Source

In this competitive landscape, all businesses have significantly adopted content marketing to generate leads, drive sales, and develop brand presence. This clearly shows the importance of investing in a potent content marketer who forms and distributes valuable content to drive expected customer actions.

Creating excellent and qualitative content is a tough job. That’s why companies are coming across difficulties in finding a skilled and detail-oriented content marketing professional. Also, content marketers are far more than writers as they have to create the content and nurture the leads. 

Worried about finding the perfect candidate for the content marketing profile that manages all these responsibilities?

Don’t be, as this article will help you find a proficient and enthusiastic content marketer by describing the top-notch qualities you should look for while hiring. This will make the job of the HR managers more simplified and straightaway to pick the best content marketer trying to find a job. 

Let’s dive into it!    

10 Must-have Skills To Consider For Successfully Hiring Content Marketer

Bill Gates, in 1996 has written complete content on the topic, “Content is King,” elaborating the true importance of content for all the nature and sizes of companies. This clearly depicts how vital content is and its role on the internet. 

Thus, for running a business successfully with a reputable identity, content is something that definitely can’t be ignored. In a survey, when asked about the aspect through which the success of the content is measured, look what is found, in the following figure-  

Source

Almost 76% of marketers consider organic traffic as the top metric to determine their content success. Thus, to bring that effect, hiring an individual who is thoughtful enough about it as well as put the skill on their resume is necessary. 

But could you find the best candidate easily? 

In the following points, let’s elaborate on all the qualities you should examine while undertaking recruitment for a content marketer profile.

1. Look For A Focused Content Marketer Individual 

What do I mean by “focused content marketer?” Let’s understand it. In the overloaded content market, a number of contents are developed and posted on the internet. In this scenario, forming and publishing content in a generalized manner may or may not bring the expected results in terms of its conversion. 

Thus, in an effective hiring process, you should seek out a content marketer who is laser-focused and writes with a clear purpose in mind. They understand the audience and business’s needs and accordingly craft high-quality content. This will catch the readers’ attention and make them consider the content as a potent resource library where topics are written well by focussing on the audience. What will it give in return? Better ranking, potent brand awareness, and numerous leads on autopilot mode. 

Increasingly, content teams are turning to pre-hire assessment platforms like Adaface, Workello to filter out bad writers with good portfolios.

2. Inspect Quality Content Creation Capability

To keep the audience engaged enough, it is pretty essential to form and share nice content regularly. This will retain excitement inside the readers to read about new events from your side. Having this skill inside the content marketer will show their deliverability and schedule-focused nature for generating a great piece of content.

But “Consistency” is one of the major challenges coming in the content marketing strategy faced by many companies, as shown in the figure below-

Source

To keep yourself safe from such struggles, assessing this aspect helps kickstart your content projects effectively.

3. Check Their Creativity And Imagination Power

Creativity and Imaginative are two crucial champions that help to rank the content from all the others. To get that effect, hiring someone who is enriched enough in this space will benefit extensively. 

The importance of creativity and imagination is very diverse, which helps the content marketer to learn about content distributions, uncover interesting angles, and analyze content gaps. A content marketer who understands all these aspects can turn up the engaging factor inside the readers with its creative expertise. In other words, you get a top-tier content when you combine creative mind of a content marketer with a content creation app.

This will work as a competitive edge for you to present yourself better in front of the audience. Want to miss such an opportunity? Absolutely not, so don’t forget to examine this quality in your hiring process.

4. Analyze Their Knowledge About Basics Of SEO

To be a well-versed content marketer, SEO proficiency is a must to give the exact value to the content. With the knowledge of SEO, the content marketer will be able to understand the changing algorithm of Google. This will help them to build an SEO-friendly content strategy that helps you to rank relevantly. 

Make this assessment a bit interesting with the following scenario where the recruiter asks the following question to the applicant- 

Recruiter to the candidate: “Which tool do you prefer to use specifically for SEO?”

In reply: “I use Ahrefs, Moz, Ubersuggest, etc.”  

Getting this answer shows the candidate’s SEO skills. Further, analyze his/her knowledge about writing and optimizing the content to get searched, tracking content, maintaining and updating the existing content, etc.

All these rank SEO as the number one content marketing strategy at all-time as shown in the figure below-

Source

The content marketer who has built knowledge in this area will be the best candidate to fill this vacant profile. However, if the candidate is smart but lacks enough experience or does not have a particular skill, don’t rush to reject the applicant. Instead, build a mentoring program to train new employees and give them all the necessary knowledge and skills to succeed.

5. Determine Their Researching Skills

Research, research, and research. This is the main ingredient that makes the content exceptional. Why? Because it will form well-researched content by gathering information, statistical data, and analytics from varieties of sources. 

A brief understanding of content marketer should comprise the following three points-

1. Know The Core Customers– 

1. Who are the customers?
2. What are their pain points?
3. What do the current demographics and psychological data say?

Researching for all this information helps to craft engaging and customer-centric content.

