If you’re a young company, you may be new to the concept of content marketing, a type of marketing that involves the creation and distribution of content to a target audience. Companies distribute content through a variety of channels including blogs, social media, newsletters, e-books, white papers and webinars.
A content marketing team is a valuable resource for any company, but a group of skilled employees doesn’t come for free. Check out this guide to learn about the costs of growing a content marketing team and the key players you should have on board. You’ll also learn about the pros and cons of content marketing and a few alternatives ways to get your brand messaging across.
Pros and Cons of Content Marketing
Before you learn about the costs of building a content marketing team, it’s useful to understand the pros and cons of this type of marketing.
Pros
Content marketing offers several benefits to companies. It may allow you to:
- Attract followers, clients and customers
- Boost brand awareness
- Become a good source of information for your customers, clients and other professionals within your industry
- Spend 62 percent less than you would on traditional marketing and generate more leads, according to Demand Metric
Cons
There are also a few disadvantages to content marketing. This type of campaign:
- Requires a lot of hard work
- Costs money
- Can be challenging if you’re only used to traditional marketing methods
The Costs of Content Marketing
To get a feel for what you might spend on content marketing, it helps to know what other companies are spending. In the business-to-business (B2B) sector, companies spend an average of 26 percent of their marketing budget on content marketing, according to Marketing Insider Group. In the business-to-consumer (B2C) sector, companies allocate an average of 22 percent of their marketing budget to content marketing.
Key Players on a Content Marketing Team
A good content marketing team helps strategize, plan, create, review and monitor online and offline content. Here are a few key content team players that many brands can’t live without followed by their average annual salaries:
Content Strategist: A content strategist creates and oversees your content marketing strategy and manages every member of your content team. Content strategists should have strong organizational and analytical skills, creative and marketing vision, and the ability to write, edit and/or design content if needed.
Content Manager: A content manager ensures that content is of high quality and that it gets completed on time. Content managers are effective communicators, and they have experience choosing topics for blog posts, marketing emails, social media posts and other content. They are also highly skilled in search engine optimization (SEO) and the use of spreadsheet software.
Content Writer: A content writer follows a company’s established guidelines to write content for online and offline channels. Content writers have superior researching capabilities, excellent storytelling skills and the ability to engage an audience. It’s also helpful for content writers to have experience creating content within a company’s niche and basic knowledge of SEO and the use of keywords.
Content Editor: A content editor reviews written content and makes corrections to spelling, punctuation, grammar, flow, style and formatting. Editors also make sure that final content is directed to a brand’s specific audience. Many brands look for content editors with journalism or creative writing degrees. Other requirements may include experience working with a content management system, knowledge of image editing software and an understanding of SEO and hypertext markup language (HTML).
Content Designer: A content designer focuses on all aspects of how content is presented to users such as blog readers, email recipients and webinar participants. They think about the best way to present content — whether visual or auditory — and create the design to get the job done. Qualifications for content designers often include a degree in web design, training in graphic design and knowledge of image production software like Photoshop and Adobe InDesign. Many content designers are also skilled in user experience (UX) design and HTML.
Average Annual Salaries of Key Players
Before building a content marketing team, it helps to have an understanding of what these positions typically pay. Bear in mind that some brands hire team members that can perform more than one job category, such as a content strategist/manager or a content editor/designer. Here are the average annual salaries for key content team positions, according to Glassdoor:
- Content Strategist: $99,500
- Content Manager: $72,000
- Content Writer: $46,000
- Content Editor: $57,000
- Content Designer: $80,000
Tools for Content Marketing
In addition to a content team, your company may need to invest in a number of tools for content marketing. Examples include computer hardware and several types of software like project management software, marketing automation software, customer relationship management (CRM) software and SEO software. Many software packages come in subscription form and prices vary depending on the scale of your operation.
The Last Word
While building a content marketing team requires a certain level of investment, it might save you money in the long run if you’ve been using traditional marketing methods. And the great thing about content marketing is that it is only growing in popularity. Whether for education, inspiration or entertainment, consumers appreciate it, so not having a content marketing strategy might be riskier than having one.
