If you want to have an effective content marketing strategy, please don’t think that all you need is someone to churn out blog posts. Generating traffic and sales through effective content marketing requires more.

Content marketing is about building content that your customers need. It should be educational, inspiring, and address a pain point that they may have (or just be in the process of discovering they have).

By thinking about who your customer is and what they need before anyone puts pen to paper, you’ll be able to construct a plan for how your articles and blog posts (and social media, web pages, etc) work together. The goal is continual development of assets that grow and generate results over time.

So is your writer the right person to do this? He or she will need to not only put out great content but consider the strategy and marketing of that content. It’s a lot to ask of one person.

Consider instead building an effective content marketing team that’s nimble, complementary, focused, and happy. You’ll get this if you look at having these three roles in the team.

1. The Producer: Ensures the content is quality and creative.

• Purpose: Producing great things
• Core Skill: Writing
• Emerging Skills: Audio, design
• Aspires To: Write a book
• Potential C-level: Chief Content Officer

2. The Marketer: Ensures the content reaches and converts customers.

• Purpose: Get great things to people, get people to act on them
• Core Skill: Demand Generation
• Emerging Skills: Writing
• Aspires To: Run a go-to consultancy
• Potential C-level: Chief Marketing Officer

3. The Strategist: Ensures everything & everyone is working well.

• Purpose: Company/Team KPI’s
• Core Skill: Content Strategy
• Emerging Skills: Leadership, broader business strategy and planning
• Aspires To: Found a company
• Potential C-level: Chief Executive Officer

Together this team is balanced between those who think about marketing and those who think about creative.

This way of organising your team offers several benefits.

Autonomy: They don’t all need to sit in meetings all day to figure things out. They have one leader (The Strategist) who can, if needed, jump into a meeting, but you can ideally keep talented minds close to the work.

Complementary: This approach allows people to focus on their core strengths. You’re letting the writer write and the marketer get the message out to the right people.

Nimble: Big, slow teams kill innovation and prevent efficiency in the age of the internet.

Organising in small, complementary teams of happy people is the way to go. And if you’re working in content marketing, its important to think about where your skills and goals lie to ensure you’re working in the area that you’re strongest in.