2. Know The Competitors– To take a step ahead in this competitive world, understanding what they are doing and following in their organization is a top aspect. This requires an analytical and researching mind who can study and find out the gaps in their brand. 
3. Know Their Company– Most importantly and primarily, the content marketer should understand what the company is specialized in? This will help them to know the products and their uniqueness from others. It is the key necessity to have inside all the content marketers to align their saas content writing and marketing strategies with the vision and mission of their company. According to factoHR, to achieve these formulated visions and missions, the need for core values is important as it helps in making satisfactory decisions for both customers and the community.

Along with this, they should know about the company’s keywords and related phrases for ranking the content.

6. Explore A Good Collaborative Personality

For all the job profiles, the need for a collaborative work environment is reasonably necessary to bring the expected results. Testing this quality inside the content marketer will showcase how he/she can perform their job concerning the team and the whole organization. This requires checking their behavior, communication, and other soft skills using which they can excellently work in a collaborative culture with the team members.

Such a nature of the content marketer will minimize the cases of misunderstanding and miscommunication. This showcases their keenness to learn about the people and their value to perform their job with much efficiency and quality. All these capabilities will help to build a potent team that can collectively perform their job remotely. Moreover, completing the remote employee monitoring process will be much easier and more effective.

7. Verify Commitment Nature Concerning The Schedules

The great ideas of the content marketer will only work if it gets converted into a proper plan. To get the expected results, executing the plan with the desired timeline is a key necessity. The perfect individual you are looking for should understand its importance and know what problems will arise if they miss the deadline. That’s why they research adequately and form a documented content marketing strategy. B2B marketers continuous emphasize this point and have brought a rise in this approach, as shown in the figure below-

Source

They frame a complete outline of the blog posts for the entire year and remain stick to the publishing schedules. To keep note of the same, they may use tools like Trello, Asana alternative, Proofhub, etc., to ensure that all the team members remain on the same track. 

Further, content marketers should establish SMART goals for their content plan to work with solid and achievable targets.

Do you know what they can get in return?

Great success in an amount of 376%. This clearly shows the power of setting goals and achieving the same promptly.

8. Scrutinize Their Command On Grammar And Spelling

A content marketer from inside should reflect the quality of a content writer by thoroughly understanding the nitty-gritty of writing. The more they remain proficient in it, the more it reflects the audience’s engagement and connectivity with their written piece.

To do the same, grammar and spelling usage should be up to the mark to form nifty sentences. The most easiest way to achieve this is by using a trusted grammar checker which corrects spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes with just one click. Whether it’s website content or any other posts, people will always judge the content based on the grammar and spelling qualities. Ken Schlechter rightly elaborated the poor grammar and spelling impact by saying, “A poorly written document affects credibility.” Missing commas, poor grammar obscures, meaning changes bring bad outcomes.

Therefore, all the HR managers need to assess the grammatical proficiency of the applicant. Due to this, hiring should be linked with specific test and evaluation methods to guarantee that the candidate is worthy enough for your company. This clearly depicts the importance of analyzing their skills and qualities to be the perfect match for the content marketer profile.

So, which method will help to determine the grammatical and spelling usage skills of the content marketer?

Check their previously written content, resumes, and arrange a test to examine their grammatical mistakes. To make this process a bit quick, tools like Prepostseo, Grammarly, Hemingway, or other grammar checking software remain helpful to analyze their content.

9. Study Their Content Analytics Performance

The content marketer does not just write the content and publish it. They measure its success by analyzing the traffic and engagement of the visitors. This will show the goals set by the marketer and in what amount they are achieving them. 

Targeted KPIs play a significant role in it as they will directly show the content performance. A combination of qualitative information with data analysis will help to measure the overall KPIs. The image below shows the most common type of KPI based on the content type that the content marketer should be aware of-

Source

Thus, the job of a content marketer is all about forming a proper strategy, executing it well, and analyzing it. This will help to know what works well and what not to make alterations accordingly.

10. Look Over Story-telling Capabilities

The content gets only connected with the readers if it is written in a story-telling format. What people desire to know and how you are delivering it makes a great difference. And to make them come back to your content, presenting the valuable piece in a chronological and story format is what suits them best. 

Today the story-telling format is useful for all forms of content like blog posts, videos, and visuals. This clearly depicts the need for such a content marketer that master this art in their profession. 

Do not feel overburdened. All you need to determine is the three prime elements of story-telling, as mentioned below-

1. Targeted Character– The content is written from different perspectives. Is it first person, second person, or third person? By analyzing it and writing it corresponding to it is the prime need. This shows that the content is written reflecting you and the entire focus is on you only.    
2. Struggles– Here, the information about the challenges or issues faced by the targeted character is mentioned. It is such a concern that they wish to get it solved. For that, they are continuously looking for a solution that helps them to get out of it.   
3. Solution– Regarding the problems, the content reflects that these features or products will help them solve the issue and succeed in their job. 

All these will give the expected result when the content shows the helping nature towards the audience with its language and writing experience.

Concluding Thoughts

A content marketer is a precious gem for all businesses to succeed in their marketing campaign. This demands the need for an expert content marketer that can be a potent supporter for your company to achieve success. To hire such a candidate, make a checklist of the above-mentioned qualities to make your search more worthy. 

Although it can take time to find the perfect content marketer, recruiting the one who is equipped with all these skills will help add value to your website in the long run.