Content Marketing Strategist: Should I Hire One?

Content Marketing Strategist
Content Marketing Strategist – Here Are 3 Tips On Finding A Good One

Content Marketing Strategists are basically people who help you create an approach to make content marketing work for your business. The result of hiring them shouldn’t just be to get likes, shares or views. It should be very much tied to tangible results: leads, revenue, downloads, etc.

Few will want to be held so accountable, so the purpose of today’s blog is to give you a few pointers as to what you should look for in a Content Marketing Strategist. If you don’t want to hire it, you will at least get a good structure on creating an effective content marketing strategy.

Tip #1: How Do They Define Success?

There’s every possibility if you ask this question, the content marketing strategist will turn it back onto you. After all, if all their client wants is likes, tweets, shares, i.e. vanity metrics, it’s not actually that difficult to do.

As suggested in the introduction, these aren’t very useful. They certainly don’t pay the bills. They might occur as a side effect of strong content marketing, but they shouldn’t be the be all and end all. The candidate should, on their own accord, mention that revenue (or commitments to it) be the main KPI they abide by.

This means that their content is suitably focused on customer pains and converting that into demand for a product – your product. Good content marketing will always eventually lead to more dollars back in the client’s pocket.

Tip #2: What’s The Best Content For My Business?

This next tip does require the content marketing strategist to say what they think. You might have some ideas of the sort of content your customers will respond to, but getting the perspective of this candidate is crucial.

They might have a strength in a certain medium or platform, there’s nothing wrong with that. But the sort of answer you’re really hoping for is something along the lines of:

“I don’t know what the best content for your business is. What’s more important to me is understanding who your customers are, what sort of content they’re already consuming and where they’re consuming it. From there, I’ll be able to create something that will meet them where they are and allow them to come over to us.”

Tip #3: How Will You Come To Understand My Customers?

I spoke to it a bit in Tip #2, but Tip #3 will get the perspective of the content marketing strategist on their process of understanding your customers. Their research process is key here. Overall, no one size fits, but you should be looking for an approach that let’s them understand the psychology behind your customers. Things like:

  • past call recordings,
  • social media pages,
  • public product reviews,
  • interviews.

These will all help. The candidate might ask to shadow customer facing staff to see what the interactions are like with customers, or to speak with customers directly. The results of their findings should sound like they know your customer inside out.

Content Marketing Strategists can help, but you have to hire the right one. Don’t look necessarily for industry experience, but someone who defines success in terms of money with a focus on understanding customers and what keeps them up at night. These people are more likely to help your business succeed.

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