Success Requires Someone Inside Your Organization Owning Content

Watch Marcus Sheridan deliver the second principle of this playbook.

We’ve talked with thousands of marketing leaders over the past 10 years, and almost every single one of them agreed with this statement:

“I’m wearing too many hats.”

Inbound marketing and content creation isn’t something that can be tossed on the plate of someone at your company who already has 45+ hours of work to do each week. 

And yet, one of the most common mistakes companies make when they’re first starting out with inbound marketing is to delegate it to someone who already has a full workload. 

What’s worse is when they entrust the creation of their content to an outside agency, freelancer, or other company. 

Outsourcing your company’s content creation to a digital marketing agency can seem like a smart solution if you have the desire to hit the ground running with inbound marketing but lack the resources. However, entrusting the creation of your content to an outsider often comes at a cost. 

An outsider, no matter how talented, will always fail to fully capture the soul of your business and your values in your content. Moreover, your growth will always be limited by the set deliverables in your contract, where additional costs are often incurred if you need to increase your velocity.

A freelancer or agency will likely limit you to a set number of hours, articles, or words. You may have limited access to them as they juggle multiple clients. Overall, you will have less flexibility in your ability to publish and scale as you please. 

The moral of the story here is that, if you don’t designate a single in-house employee, whose sole responsibility is your inbound marketing content efforts, it won’t be done right. You need someone who is the owner of this initiative, from accountability to execution.

We call this person a content manager. 

You need a content manager as your champion, to be that person who says “Yes!”; who cheers everyone on and makes the lives of everyone in sales much easier.

That’s right, sales.

The best content managers out there will all tell you the same thing, if you ask them about what their goals are: 

“My #1 customer is sales.”

Not marketing.

Great content managers are laser-focused on guaranteeing their sales team members look like geniuses. Because, at its core, inbound marketing (when executed correctly) is a sales initiative, wherein you’re creating content that empowers your sales team to close deals faster with more educated buyers.

Note: A great inbound marketing workshop walks through eight essential principles of inbound marketing:

• How your ideal buyers’ expectations have changed
• How search engines work and rank your website content 
• The way your buyers search and the questions they’re asking (what we call “The Big 5”)
• Why it’s important to brainstorm content ideas from The Big 5 as a full group
• How content can impact the sales process and close rates
• Why everyone’s voice, talent, and knowledge are critical for success
• Your new editorial guidelines for inbound content
• Discussion of what would prevent inbound from working at your company

Learn more about an inbound marketing workshop. 

Let’s put this into action

• Take our course on how to hire a content manager. In one hour, you’ll learn how to screen content manager applicants, so you only spend time with those who have the greatest potential; what questions to ask in an interview and what to look for in answers; how to run a situational activity that shows you immediately who can “walk the walk” and “talk the talk”; how to set your content manager up for success before their first day; and much more.
• Use our content manager job description template for all industries. Whenever you’re hiring for a position that’s completely new for your company, one of the most cumbersome challenges is creating the job description. And we’ve taken all of the guesswork out of that step in the process with this ready-to-use, easily customized content manager job description template.
  
  
• Encourage your new content manager to join our content manager mastermind group. Once a month, content managers from a wide range of industries come together to learn, ask questions, brainstorm ideas, and more in this IMPACT-exclusive mastermind group. After you’ve hired your own content manager, have them join so they can shorten the learning curve and become an inbound hero at your company faster.