5 Key Digital Marketing Hires Every Publisher Needs to Make

Publishers should be natural leaders in content marketing. Providing high quality, authoritative content is already your stock in trade. While quality content is a fundamental requirement of successful digital marketing, it's not enough in and of itself.

You also need to develop, promote, distribute, and monitor compelling digital content campaigns for you, and your advertisers. These needs have spawned new marketing roles. Ready to grow your team in the right direction?

Here Are Five Hires Key to Your Publication's Digital Marketing Success:

Social Media Specialist

You need a social media presence to distribute your content and grow your audience. Since social media is often the first line of interaction with your audience, it’s become too important (and potentially risky) to leave this role to the interns.

Your content marketing team will provide the core fuel, your content. Yet there’s so much more to social media than just posting links to your publication’s content. Your social media specialist will often have to react in real time — whether it’s to report on fast-breaking industry news, respond to people who expect an immediate response, or share other authoritative content. Social media requires constant monitoring and interaction to be effective. Remember that accuracy, authenticity, and objectivity are the cornerstones upon which you’ll build your publication’s reputation for credibility and authority.

Skills needed: Proficient writer, early adopter, quick learner, personable nature, good judgment, familiarity with each social media channel’s policies, conversant with intellectual property (copyrights, trademarks, etc.) and privacy laws as well as applicable FTC regulations, and a firm grasp on your company’s voice and communications policies.

Marketing Analyst

Content marketing is filled with metrics and data. Expert analysis of that data allows your marketing team to make good decisions. Having someone on-staff who can turn your data into knowledge with actionable insights is a huge advantage before, during, and after any campaign.

Your marketing data specialist should help managers improve campaign performance with their analysis by identifying the strategies and tactics worth prioritizing, as well as those that need revision. Content marketing is a long haul process that requires continuous monitoring and testing of iterations to find the right formula for success. Data analysis informs those choices.

Skills needed: Statistical analysis, comfortable with software tools, strong reporting and presentation skills. You may want a specialist already proficient in the marketing data platform you're using. Communication skills are a must if you want to translate data into action. Managers can't act on what they don't understand.

Marketing Automation Specialist

With the right software in place, marketing automation, or workflows, enable you to mine the richness in your contact database and optimize it with your website and email. They help make your content creation and distribution repeatable, scalable, and cost efficient. With the proper automation specialist and software, you can:

Deliver a customized experience to a visitor based on what they do on your website.

Create dynamic static and smart lists used in various marketing automation campaigns that go beyond simple email blasts such as product alerts and newsletters, to tailored emails that reflect a lead’s behaviors and preferences, synced in time with where the lead is within their buying journey.

Skills needed: Strong strategic background and ability to map out complex procceses, analysis, logic, superb attention to detail, project management, interpersonal skills, comprehensive understanding of audience segmentation and familiarity/light experience with web development. If your company uses marketing automation and content optimization systems, then your workflow specialist should be an expert in them as well.

Content Marketing Manager

Your content marketing campaign strategist oversees content creation and the people developing it. His or her overarching responsibility is to recognize the content themes and channels that meet the needs of the campaign, uncover any content gaps, and fill them. This person should work closely with your Marketing Analyst to direct changes to the content made in the wake of reporting, and enforce the quality of the content produced. He or she should ensure that all published digital content is search-engine optimized.

Skills needed: Project management, SEO, strong-writer/editor, strategic thinking, and interpersonal skills. You'll recognize many of these skills as needed by any traditional campaign manager.

But there is a new layer of skills needed in a digital content marketing campaign strategist:

• Detailed understanding of a complete persona, more than just an audience member
• Instinct for identifying digital content mediums and topics compelling to that persona
• Ability to keep up with the evolving opportunities and challenges of the digital content marketing approach

Integrated Campaign Project Manager

A holistic content marketing campaign promotes and distributes content through multiple channels. Think of them as your human-API, communicating and tying the different pieces of your marketing together. These channels may cover both traditional and digital media. Your integrated campaign project manager coordinates all the aspects of a multi-channel approach, including:

• Customizing the content across the appropriate channels and the targeted persona
• Owning the campaign calendar setting out the where, when, and what of each campaign element
• Monitoring the contact database to avoid list fatigue
• Tracking the performance of specific channels
• Managing the media budget

Skills needed: A Deep understanding of different media channels and their purpose, project and budget management, data analysis, and presentation skills. Your integrated campaign manager should also have expertise in any marketing automation tools being used. 

There’s no set formula for marketing success, but these roles are a great place to start when recruiting for your company. Even if you don’t have the budget to onboard five new hires, look for people with traits that mirror those mentioned in two-or three of the skill sets listed above. No matter where you net out when building your team, keeping these potential positions in mind will help you propel your digital publishing efforts forward.