
Includes the relevant keywords in optimal positions (i.e. headings, titles, etc.)
Is easy to read, skim, and is visually appealing.
Includes a single, clear CTA.
It’s the content that meets all these pillars and more that gets the best results.
Goal of this step: Writing the piece to a top-notch standard.
6. They test drive: does the piece work
User-experience (UX).
Once the piece is created, it’s time to edit.
Or as we like to call it, test drive the content.
It’s important to get someone who didn’t write the article to do this.
This step is about addressing, honestly, whether this piece of content is any good. And whether it’s likely to get the results we want.
Does it:
Answer the search intent of the user?
Go the extra mile compared to what’s out there?
Hold your attention?
Respect your time as a reader? (i.e. Get to the point quickly).
Look good and read well?
Include a CTA that makes sense for the piece, the brand, and the audience?
Link to internal and external sources?
It may all feel a little repetitive by this point.
But these steps are crucial, and give content marketing specialists opportunities to adjust and optimise numerous times throughout the creation journey.
Goal of this step: To test whether the content is likely to achieve the results we want.
7. They promote: getting the audience’s attention
Social media, email marketing, influencers, ambassadors, collaborations.
Cool, we’re happy with the piece and ready to get it out there.
SEO takes time to yield results. It’s an ongoing process, so one piece of new content likely won’t generate a sudden spike in visitors to a site.
This step is about utilising a brand’s existing audience if they have one. This might be via social media or email marketing, for example.
Each social channel requires a different approach, and email marketing another again.
1.3% of articles claim 75% of all shares on social media.
So doing it right pays off.
Goal of this step: To get new content in front of our audience and compel them to read it.
8. They expand: link-building and relationships
Backlinks, guest posts, webinars, co-marketing campaigns.
“It’s no secret that backlinks remain an extremely important Google ranking signal.
A 2015 study published on the Moz blog concluded that, of the content in their sample, “75% had zero external links”.
Again: our research from this study found that 94% of all content has zero external links.
Building links through content marketing is more challenging than ever. Only 6% of the content in our sample had at least one external link.”
Search engines like Google are not “the internet”.
They are like huge filing cabinets of websites on the internet. They don’t know all of them yet.
They build up their database by crawling websites to find links to other ones. So the more links that content has from other sites (backlinks), the more likely it is to rank highly in search results pages.
It’s a sign of credibility and authority. And these “trust signals” are super important to search engines.
This is why SEO takes time to yield results.
It’s a process that never really stops.
Content marketing agencies will be looking for ways to boost the performance of content by asking others to link to it. There will need to be a trade-off, and this is where joint marketing campaigns like webinars or events can work well.
Goal of this step: To increase SEO performance by getting mentions on other websites.
9. They measure: is the piece generating a return
Conversion rates, click-through rates (CTRs), key performance indicators (KPIs), bounce rates, dwell time, read-through rates.
Web analytics is a crucial part of content marketing. It tells us whether content is actually generating any revenue.
It involves collecting, analysing and reporting on the data we have.
Where content marketing specialists come in handy is knowing which metrics to pay attention to and why.
Because there are loads. But businesses don’t need them all.
In fact, they usually only need to track a handful.
Goal of this step: To analyse the actual performance of the content and diagnose any areas for improvement.
10. They review and experiment: performance tests and updates
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO).
“65% of companies that succeed in content marketing run content audits more than twice a year.”
Content marketing isn’t just about creating new pieces.
Search intent changes. Industry sentiment changes. Audiences change. And with that, content must evolve and change too.
So content marketing agencies regularly check whether their clients’ content is performing as it should, and if not, where it can be improved.
Updates can lead to huge increases in engagement and traffic, with relatively little heavy lifting when compared to creating new pieces from scratch.
Goal of this step: To adjust the current approach based on data and improve performance.
What great content marketing can achieve
Is it really worth the time and money? Let’s see.
Conversion rates are almost 6x higher for those using content marketing (source).
73% of companies that increased spending from 10 to 70% of their entire marketing budget on content marketing saw significant success (source).
SEO generates 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media (source).
SEO has an average close rate of 6% (eight times higher than traditional marketing). (source).
72% of survey respondents planned to increase their content marketing budget in 2022 (source).
Cumulative yearly growth in unique traffic is almost 8x higher for content marketing leaders compared to followers (source). I.e., the trendsetters, the specialists.
61% of consumers are influenced by custom content (source).
Is a content marketing specialist or agency right for me?
“78% of CMOs believe that custom content is the future of marketing.”
Content production is the biggest challenge for almost half of marketers.
As you can see, there’s a lot to it, and it’s time-consuming.
That’s where outsourcing comes in.
Having a content marketing agency working with your brand means that you:
Get a ready-made team of specialists who live and breathe content marketing.
Have experts dedicated to ensuring that your content is generating a return on investment.
Have the latest knowledge and advice tailored to your brand’s needs at the drop of a hat.
Have time to focus on other areas of your business, safe in the knowledge that your online presence is growing and being managed properly.
At Paste & Publish, we understand that different brands like to engage with content marketing agencies in varying capacities.
That’s why we offer a few options when it comes to ways of working together:
Do it yourself: We help you produce a marketing strategy and then coach you to generate the results you want. We are on hand to share our expertise along the way.
Do it with you: A more collaborative approach. Perhaps you’d like support producing great content but to still be very much involved.
Do it for you: You’d rather offload your content marketing and focus on other aspects of your business. We can manage this end-to-end, with regular updates, reports, and fresh ideas to drive your performance.
We also give back.
By working with us, you support us in our 5% pledge to help the environment.
Interested in having a chat?
Reach out to us here.
