Drive revenue, customer engagement, and thought leadership with great content

Content marketing writers work with your teams to write revenue-generating materials that help you reach new audiences, build trust, educate and retain customers, and achieve strategic internal goals. Writing compelling marketing content also requires highly specialized knowledge and experience. Let’s explore the specific knowledge and expertise that a content marketing writer can contribute to your business.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing co-evolved along with the Internet as a strategy to capture the attention of potential customers amidst a furiously proliferating information environment. Email marketing platform Marketo sums up the situation: “Content marketing is the process of creating valuable, relevant content to attract, acquire, and engage your audience. Buyers and customers today are inundated by more marketing messages than ever before—more than 2,900 per day, by current estimations. This creates an environment of attention scarcity, challenging marketers with the task of producing engaging content that won’t get lost in the static.”  

Well-crafted content marketing cuts through the static to not just capture attention. By consistently publishing and sharing high-quality content across multiple channels—social media, blogs, podcasts, websites, apps, newsletters, emails—content marketing establishes thought leadership and builds trust and relationship with audiences. 

How Are Content Marketing Writers Different from Other Writers?

Valuable, relevant, and consistent—that’s the set of adjectives that the Content Marketing Institute uses to describe the ideal qualities your content marketing needs “to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” 

In contrast to other writers, content marketing writers bring a laser focus on producing knockout content specifically for the marketplace. They understand how valuable, relevant, consistent, and well-crafted content can help you establish and maintain thought leadership and drive revenue. They know how to create informative and engaging content that connects your company goals with your customer and audience needs.

Marketing writers are fluent in the unique language and requirements of a specific set of stakeholders—your marketing leadership, sales teams, your product marketing crew, and especially, the audiences you want to attract and retain. They know how to craft compelling stories that resonate with audiences.

Content marketing writers bring a laser focus on producing knockout content specifically for the marketplace. They understand how valuable, relevant, consistent, and well-crafted content can help you establish and maintain thought leadership and drive revenue.

What Do Content Marketing Writers Write?

Working closely with your teams, content marketing writers produce a wide range of content, including blog posts, newsletters, white papers, ebooks, slide decks, customer success stories, case studies, email campaigns, social media posts, even infographics. They excel at a particular form of content marketing: informative, evergreen, long-form content that will keep attracting your target audience and steadily boost your thought leadership credibility well after it’s posted.  

What Should You Look for in a Content Marketing Writer?

We asked Jennifer Barker, Director of Content Marketing for one of our long-term clients, PresenceLearning, about what she looks for in choosing a content marketing writer. She shared these insights in answer to our questions.

What skill sets are you looking for in a content marketing writer?

“First of all, writing experience and skill is essential. I think content marketing is a craft—it’s not a role that you can just move anyone into. It requires experience. 

“Another quality I look for is someone who can be collaborative—like a newspaper journalist is. They understand that the best information is not always in their head. They have to go seek out other’s perspectives, other sources—data, information, and research—to bring a piece of writing together. They always get other’s reads on things, and especially, on the actual copy once it’s produced. They need to bring at least one, ideally two sets of eyes to the work. So I look for someone who’s willing to work collaboratively and open up their work to feedback.

“And I look for someone who understands the value of adding anecdotes and data into a piece of writing and knows how much better that can make it.”

What particular value does a content marketer bring?

“So much! Ideally, they bring value in being the voice of your brand, bringing a level of sophistication to it, and consistency in language, tone, message, with an eye for the editorial style and copyediting. They really translate your value as a company to the world and engage readers of all sorts in understanding it better and being interested in it.”

Prepare to Work with a Content Marketing Writer 

Reality Check: Time

In addition to a realistic budget commitment, you’ll need to commit time for content marketing projects. 

• Different content types require different timelines. 
• When you hire a content marketing writer, you’re gaining their skill and experience in helping you to set realistic timeframes.
• The editing cycle takes time.
• Be prepared for several rounds of back-and-forth with various stakeholders.
• Some content may need legal review—your legal advisers will need lots of lead time to provide feedback and approvals.

Identify & Dedicate Team Members to the Content Marketing Project

To write their best content, marketing writers don’t conjure words out of thin air—as much as they might like to. The best content results from a rich, ongoing exchange between team members and the writer. That only works when team members make themselves available for input and questions. 

• Educate your other team members about your content marketing goals, and make sure everyone understands what your marketing writer does and doesn’t write. 
• Different types of content require different kinds of internal expertise. Make sure you’ve assigned the right team members who can give your writer the information they need, when they need it. Depending on the content asset, your writer may need input from members on the sales, product, marketing and communication, or editorial teams.
• Make sure at least two team members are on call to support the writer, give feedback, and answer questions. Depending on the diversity of your content requirements, you might need several team members to support the content project.
• Work with your writer to create a clear content list, schedule, and project plan, and confirm all stakeholders are committed to it. 

Open Access

Just like our section on Open Access in our post on working with a technical writer, your marketing writer needs to get up to speed quickly—open access to your systems will make that happen. 

• Treat your writer as an embedded team member. Give them access to stakeholders on Slack and other messaging platforms you use. Introduce them to your teams with a warm welcome, and help them to understand what everyone does and who can help them. 
• Share social media channels, pitch decks, marketing collateral, blogs, product descriptions, documentation, product demos, and brand guidelines if you have them to help them master your company vision, culture, language.
• Initially, schedule a few informal video meetings with various teams for your writer to ask questions about everything they’ve seen, heard, and read. 

Want to learn more about what a content marketing writer can do for your team? Contact us.