How to Build the Ultimate Content Marketing Team

You are nothing without your team.

In the world of B2B, the marketing team has become the most important department to ensure success. Your marketing team are the guys or gals who are going to take an initial idea and bring it to life for your customers and clients. They are the connection between a product and sales.

Now is an exciting time for any marketer to be working, as the possibilities of digital and inbound marketing are endless. The consumer now has more say than ever in the services and products you sell.

As a CMO, your marketing team is crucial to ensuring the success of your company, which means you’ll need the right mix of creative people, development masterminds and analytical thinkers.

So, how do you create and lead an all-star team that will help your brand soar to new heights? We’ve compiled 3 fundamental steps to lead your people and build the ultimate dream team…

STEP 1 – Ensure your team is working towards common goals

As a marketer, it can be easy to chase multiple projects or get distracted by the latest big idea. As a CMO, it’s vital that you manage your team to ensure they stay highly focused on your key common goals. Sure, you might have different departments working on different projects, but your role here is to be disciplined and choose team-wide goals that ultimately lead to revenue rolling in.

Ensure you set clear and manageable metrics for your team, and constantly reinforce the team wide goals so that your team is reminded and motivated to work towards these high impact goals.

The metrics you set here should be cross-functional across the team and aim to support your marketing funnel including content production, product launches, and sales operations.

The goals and metrics you set should be created based on direct feedback between sales and marketing. Speak to your customer support department or the business development leader and get a direct glimpse into the market and what the consumer is saying about your products. Use this information wisely, coupled with your marketing team’s ideas, to commit to set goals and metrics.

STEP 2 – Streamline communication and project work

In today’s world of digital marketing, it’s more vital than ever to have a streamlined communication and project management system. This is essential to keeping your team on track and focused on the key goals and metrics. To start off with, aim to set up a marketing automation system and a project management system.

Marketing automation system

Marketing automation is a great place to start, which will help you reduce time and free your team up to focus on product development. Do your research and find the right tool to use to ensure your team are best utilizing their time.

What we use:

Hubspot – you simply can’t go past Hubspot for the most effective and user-friendly marketing automation system. Their software helps you to focus on key goals, grow your list, and truly speak to your target audience in a systematised and focused way.

Project management system

An effective project management system can help keep your team communicating in a simple and fluid way. It can help to reduce time, improve work ethic and reduce the amount of emails going back and forth.

We suggest:

Trello – Simple, powerful, (and free) project management using highly intuitive “boards” and “cards”.

Asana – a freemium project management tool that helps to eliminate email and make project work easy and simple.

Basecamp – one of the most popular project management tools around, Basecamp is great for more detailed project work, allowing people from different departments to work succinctly together.

STEP 3 – Work with your team members’ skills and strengths

This is often an overlooked aspect of creating an inbound and content marketing team. Sure we’d love to find one person that can do everything at 100% but that’s an unrealistic expectation. People thrive when they are working and producing content that’s aligned with their strengths and skill sets, so you should design your team this way.

The first step to creating a dream team is to list out all the skill sets you would need. After doing so, you can start to assign team members or find new team members that fit those specific skill sets and strengths.

Within a marketing team you’re going to need a lot of different skills and personalities but generally you’ll need:

a content strategist
a visual content creator
a strong writer
a skilled project manager
a stand out developer
an editor/researcher.

Engage with your team to find out who fits these positions and use their strengths to your advantage. If your team is small you might find one person can wear several hats. For example, your marketing co-ordinator might also be handy with Photoshop, so can perform the role of visual designer as well as content strategist. Or you might hire a writer who can self-edit and do all their own research.

Your team is everything to the success of your company, so choose wisely and don’t skimp when it comes to either developing these skills in existing team members, or in finding new people to fill these roles.

Conclusion

Creating the perfect content marketing team isn’t easy. But by focusing on what’s important and not being too caught up with the latest fads or tools, you can put together and lead a solid inbound marketing team that gets results for your business using content and marketing automation.