Isn’t it amazing to know that some companies can flush out one great content after another?
It would not be wrong to think that companies like eConsultancy, Buffer, and HubSpot must be employing a huge team of writers given the quality and the frequency of content they’re producing.
But that’s not true.
The “secret” is that these companies have set up a well-defined and close-knit team of writers for content production and marketers for inbound marketing.
So, how can you turn your company into an inbound marketing powerhouse?
In this section, we’re going to cover all the steps involved in transforming your company into an inbound marketing machine.
First, we’ll tell you all the skill set required to become successful with inbound marketing. Then, we’ll also go on to show you various types of marketing team structures for newly found, mid-sized businesses, and enterprise organizations. Finally, we’ll give you useful resources to help you find, recruit, interview, and hire only the best possible team for inbound marketing.
What types of skill set needed for successful inbound marketing?
There’s not one team structure template available out there for setting up an inbound marketing team. This is because every company will have a different set of requirements for content production, unique competitive factors, and varying internal resources.
According to Joe Pulizzi, the founder of the Content Marketing Institute, says, “The success achieved through content marketing will always vary in every company of every size. What you can do is match the roles with the available skill and outsource what you need.”
It’s that simple.
So, the first thing you’ll have to do is, think about the skill sets that you already have on your team today and look for any gaps.
Without wasting another second, let’s dive in and identify some of the core skill sets that you want your inbound marketing team to have:
Writing
This you probably knew would come up. You see, a lot of writing is required for inbound marketing. As an inbound marketer, you’ll be creating everything – from short web copy and nurturing emails to whitepaper and long form blog posts.
Web Design
In addition to taking care of the basic design tasks such as creating PDF files for offering content, creating landing pages, and setting up email templates, having a professional web designer in your inbound marketing team will be highly beneficial for you. A good design can breathe life to your content through the use of awesome infographics, charts, and imagery.
Web Development
While it’s true that for a majority of inbound marketing tasks you actually don’t require a help from a web developer on a daily basis, however, you’ll definitely run into problems where you’ll require technical help. Web developers will be an asset for your organization whenever you want to create bespoke web design, integrate business systems, and develop custom functionality.
Data Analysis
Inbound marketing is a number’s game. You will want to have someone on your marketing team who can plunge into the dashboards, metrics, industry whitepapers, forecasts, and keyword research.
Inbound Strategy
From a high-level perspective, the main responsibility of a strategist is to make sure that the inbound marketing strategy aligns with overachieving business objectives. Strategies, therefore, need to have a good grasp of understanding their target audience and competitors in the industry so that they can come up refined strategies, well-informed tactics and generate new ideas.
Software Expertise
Marketing today is increasingly becoming technical in nature. If you’re going to create your entire inbound marketing strategy based on a certain marketing and sales software pile, you’ll need to hire someone who knows what is happening under the hood.
Project Management
Once you have launched your marketing strategy and running, you’ll soon come to realize the significance of project management. With so many things involved, you need a help of someone in your team who can take charge of running projects on time, under/on a budget, and on specifications.
The director of Content at Econsultancy, Chris Lake, offers some useful insights into the responsibilities and roles of a great content team. As you’ll soon discover, out of 16 roles that Chris talks about, many overlaps with the core skills that we just went through in this guide. So, if your current marketing team is quite small, you’ll need to set up a multi-skilled people who can handle all of these responsibilities and roles.
