The return of the content marketer
Why we need a completely new definition and career path for content
A few months ago, there was a long discussion about content careers on this marketing community I’m part of. And almost everyone who started their careers in content had a good, strong say. It says something about the frustrations of content folks that the conversations went on for two days!
The question that started this off came from a friend, if I remember right, and it was this: Where are all the senior content marketers? There seem to be a bunch of good early ones, and as they grow, they switch either to product marketing (most of my friends), or leadership. Which means that when you look for senior, experienced hands, they just aren’t there. Which is annoying, because the work is definitely there.
The answer to why everyone was switching to either PMM or something more specialised and getting off the content track was simple: No one wanted to pay senior content talent. Management did not see a point in paying for a skill they thought was easily replaceable with cheaper, entry-level talent. And that actually did make sense in last decade’s context, when India was selling mostly to SMBs based on SEO and basic inbound. So content marketers responded to the incentives in front of them: They moved on to other skills and functions, where they could anticipate and plan their own growth.
And then the world changed.
The quiet transformation of content marketing
The post-pandemic software landscape in India has had 4 major shifts, and these happened slowly and steadily, almost without anyone else noticing. AI was just the last straw.
This is what happened:
If you are trying to sell SMB software to the world from India now, the numbers don’t work. Acquisition is too expensive. You need to be smarter in your GTM, but also go upmarket, sell to enterprises.
AI means that the entry-level content marketer, the one who could put up a quick first draft, is now completely obsolete. Everyone has access to this means of production, and they are using it. This means a glut of first-level content, which is bad news: Your differentiation is gone.
Therefore the quality of content you need to attract customer attention has now gone up dramatically. Customers are being relentlessly sold to, and so the inbound marketing you do has to actually get them to come spend time with it.
Once upon a time, social media was a place from where you could bring prospects to your content, your website. You can still do that now, to a lesser extent. But they have also become destinations of their own, necessitating native strategies. Social cannot be an afterthought, it has become too tough.
It’s easy to see what I’m leading up to here. You need high quality, well produced, superbly designed, and actually useful content to stand out. You need different kinds of content for different platforms. To create all of this you need time, and you need experience. You need the content marketer back.
Organisations and marketing leaders are already taking note of this, bringing in subject matter experts to act as content producers (or at least editors), or hiring specialist freelancers. But as everyone who has worked in software marketing realises soon enough, you need in-house talent to plan, ideate, and execute this. The scale of this content creation and distribution will only become bigger and bigger as your progress.
A new definition of the content marketer
I saw this coming in 2020, not because I knew or could imagine that AI of this scale was coming, but because the shifts were evident. It was just getting harder and harder to attract and hold prospect attention. And it’s clear that better, more useful content is the only way to do so.
When I started thinking about structuring this role for my own team, I realised that our labelling is also wrong. We call it content marketing, when content is just one part of the mix. I think a reframing is necessary. We should start calling what we do inbound marketing. And that should break down into: Content, social media, and SEO.
Now you may say, isn’t content production, and also social media and SEO distribution? That’s exactly where I disagree. Social media and SEO are not things you think about after the production, they have to be baked into creating the content itself. Why? Because what works as a blog will not work as a LinkedIn post, what worked as a whitepaper will not work as a native video on Twitter, and none of these are SEO-optimised. For all of which you need to present the content you make completely differently.
Let me break this down in to the kind of content you need to make from just one idea.
A blog
A breakdown of the idea to be posted in the newsletter
A video for Youtube, which is different from native videos to embed on social media
Social posts for LinkedIn, Twitter, and if applicable for your target audience Instagram and Facebook too
Expansion into a whitepaper that can be either gated or ungated
Converting it into an idea for a podcast with an expert
All of these things are what the modern content marketer has to do. And only one of it is what we identify her role with: Content. Isn’t that ridiculous? Though it makes sense that writing is where all of this will start from, the role itself has moved far away from just content.
Even if we leave alone the sheer creativity required to even conceptualise all this, the thought of just executing this at scale should be enough to make my point.
So how should we structure this? I have a plan.
The new playbook for inbound marketing
Don’t call it content marketing. Call it inbound marketing. There are three parts to inbound marketing - Content, social, and SEO. Plan your calendar and distribution under these umbrellas.
Think of the head of inbound role as that of an editor of a new media company. They will plan the ideas, the messaging, and then will disseminate it through the channels available and applicable - video, social, blogs or newsletters. Then they will plan through execution and distribution. Build your team around these editors.
Let your head of inbound hire specialists. Your writers can’t make good videos. That’s a different skill. You want social distribution? Great. Let them hire a creator. You don’t have to do this all at once, but the structure will help you think through your priorities and go from there.
Each company’s marketing plan is different, target audiences are different. The prospects read and watch different things, and spend time in different places. Don’t look at other companies to plan your marketing team structure and strategy. The one-size-fits-all days are over. The bars are much higher for marketing now.
And finally, we have to pay our
contentinbound marketers more. The only folks in our ecosystem experienced and capable enough to play this new inbound game are the folks who stuck with content, and have done all of this already. We have to expand their scope, empower them, and let them play.
PS - If you need to share this with your colleagues and/or boss, now is the time to do it. The button is right there.
What I have written above is exactly what I’m doing at my team at Atomicwork. It’s exactly the structure and thought process I will use to grow out the team. Which means I very much have skin in the game with this idea.
Also, as I started writing this essay, I was coming from the viewpoint of the content marketer. But as I finished I realise I have also articulated something else: A new playbook for inbound marketing. I will elaborate on this in a new edition before the end of the year.
To read that essay and more, please subscribe below to get it straight to your mailbox.
I received some great feedback on last week’s edition, in which I wrote about the marketing MVP. In the piece, I realise I wrote about building the marketing MVP for my own teams but did not explain how. I will do so this week, in a special mid-week edition.
Plus, this is also a call for feedback. Please reply back to me with any feedback/criticism you may have. I’ll be very grateful, it will help me improve. My email is sairamkrishnan@outlook.com, if you prefer that. Thank you, and keep reading.