Between meetings, constant strategy planning, actual strategy execution, 3rd party relations, communications, production, travel, etc., most marketing managers and team members have established a pretty full slate for their day-to-day work.
Now enter content marketing - the darling (and rightfully so) of today's marketing world and a new frontier for many marketing professionals.
Content marketing should continue to grow in proportion to the overall marketing budget for most companies in 2015 and beyond, but it won't displace a majority of marketing tasks and responsibilities.
That's why many companies should consider bringing on a full time, dedicated content marketing specialist. With the learning curve that your current team has and the amount of added job responsibilities it brings, a content marketing specialist could be the solution to effectively jumpstarting your strategy in 2015 and beyond.
We've discussed content marketing in length on our blog, but we will share a few key stats to drive the point home:
Creating and maintaining a content marketing strategy can be a very large task. There are a ton of variables involved:
As you can tell from that last bullet, the above is just a portion of the areas required, so you can see that there is a lot that goes into content marketing.
Of course no one person can handle content marketing on their own - it requires collaboration with designers, copywriters, developers, etc., but having a dedicated content marketing specialist who understands this broad landscape, and particularly how the individual parts intwine and work together, can be extremely beneficial for your company.
Even if you will likely be outsourcing a majority of your content strategy and execution to an external agency, having a content marketing specialist act as the liaison will help ensure your company gets the most out of that relationship.
Now, a company with a solid vision for the future would be wise to begin training employees responsible for the individual line items in my list above on the tenants of content marketing. Having a full team of talented individuals who understand the how's and why's will not only help the unit as a whole work more efficiently but also set them up for innovation, not head-nodding stagnation, in the future.
Finding this content marketing specialist is of course the next step - check out this post about how to identify the ideal content marketing manager.