Hi there! It’s Matt with MessageUp.
How many marketers does it take to produce an effective blog post?
Sounds like one of those “…to change a lightbulb?” jokes, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, it’s a serious question with a rather unpalatable answer.
The short version is: more marketers than most B2B companies have available.
Why so? Because producing an effective blog post is not the same as writing and publishing a blog post.
One person can knock out a 1,000-word article in about an hour, assuming they’re a competent writer/typist. This is especially true now that we have generative AI to do the research, frame the article, come up with titles and subheadings, flesh out the key topics, and offer advice on writing style.
But what makes content marketing effective isn’t the rote production of AI-assisted summaries and listicles.
It’s the strategic publication of content that is relevant and helpful to your target audience at specific stages in their buyer’s journey.
Each of the words in that phrase requires careful consideration and intentional action.
You need a strategy.
You need to understand who makes up your target audience.
You need to understand their needs and wants at different stages of their buyer’s journey.
You need to design, schedule, produce, and publish content that caters to those needs and wants.
And, you need to monitor the performance of your team and the content it produces to see whether it’s hitting the mark and how to make things better.
A single marketer handling all of those tasks is one helluva one-man-band.
And yet, that’s exactly what many B2B companies ask of their sole marketing specialist—or, worse, of non-marketing employees who are asked to “cover” marketing in addition to their day jobs.
I understand that marketing isn’t the first thing most ventures will hire for when they’re newly formed and bootstrapping.
So, when is the right time to hire for marketing? And what role(s) should you hire first?
In this week’s post on the Framework blog, Strategic Staffing for Content Success—When and Who to Hire for B2B Content Marketing, we consider seven key roles that effective content marketing teams need to fill, and when a growing B2B company should plan to fill them.
Multi-tasking and freelance resources are essential ways of filling roles when there isn’t yet enough demand to justify a full-time hire. But it’s important to recognize when they’ve outlived their purpose and are becoming bottlenecks in the content marketing process.
Operational Updates
As a reminder, we’re making our content more accessible by publishing a series of short videos on LinkedIn, Instagram, and our YouTube channel. Please follow/subscribe to each of them, if you haven’t already!
Each weekly video segment explains a key content marketing concept in about two minutes. If there are particular topics you’d like to see us cover in future episodes, drop them into the comments below or send us a message.
Reading and Taking Action
This week’s What We’ve Been Reading collection features articles on leveraging influencers in B2B marketing, recommended marketing books, creating effective case studies, and B2B marketing trends to watch.
I’ve already put the Martech Series article on case studies to good use with one of my clients. It provides one of the best overviews I’ve seen on what makes some case studies more effective than others and how to go about writing one for your company.
Rounding out this week’s newsletter, my One Step actionable tip encourages you to think critically about the key tasks and skills needed for your company to produce effective content marketing. How are you covering them today and what steps might you take to raise your game or debottleneck the process?
See you next Wednesday.
Cheers!
~ Matt
Our Latest Posts on The Framework Blog
Feb 07, 2024 - Strategic Staffing for Content Success—When and Who to Hire for B2B Content Marketing
Jan 31, 2024 - Cheap, Quick, and Easy—3 Red Flags for B2B Content Marketing
What We’ve Been Reading
Here are some articles we’ve been reading this week that we hope you will enjoy and find valuable:
15 Unique Ways to Leverage Influencers in B2B Marketing
There's a persistent belief among B2B leaders that influencer marketing is a B2C tactic and not relevant to their company, which simply isn't true. B2B influencer marketing is alive and well. While it's a stretch to call all 15 ideas in this piece compiled by an expert panel for Forbes Agency Council "unique", they are definitely worthy of consideration when deciding if and how to enlist influencers in your B2B marketing strategy.
6 Books to Help Make Your Marketing More Successful in 2024
Mike Pastore at Search Engine Land offers up six solid book recommendations for taking your marketing to the next level, all of which are great reads and most of which are directly applicable to B2B marketing. We've added two of them to our TBR list for 2024!
What Can Help Differentiate Your B2B Marketing Case Study?
Case studies are a highly-prized elixir in B2B marketing circles because of their power to attract new customers. In this article, the team at Martech Series explores how case studies work, and how to go about writing and promoting an effective case study for your business.
19 B2B Marketing Trends to Enhance Your 2024 Business Prospects
Dammit, we fell for the headline with the unusual number (19) at the beginning! And it's a listicle! Fortunately, this one was compiled by an expert panel of Fast Company Executive Board members, who were each asked to name a trend that they are most excited about—and why the rest of us should pay attention to it during 2024.
Books on B2B Content Marketing
Secure yourself a copy of Content Marketing: Mission Critical, a guide for B2B CEOs, and Content Marketing: Making the Magic Happen, a guide for B2B marketing leaders, in paperback, e-book, or audiobook format, by visiting www.messageup.com/books. There you’ll find discount codes as well as details on limited edition boxed sets that include copies signed by the author.
One Step…
Today’s One Step actionable tip asks you to think about the key tasks and skills needed for your company to produce effective content marketing.
As we covered in this week’s blog post, there are a number of key roles your company needs to fill—either by hiring people with the right skills or by engaging them on a contract basis—if it wants to consistently publish effective content. They include:
Content Strategist
Content Writer(s)
Graphic Designer
Content Editor
SEO Specialist
Social Media Manager(s)
Analytics Specialist
Thinking about your company’s content marketing efforts, ask yourself the following:
To what extent do we need each of the listed roles for our content marketing to be effective?
How are we covering them today?
Where might we be short-changing the process? (for example, asking someone to cover one of the roles who doesn’t have enough skill or experience)
What steps might we take to raise our game or debottleneck the process?
Proposals to hire additional resources—whether contract, part-time, or full-time—often meet resistance because they add to the company’s costs.
Overcoming that resistance requires demonstrating a clear need and how the new resource will help the company perform better—ultimately generating more revenue.
Be sure to outline the business case for any incremental resources you want to hire before taking the idea to whomever holds the purse strings.
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