Whether you want to build an agency to help organizations unleash the power of content marketing or are trying to build an in-house team for your business, know that finding top talent is easier said than done. This doesn’t mean that you can’t build a strong content marketing team, but you will need to work hard to build one, especially if you can’t pay them top dollar.
If you know where to look and how to vet writers, you could find some great writers out there that will write within your budget. And, if you’re ready and willing to pay a little more, then you could get more people than you can handle. Let’s take a look at how you can build a strong content marketing team.
Have Clear Objectives
You first have to set clear objectives for your content marketing strategy. Are you trying to educate the public on a very technical subject or make yourself look more accessible? Or maybe your goal is to rank high for specific keyword searches and guide prospects through a sales funnel?
These are all very different objectives and will require different types of writers. You could also benefit from having different types of writers for different purposes. You could have sales-like content created by sales-oriented content, casual content written by writers who are more creative, and technical content written by technical writers, for instance.
Start Recruiting
The next step is to start recruiting talent. You have multiple options here. One of them is posting on job search sites. Create clear listings that tell exactly what the job is about and what you’re looking for in a writer. Make sure that you make the job listing title very clear too and let people know what type of writer you’re looking for exactly.
Another option is to go on freelance sites. Upwork, Freelancer, and Guru are all great options. ProBlogger is another great site you could try. What’s great about ProBlogger is that you can post jobs and have tons of writers apply in a few days. You’ll then be able to cherry-pick who you want. You have to make it clear that you’re looking for someone for a long-term position, however.
From then on, you will need to ask your top candidates to submit trial articles. Pick subjects at random, but make sure that they’re aligned with the type of content you will be asking from them.
You must use a plagiarism tool to check if any of the articles they submit were copied from somewhere else. You can use a tool like Quetext to do this. It makes it easy to check for accidental plagiarism or intentional plagiarism by telling you exactly how much the content submitted matches with outside content.
Establish a Clear Structure
Your team needs to have a chief content officer, which will probably be you, a chief editor that will look at all the content before it runs through you, and a few ground-level editors that will edit the content before it gets to the chief editor. You can also play the role of chief content officer and chief editor if you don’t have issues with the workload.
Everyone should be clear as to what should go to who and who should be contacted for questions. You should also use a project management tool to make sure that everyone stays on track and on the same page.
This is all you need to know if you want to build a solid content marketing team. Make sure that you nurture the talent you manage to attract and do everything to retain them as top talent is extremely valuable these days.
