What is content marketing? The classic definition of content marketing is creating, distributing, and curating content that will affect the buying behavior of a given audience. There is another definition that I really like. Content marketing is an approach to a commercial site based on media principles and patterns.

Content isn’t just text. These are videos, gifs, infographics, presentations, audio recordings (podcasts). You convey information to the consumer in different ways and through a whole system of communication channels. And a content marketer can do it correctly and effectively. This is a specialist who thinks through a detailed plan (strategy), which includes creating a useful target audience of content and distributing it. The key word here is useful.

Of course, content is not only text, but it is desirable for a person who deals with content to be able to write well and evaluate texts written by others. It is often said that copywriters and content marketers are those who wrote good essays in college. For example, if you managed to write each review essay well, now you can also write reviews on various services or products. If you were good at argumentative essays, then now it is also very useful for you when writing content that will deserve the trust of readers.

Content Marketer – Skills and Responsibilities

It is this profession that will make you a universal soldier, or rather, a scout. The reason is that before you start collecting any ideas into your editorial portfolio, you have to do such deep, professional intelligence so that you can clearly and correctly answer the main questions.

Namely – where is your target audience (social networks or forums, search engines, and YouTube), what do these people want to hear from you, and through which channels can you establish communication faster and more efficiently?

In addition to deep intelligence, a true content marketing warrior must be able to analyze data. And do it in accordance with all the rules of Internet marketing: masterfully own tools and metrics, extract data, tag links, track conversions – and based on the analysis, quickly make changes to the content plan. 

So let’s put the skills that are required for a content marketer into one list, content marketer:

• knows what competitors are offering and knows how to use tools to monitor the market
• studied his or her target audience and divided it into segments
• drew a portrait of a classic “character” that comes to the site
• writes well
• analyzes the whole picture. Knows how to create a whole range of measures that will be important for promotion. Let’s add strategic thinking here
• has PR skills. The content marketer keeps in mind an arsenal of promotion techniques (sometimes not entirely white) and possible sites for content placement
• is friendly with editing and layout
• knows SMM well 
• owns the skills of web analytics to the right extent. The content marketer is always ready to develop in this direction
• does not confuse essence. The content marketer doesn’t create content for the sake of content. He or she understands the importance of the marketing component: thinks about the sales funnel with targeted actions.

Analyzing the vacancies that are on the market and the tasks assigned to the content marketer, we can outline the approximate range of his or her responsibilities:

• determination of the goal and marketing complex of measures that will allow achieving this goal
• a detailed analysis of not only your target audience but also competitors in this market niche (you should know their methods of work, ways of promotion and study the content with which they are promoted)
• drawing up a detailed marketing plan. It also includes the search for performers for the assigned tasks
• creation of unique, interesting, accessible, and useful content. It is important to find points of contact between the interests of the audience and the brand
• promotion of content in the media, social networks. It is necessary to create strategies for promoting content on the Internet (the so-called content seeding). Such strategies include press releases for the media, conferences, briefings, announcements, guest posts in specialized publications, and close work with social networks. This also includes work with possible negativity and feedback monitoring.

All of the above is a cycle. You can’t stop. The chain of actions looks like this:

Competitive Analysis → Objectives → Creation/Seeding → Monitoring → Adjustments.

You have read all of this and must have been scared. And everyone (I’m sure) asks himself or herself the question – why should I know so much, not sleep at night, and, instead of reading fiction, absorb the works of famous content marketers? The answer is simple: if you want to become a professional content marketer, you need to possess all these skills and learn as much information as possible. Good luck!