In any digital first marketing plan, content marketing is a fundamental to online marketing growth. Be it your email cadence, social media, blog or podcast strategy, the basis of executing and growing any of these channels involves building a good amount of high-quality and relevant content.

Honing in on the right content marketers and content marketing skills becomes crucial at this stage for any marketing leader. Every sub area of a typical modern marketing structure will need a different skill set. A marketing operations executive for instance should typically have a stronger tech-savvy martech sense than an executive who is meant to drive social media growth.

Specifically, when it comes to looking for certain skills in a content marketing team, what should marketing leaders focus on?

Here are a few quick takeaways based on recent conversations we’ve had with industry leaders:

Quick and Accurate Writing and Editing Skills

Digital marketers today need to act fast and think fast. For a marketing team to run a campaign or even help with PR crisis management, the right type of content has to be built on-time, every time.

Content marketers or content writers and editors who work in marketing in today’s digital first space can enable their team’s output faster if they have the ability to write and build quality content with accuracy quickly.

Content marketers who can do this no matter the type of content needed by the brand or marketing team (blog, social media post, PR announcements etc) will at the end of the day be able to keep their marketing execution process and output a lot more streamlined and healthy.

Above par Industry Knowledge

Content marketers or writers who have spent a significant amount of time in one industry will be able to write as per the needs of that industry and deliver content on it faster than those who are new entrants into the industry. However, it must be kept in mind that shortlisting marketing hires based on only this factor, would not be fair.

Experienced content marketers and content writers who have a flair to create content across multiple products and industries usually have the ability to adjust and learn about new domains they enter fairly soon.

While building a marketing team or while growing an existing one, creating a balanced hiring process keeping this in mind helps. Evaluating content marketers on their current industry knowledge or content marketing process while also filtering them on the basis of a real-time ‘test’ or two can enable better hiring decisions in many ways.

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Knowing how to Write Across Multiple Digital Marketing Channels

One of the standardized HR norms that seasoned B2B leaders follow in most cases is maintain lean teams. There are several benefits to hiring and having leaner team structures. At a time when digital channels in terms of their quantities are increasing, in a lot of cases, marketing teams end up dividing content creation and content marketing teams as per the marketing channels.

This leads to having a separate email marketing team, a separate social media team, a separate team to handle website blog content and so on. However, seeing how content creation and content marketing is a basic fundamental in today’s digital marketing sphere, structuring a team or executives that can overlap between channels can enable a better team framework in the long term.

For example: a unified head of content profile that unites different writers for different content marketing purposes can be tasked with creating content through the team of content marketers for the different marketing target channels in unison with core marketing goals. While doing this, hiring executives who can easily shift between creating content for social, for email, for blogs can be useful in maintaining a healthier team sense on the whole.

Keeping Content Marketing Plans and Content Marketing Channels Lean and Simple

A digital marketing team today doesn’t need to be active on every popular digital marketing medium. But, they need to be most active where their target customers are. Identifying the key channels to focus on should therefore be the prerogative of the marketing leads and content heads, in unison.

Content marketing and content writing can be an effective (and fun!) activity for modern marketers. The combination of the right skills, knowledge, experience in this area can make or break a brand’s presence in a digital-first marketplace.

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