Posted by Have you ever tried explaining what your job entails as a content marketer, only to receive blank stares? Or perhaps you work in another profession, and never really understood what a content marketer even does?
Content marketing is a type of marketing that seems to confuse a lot of people. There’s even sometimes debate among marketers themselves what content marketing involves!
The reason for the confusion could stem from the fact that content marketing undeniably requires a vast range of knowledge and skills to do well.
To help clear up what content marketers do, we put together this guide of 15 essential things every content marketer needs to know to excel at their job. We’ve also included some useful resources throughout the guide so you can address any gaps in your knowledge or skills as a content marketer.
1. How to Develop a Strong Content Marketing Strategy
Effective content marketing isn’t just about writing about whatever comes to mind and publishing it on a whim. It requires careful research, strategizing, and planning. That’s why it’s essential for content marketers to know how to develop a strong content marketing strategy and put it into action.
2. How to Write Engaging Content
One of the main responsibilities of a content marketer is to create engaging content. While you don’t exactly need to be a Pulitzer Prize winning writer to do so, you do need to know how to draw readers in with your words. Knowing how to tell a compelling story will help to captivate your audience and encourage them to take action. Fortunately, once you put a few tips into practice, it’s relatively straightforward to improve your writing and create more impactful content.
3. How to Choose the Right Content Marketing Tools
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As a content marketer, your toolkit should be filled with useful tools that allow you to scale your content marketing. The thing is, everyone has an opinion on which ones are genuinely worth using. Fortunately, there are a handful of tried-and-tested tools that most content marketers recommend.
If you’re interested to find out what they are, be sure to check out the article we just shared above!
4. How to Get Your Content Shared
If you’re a content marketer who isn’t doing any type of outreach after you hit ‘Publish,’ you’re wasting a golden opportunity for your content to reach even more potential customers. Outreach marketing is incredibly powerful because it’s a key way to encourage other publishers to share your content on their websites, social media, newsletters, and so on, which can in turn strengthen your SEO, branding, and link building efforts.
5. How to Conduct Keyword Research
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Every skilled content marketer needs to know how to conduct keyword research so that they can write relevant, targeted, and SEO-friendly content. There are plenty of ways to conduct keyword research that you can use to ensure you’re creating the best content possible. If you’re new to the keyword research process, it can seem a bit finicky. But trust us when we say that it gets quicker and easier with time!
6. How to Identify Long Tail Keywords
Speaking of keyword research, knowing how to identify long tail keywords is a seriously underestimated content marketing skill. It’s highly valuable to target long tail keywords because they’re generally easier to rank for and can lead to high levels of search traffic. You can get started by using these tools for identifying long tail keywords.
7. How to Conduct Competitor Research
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There’s tons of amazing content already out there… and even more lackluster content. One of the easiest ways to create content that not only speaks to your readers but also ranks is to conduct competitor research. After all, once you have an understanding of what content your competitors are creating (as well as the content marketing strategies they are using), you’ll be able to improve upon their content and give your readers something even better to chew on.
8. How to Let Go of Your Words
As a content marketer, you’ll be writing a lot of content. Knowing when to cut your words down is one of the hardest lessons you’ll need to learn. It’s often painful to delete lines, paragraphs, or even pages of content you’ve spent hours working on, but it’s usually necessary to make your writing more concise and ultimately, more engaging.
9. How to Set Up & Use Google Analytics
While established companies will already have Google Analytics up and running, new companies or small businesses may not even be aware of what GA is. As a content marketer, you’ll most likely be the one responsible for setting it up, so make sure you know what steps to take to get started. Of course, you’ll also need to know how to work your way around GA and make use of the data you obtain.
10. How to Track Your Results
Just like any other job, you’ll need to have some tools and metrics in place to track your results. Tracking your content marketing results will give you the data you need to identify what’s working and what’s not. It will also allow you to measure the effectiveness and ROI of your content marketing campaigns and strategies. So what tools can you use to track your results?
11. How to Leverage SEO
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Content marketing and SEO are sometimes used interchangeably, but they are in fact two different things. They do, however, have important overlaps, so it is critical for content marketers to understand how they can leverage SEO to work toward their content marketing goals. Plus, most content marketing roles require candidates to at minimum have a basic understanding of SEO best practices, so it’s useful to at least familiarize yourself with a basic SEO checklist.
12. How to Leverage Social Listening
Every content marketer should also know how to leverage social listening. While social listening is often used by social media teams, it can also lead to incredible results for content marketers. For example, by leveraging social listening in a content marketing campaign for their client, All Points Digital increased the client’s website visitors by 1500% over a 16 month period.
13. How to Build a Successful Content Marketing Funnel
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The most successful content marketing campaigns rely on a data-driven approach. One of the best ways to take a data-driven approach as a content marketer is to build a powerful content marketing funnel. If you’re unsure of what a content marketing funnel is, it’s “a process to generate new leads from different types of content. Such leads are then converted into buyers and are nurtured to make the purchasing decision through progressive “funneling.”
If you haven’t built one before, it can seem a little overwhelming. So give our article above a read to learn step-by-step how to get started.
14. How to Create Different Types of Content
Content marketing is often associated with blog writing. However, content marketing encompasses a wide variety of different types of content. In addition to blogging, a content marketer may need to create infographics, ebooks, quizzes, courses, videos, webinars, to name a few examples.
15. How to Repurpose Content
One of the reasons that knowing how to create different types of content is that it helps a content marketer to effectively repurpose content. One of the most underrated skills in a content marketer’s skills set, repurposing content involves taking previous content and revitalizing it to help them bolster your SEO.
With Crowdfire, you can find curated content, schedule your posts, engage with your audience, deep-dive into analytics and create custom reports. Now introducing Social listening. Try it for free.