What Makes a Great Content Marketer?

Performance Content Marketer Unicorn

No, seriously… I’m asking. What are the characteristics of a great content marketer? I would love to know your thoughts…

As the world’s largest content discovery platform, and proud defenders of our content guidelines, we are inundated with great content every day. It fills our data centers, our inboxes, and our WhatsApp message groups.  And we LOVE releasing it into the World Wide Web to be discovered by the most interested reader or viewer.

Not only do we get a glimpse at this great content as we pass it through 50+ algorithms, but we also get to communicate every day with the great content marketers responsible for its creation. We learn from their successes and their failures, and try to understand how we can help them do their job better. From this view, a recurring theme where I’ve noticed challenges arise is in the area of performance. The content marketer’s creativity around creation is consistently sound, even outstanding at times, but the connection to how their content should be measured is frequently lacking. It’s this gap between great content and performance measurement that keeps content marketers from controlling a larger percentage of today’s marketing budgets.

In order to bridge this gap, and secure their influence at the executive table, content marketers must become “performance content marketers”, or PCMs, as we’ll start to call them. These are some of the characteristics that I believe make up a great PCM. What am I missing? I’d love to know what you think.

1. A Customer

-You obsess over representing the voice of the customer.

-You’ve experienced the pain points of a company’s customers first-hand because you are, or at some point were, a [FILL IN YOUR CUSTOMER].

2. A Creator

-For you creating content online is akin to breathing and brushing your teeth; you just do it naturally everyday.

-You have a strong appreciation for proper formatting and visual aesthetics when it comes to the reader, viewer, or user experience.

-You feel strongly that great content should be treated like a product in terms of continuous iteration and improvement.

-Your comfortable finding and modifying images to complement written content.

3. An Editor

-You have a 6th sense for what content is great and what is crap. The content force is strong within you.

-You can easily identify talented writers and creators.

-You simply love writing. It’s in your blood.

-You have impeccable grammar and a gift for turning a phrase.

4. A Statistician

-You believe insights from data can make the best content IF created with the customer in mind.

-You’re capable of seeing trends in data and explaining why they’re useful.

5. A Performance Marketer

-You achieve great satisfaction by looking at the performance data of your own content, and learning from that performance to create more content that drives real business results.

-You have deep knowledge of SEO, PPC, web analytics, conversion rate optimization, marketing automation, email marketing and how marketing technologies work together to help you achieve your marketing goals.

6. A Voice

-You have your own opinions about [INSERT YOUR INDUSTRY HERE] and the foresight and speed to write timely and potentially controversial articles about current events.

-You get that humor works, and you enjoy using it to hook your readers.

7. A Learner

-You are a student of great marketing and great content; always learning, always wanting to get better at your craft.

-You understand that to compete with the useful content created by [INSERT WEBSITES, BLOGS, COURSES YOUR CUSTOMERS LEARN FROM], you must have a genuine interest in the content they produce.

Is someone with all these characteristics a unicorn? Maybe, but depending on your team’s size this PCM doesn’t necessarily need to have ALL of these traits. For a small team, yes, it’s essential, as this person will have to wear many hats and jump from role to role. For larger teams, however, it’s ok for this person to not posses all these skills, as long as each person on the team is very strong in at least 1 or 2 areas that compliment the traits of other people on the team.

What other traits do you believe make up a great performance content marketer?

We’re always looking for great PCMs… Do you have what it takes? Apply Now or email me directly at miko@outbrain.com.

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