On hiring brand content marketers and building a great team

I recently was interviewed by Jen Selverian, a marketing and media consultant and long time friend. It was a fun exchange and Jen asked great questions about my experiences building brand content marketing practices at both brands and agencies - and how to hire great content marketers.

Q&A below:

JS: First, let's start with the basic definition of a content marketer, and its closest relatives: copywriters, content strategists and content creators. Help me understand the differences.

MF:  Content marketing in its simplest form is about delivering story and information of value in an engaging way to establish and expand relationships at scale.  When done right, brands can win hearts and minds with customers and prospects.  It’s a multi-disciplinary craft that spans strategy, creative, user experience, brand and performance.  Strategists establish the objectives, insights, channel ecosystem thinking and track for iterative optimization opportunities.  Copywriters develop the written aspect but also are always mindful of what’s interesting to audiences and how it’s delivered in a way that’s anchored in brand voice.  Creators play at the intersection of production, project management and platform expertise.  

JS: If you were building a content marketing practice, as you did at IBM and Goldman Sachs, what would be your priority of hires?

MF: Building an in-house content marketing practice, like any marketing practice, needs to be tailored to the organization.  How big is the organization, in terms of regions, business units, volume of content created and brand ambition?  What is the maturity of the marketing organization, in terms of culture, partner disciplines, business buy-in and of course, technology and data infrastructure.  Once you begin to have a sense of the organization today and where you’re trying to take it, mission critical questions around a centralized vs. decentralized organization structure take shape.  In other words, how much of your team do you want sitting across business units versus embedded within units.  I’ve seen multiple approaches for different types of businesses but I’d offer that most larger organizations tend to lean towards a hybrid model over time that has teams at both the corporate and BU level.  The corporate teams set standards and bring to life cross-team initiatives.  The BU teams lead business-dedicated initiatives and become deeper topic experts for those units.

To answer your question around priority hires, I’d offer that you need to start with hiring a strong set of leaders who can champion the culture of storytelling and content that you’re trying to build across the organization.  These leaders should be able to have the conviction to stand up for the value of creativity, originality, strategy, standards, process, governance and craft.  That’s not always an easy role to play - and it takes both courage and experience.  These leadership roles might be referred to as “Editor in Chief” or “Content Director.”  Working with these leaders, you’ll want content strategists who can help organize insight, campaign journeys and tight briefs.  And of course you’ll want producers, writers and designers who are passionate about bringing great storytelling to life.

JS: What are the critical skills a content marketer needs today?

MF: Critical skills that I’m always looking for are the following:

• Passion for storytelling, thought leadership and experience

• Appreciation of audience insight and brand voice.

• Strategic perspective and structured thinking across messaging, channels, process and governance

• Critical thinking around purpose, quality, performance, testing, learning and optimization

• Strong writing, editing, and/or design skills - with attention to detail and craft

• Ability to think creatively and resourcefully on their feet

• Analytical and with an ability to translate data into creative and business insight

Ultimately good content marketers will display some or many of these qualities - great content marketers have a passion for storytelling, delighting audiences and connecting positive engagement to business outcomes.

JS: How do you assess those skills when you're hiring? 

MF: Beyond reviewing resumes, portfolios and writing samples, when I meet with candidates I want to understand if this work really lights them up.  It should be an exciting profession, because it is!  Content marketing is about delivering great experiences that create brand love.  The process of strategy and creativity, when everything is clicking, has an unmistakable energy.  Have these candidates seen that come to life in their work history?  Are they imagining how it all comes together to create brand magic?

Further, are they curious? Do they want to figure out what makes audiences tick? Do they want to really understand topics and become subject-matter experts? 

Beyond classic interview conversations, I also find value in introducing mini creative challenges during interviews - to see if candidates enjoy impromptu creative problem-solving, or become intimidated by it.  Can they embrace thinking strategically and creatively on their toes?

JS: What questions do you use to qualify candidates?

• How do you define content marketing today?

• What does great content look like to you?  

• Are there any content brands or programs that you admire?

• Please share one or a couple of examples of content work that you delivered, which you're most proud of.

• How has work you’ve delivered made a positive impact on business?  How do you know it drove value?

• Do you have a preferred approach or creative process that you lean on to deliver great content work?

• What are the partnerships and/or collaborations that are most critical to success for your content work?

• How have you empowered others to succeed in their content work?

• Have you ever had to pivot or optimize content work - how did you approach that?

• You have a new client - they produce pencils.  Craft a game-changing content program to grow this pencil business.

JS: What does the future of content marketing look like?

I’ll start with where we’ve been and are to get to the future of content.  Over the last 10-15 years, the recognition of content’s importance has really taken off.  Today, it’s undeniable to most marketing professionals that content is essential for driving marketing success, more meaningful brand experiences and business growth.  Few marketers would advocate for plans without content.  And yet, content marketing as a discipline continues to struggle with measurement and attribution, particularly in the mid-stages of the customer journey.  We can align content fairly well to upper funnel reach, and we can align demand content to leads and sales - but the middle part, where real relationships between brand and audience form is a bit more vague when it comes to the numbers.  For this reason, many brand teams find that they have created a lot of content but there’s still debate about which content is most important and worth the investment.  As more budget has been dedicated to content, more accountability is rightly expected.  So in some ways, Content Marketing might be considered in its “adolescence” right now.  It has more investment and more of a seat at the table than years ago - but it needs to really prove the value and governance beyond intuition to secure long term influence.  Performance and ROI need to be even more clear.  And marketing as a whole, not just content, needs to move beyond soft metrics and into an era that I’m referring to these days as an “era of revenue acceleration.”

The future for content is bright.  I’m confident that teams will get better and the measurement rigor.  A number of areas excite me about the future of content.  First, I believe that content marketing is evolving into experience marketing.  Content defines brand experience - and likewise, brand should deeply shape content, across purpose, voice and form.  So I see content experience, brand experience, customer experience all converging around experience.  As that happensteams will need to be more nimble across the brand experience.  New AI tools like Chat GPT and Dall-E 3 will help rapidly prototype content.  Humans will still play an essential role in strategy, creation and versioning of content in a manner that is accurately personalized.  And AI will also help with activating content in an omnichannel and audience-segmented manner. 

In terms of the future for content marketing teams, I believe major brands will continue to invest in in-house teams, but they will only thrive with commitment to culture and clear strategy,  process and governance.  I believe all agencies are making a play for content but only some will really be great at it.  And I see the rise of more independent content consulting via creative collectives that fully embrace the agile / nimble possibilities of hybrid and remote work.

I could go on about the future of content as it relates to other important trends such as the maturation of the creator economy, the era of revenue acceleration, the recent questioning of digital advertising and more.  Perhaps for another post - but all to say the future is bright!

JS: What advice would you give to a content marketer looking to upskill? 

MF: Here are some thought starters for content marketers at all levels to consider as they invest in their growth:

• Find stories you want to tell outside of work and share them with the world.  The act of storytelling builds momentum.

• Ask people who you trust to review and offer honest feedback on your work.

• Think about how you articulate the story, purpose and value of content marketing.  

• Review the performance data available for your work systematically and make sure you can highlight the trends at both an aggregate and individual asset level.

• Network with content marketers that you admire and see how they respond to your story and how they tell the story of content marketing.

• Attend and participate in content marketing events and webinars.

• Explore great learning hubs, such as Content Marketing Institute, LinkedIn Learning and more.

I hope these perspective are helpful. I have a podcast coming out soon, during which I’m connecting with great marketing leaders of all types - and I look forward to sharing and discussing with our marketing community. More to come!