SilverDisc Guide For Marketing Managers: Building Your Content Marketing Skillset

Looking after the marketing for your business means you have a lot to do, and being part of a marketing team often requires a varied skillset – or for a marketing manager, it can require understanding and knowing how to develop the skillsets of the people within your team. In this new series of blog posts, we’re going to take you through how you as a marketing manager can improve your skills, ensure you’re up to date with the latest developments and trends, keep yourself and your team trained up, and grow your business while working on your own personal development.

For our first article in this series, we’re talking about how you can build up your content marketing skillset. We’ll provide resources for increasing your knowledge and recommend some specific areas to focus on. We have a wealth of information available right here on the SilverDisc blog, but there are also many useful external resources we’d love to share with you.

Content Marketing

First, let’s take a general look at content marketing. We have written articles on a range of topics, to help you to:

At SilverDisc we love HubSpot, especially as a content marketing resource, so here is one of several recommendations I’ll make here for their articles: the HubSpot Marketing Blog is such a helpful resource for all things content-related. HubSpot also offers a range of free content marketing courses to help you sharpen your skills.

Blogging

Looking specifically at blogging, this type of content has become a central part of many businesses’ content strategy, and it can be beneficial for several reasons, including helping you to generate more sales. Here are five quick tips to help you blog better.

Elsewhere, I’ll again recommend HubSpot as a great resource for brushing up on all the ins and outs of blog post writing. I also love Problogger.com, which is a blog and a podcast about all things blogging. It’s particularly useful for people wanting to make money from their blog directly, through advertising, affiliate links and so on, but owner Darren Rowse has so much great advice for anyone running a blog, and I always feel inspired when listening to his podcast.

Finally, Quick Sprout provides lots of information on blogging and other aspects of content and digital marketing.

Content Planning

As a marketing manager, you may be overseeing the overall strategy and planning for your company’s online content. Take a look at our blog post to find out the why and how of planning your content marketing strategy.

A core part of planning your content and staying organised is using a content calendar, which we cover in our blog post How To Write Regular Blog Posts and Stay Organised. This will help you to align your blog, social media and other content to create synergy between all of your online content channels.

Spelling and Grammar

Anyone in the office will tell you I’m a stickler for grammar, so I’d also like to mention here the importance of excellent spelling and grammar. Grammarly is a great tool for checking spelling and grammar, and I find the Chrome extension incredibly useful for checking emails, Google Docs, and content entered into forms on websites. The Grammarly blog is also very helpful for explaining common grammar questions and providing tips for better writing.

Case Studies, Reviews and Testimonials

Don’t forget about case studies, reviews and testimonials – these are all great for increasing leads and building trust. We have a blog post explaining how to write a great case study, and here we talk about how you can make the most of your testimonials and reviews.

Product Descriptions

Thinking specifically about products now, there are a few things to consider when writing effective product descriptions – as I learned during my time working for an IT reseller in their content team, prior to joining SilverDisc. There’s more great information and examples of effective product description copy available at WordStream, Shopify and Sumo.

Video Content

Not all content is text-based, and some ideas will better lend themselves to other formats. While blog posts, articles, website pages and ebooks are all very valuable pieces of content, remember that some users will prefer images, infographics, or videos. Lumen5 is a great free tool for creating short videos using text and images if you’re just getting started – our Lumen5 blog post shows you how.

In the video edition of our recent Early Digital Adoption blog series, we covered how you could create a video marketing strategy incorporating storytelling, augmented reality and more to build brand awareness and user engagement.

The Ultimate Guide to Video Marketing from HubSpot is a comprehensive guide to planning, shooting, distributing and analysing video.

Content Marketing Institute also offers some great tips for getting the most out of your video marketing, while you may feel inspired by this guide to video format types from uscreen.

SEO Content

It would be remiss of me to talk about content marketing and blogging without mentioning SEO, which is a fundamental part of optimising your content. In a later blog post we will cover how to build your SEO skillset, and in the meantime the SilverDisc blog has a wealth of information for improving your site’s SEO.

Stay tuned for the next blog post in this series, where we’ll help you to level up on all things paid advertising.