How to build a B2B content marketing team

Great B2B content marketing is teamwork.

But it’s rare to have all the necessary talents in one person, so you need to put together a multi-disciplinary project team. The team may stay together for the long haul (which would be great) or assemble, disperse and reassemble for each new project or piece like Arnie Schwarzenegger in The Terminator (and every other movie he’s done).

But to make your content marketing initiatives a success, somebody needs to be wearing these hats. The roles may not each live in a dedicated body — they may all be inside one person – but you need them on the team:

The Content Strategist

• The Big-Picture dude
• Understands the business inside out
• Bang up-to-date on content marketing
• Communicates well with stakeholders
• Good facility with all media
• Student of Sun Tzu

The Expertise Harvester

• A journalist/analyst type
• Knows where the goodies are in the company
• Great at ferreting out knowledge and stories
• And packaging them up into briefs
• Student of James Spangler

The Writer

• Bastard love-child of journalist and copywriter
• Master of all formats and media
• Turns unstructured gobbledy-gook into clear, compelling stories
• Does it fast
• Student of George Orwell’s essays

The Designer

• An information salesperson
• Master of all media & formats
• Great at structure & hierarchy
• Message first, design awards third
• Student of Edward Tufte

The Geek

• Lives in the analytics
• Great at turning data into insight
• And insight into firm recommendations
• Great at setting up stuff to track
• And convincing people to tag their links
• Student of Richard Feynman

The Process Wonk

• Project manager
• Complete/Finisher
• Firm but fair but friendly
• Loves them spreadsheets and project plans and editorial calendars
• Actually believes deadlines are deadlines
• Student of Henry Gantt

The Friendly Sales Dude

• Meets with marketers to define a sales-ready lead
• Understands the role of content through the buying cycle
• Says thank you when real leads are dumped in lap
• Happy to attribute that sale to a content-generated lead
• Buys Bruichladdich Ten for marketing team annually
• Student of Dale Carnegie

The Socialiser

• Knows how to share content so others share it too
• Fluent in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Slideshare…
• Has a gazillion (relevant) followers
• And a reputation for sharing good stuff
• And helping others
• Student of Tina Brown

The Paid Media Planner

• Knows the difference between CPM, CPA and ROI
• Great at pay-per-click — in search engines and social media
• Will try anything – a natural experimenter
• Great relationship with the Data Geek
• Proves the return on every dollar invested
• Student of Warren Buffett

The Nurturer

• Lives and breathes Revenue Performance Management
• Drives marketing automation like a BMW
• Speaks Salesforce (or other CRM)
• Knows how to model attributions
• Owns the funnel: content in, money out
• Student of Florence Nightingale

The Search Bunny

• Keen eye for the keyphrase gap
• Good at optimising without killing copy
• Keeps on top of Google’s latest whim (Pandas, Penguins, Potato-heads)
• Never buys a link
• Owns no black hats
• Student of Pythia

So okay — how many of these do you have on your team?

Do you think we left anyone out?  Do comment….