4 Critical Skills to Look for While Hiring a Content Marketer For Your Startup

Before you hire a content marketer get to know what you want them to do and how to collaborate with them to achieve those goals.

Content marketing is no longer an option, some of today’s most successful brands (Buffer, HubSpot, IBM, Microsoft, GoPro) use content marketing as an integral part of their overall marketing strategy. 86% highly successful companies have someone in charge of the content strategy.

Many companies think it’s easy to incorporate it into their existing marketing approach. However, like all other marketing tactics content marketing requires a lot of planning, time and steady efforts to deliver proper results.

Here are the 4 critical skills to look for while hiring a content marketer for your company.

#1. Promotion of produced content – Content creation is only one part of the entire assignment. While hiring a content marketer, freelancer or firm, make sure that they invest in promoting the produced content. Content promotion starts when the content marketer takes action.

Even the best quality content pieces are ineffective if not promoted to the right audience.

Source

Use Buffer to schedule posting your content to your social media channels. The folks at Buffer share numerous useful tips about this process. Every post has a strong call to action for sharing and commenting. This is one reason why their posts get thousands of shares.

If you mention influencers in the post, reach out to them and share the piece of content. Let them know this by email or Twitter. When these influencers share your content, you build a larger audience. You cannot afford to miss out reaching to influencers.

While hiring a content marketer test their ability to write outreach emails.

In Gary Vaynerchuk’s (Co-founder of VaynerMedia, Investor and Internet Personality) words:

#2. Producing high quality content – 60% content marketers create atleast one content piece each day. This shows the importance of content creation.

Here’s a spoiler – Content marketing success depends a lot on quality and consistency than on quantity.

High quality content gets shared and read more. Does this mean that high quality content helps the company gain more visibility?

Ideally yes.

Sure brands have to be ambitious, but creating quality content takes a great deal of time and efforts. Try creating multiple pieces of high quality content every week and soon the content plan will be wrapped up.

Don’t straightaway expect your content marketer to start writing multiple pieces of high quality content each week.

Here’s a tip – Start slow. Use different formats of content, measure the results and adjust the strategy based on what works.

In Matthew Toren’s (Co-founder of YoungEntrepreneur.com) words:

#3. Focusing on content curation – Most content marketers curate content in some or the other way. A report shows that 82% marketers curate content. Top marketers create 65% own content and curate an additional 25%.

An enormous mistake companies make is developing a mindset that they should be focusing only on content production.

Sure your audience wants to hear from you. That’s primarily why they follow you on social media. 70% people say they always open emails from their favorite brands.

How will you position yourself as a trusted industry leader? By providing useful content generated in-house, from thought leaders and competitors.

When you share content from other reliable sources, it shows that you’re interested in providing value to the audience and builds trust. By building trust, there are more chances of acquiring a loyal customer who engages with your brand.

In Neil Patel’s (Co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics) words

#4. Producing content that solves a problem – The different types of content pieces that can be produced include:

• Bite sized videos
• Image and visuals
• Long form with stats
• Live videos (Snapchatting)

Companies concentrate so much on producing content that they neglect the most crucial aspect: of solving a problem.

Ask yourself: Are you creating content that promotes your product and service all the time? Or are you creating laser focused content that solves the problems your ideal customer faces?

In Mitch Meyerson’s (Speaker, consultant and Author of Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars) words:

Hiring a content marketer for the sake of creating content is the biggest mistake a company can make. Every activity of the content marketer should revolve around solving and presenting answers to the pain points and frustrations of the audience.