The Advanced Content Marketing Guide
In this guide, we’ll cover the deeper thinking and skills needed to excel in content.
This guide is for you if:
You’re a content lead looking for formalized process ideas
You’re a content specialist looking to level up your career
You have a basic marketing understanding and are looking to make a career switch
Key concepts include:
Guidelines to professionalize your writing
How to gather data to support your strategy
How to craft and execute content strategies
In this guide, we’ll cover the deeper thinking and skills needed to excel in content.
This guide is for you if:
You’re a content lead looking for formalized process ideas
You’re a content specialist looking to level up your career
You have a basic marketing understanding and are looking to make a career switch
Key concepts include:
Guidelines to professionalize your writing
How to gather data to support your strategy
How to craft and execute content strategies
In this guide, we’ll cover the deeper thinking and skills needed to excel in content.
This guide is for you if:
You’re a content lead looking for formalized process ideas
You’re a content specialist looking to level up your career
You have a basic marketing understanding and are looking to make a career switch
Key concepts include:
Guidelines to professionalize your writing
How to gather data to support your strategy
How to craft and execute content strategies
What to expect in our guide
As an alternative to a pricy content course with a rigid process, The Advance Guide to Content Marketing gives you the tools needed to shape your own content strategy and build your skills as a writer. The principles you will learn are versatile in any industry and company size.
This guide will give you access to plenty of methods for research, a personalized template for content strategy, and new tips to professionalize your writing.
Why trust a content course for career growth?
Most free resources and guides don’t include helpful tips. They speak in generalizations about how to create a schedule, use topic pillars (with no direction for why or how to choose them), and repurpose to rapidly produce content. Think: the overused HubSpot practices.
These factors are important, but they are fairly self explanatory. At your level of writing and desire to build a data-driven strategy, you need templates that help achieve a higher level of thinking. Our goal is to teach through examples, inspire deep thinking, and give you templates you can put to work immediately.
Also, as content career paths evolve, you can put these templates into practice to drive revenue and have stronger talking points in job interviews.
Why are content career paths changing?
Many would argue that perfect grammar, style guides, and corporate experience are the building blocks of an advanced content career. That may have been the case several years ago, but today’s hiring landscape is a bit different.
Several factors have changed the game in content:
New tools put data at your fingertips. Writers who know how to draw insights can choose better topics and write better content.
SEO grows increasingly competitive - it takes a stellar content strategy to put you on the map.
The ability to A/B test enables companies to drill into top-performing messaging.
The rise of social media provides a new channel to promote quality content.
The right skillset will set you ahead
For these reasons, a top content specialist should have a deep understanding of SEO, how to leverage persona research, and how to build a data-driven strategy. Being a good writer is simply a given.
The good news - if you can master these areas of content, you will be rewarded. Zip Recruiter lists the upper end of Content Strategist salaries at $112,000. Furthermore, all of the top paid marketing jobs (such as Search Engineer and Digital Consultant) list content strategy as a top responsibility.
What about conversion rate optimization (CRO)?
Depending on what part of the buyer journey you’re targeting, you may or may not prioritize conversions. For instance, an awareness-phase web page could be used to generate backlinks or gain brand visibility. But if most of your content strategy revolves around revenue generation (or low-funnel content), CRO will be a bigger focus.
Following this guide can give you a solid CRO foundation. It will help you increase content quality to facilitate conversions; build trustworthiness of your brand and talk about your product features in a compelling way. While not covered in this guide, A/B testing or adding popups, CTA callouts, and design elements are the next steps that will give you an edge.
Helpful tips and additional resources:
Productivity Workflows for Blog Managers >> Learn how to batch tasks, achieve the flow state of mind, and organize your day to be more productive. Walk through an example of planning a full week.
Content marketing process flow chart >> Content marketing is a cycle. Follow this process to efficiently produce valuable content.
Content repurposing strategies >> Work smarter (not harder) and scale your content operation.
Marketing Starts with Features and Benefits >> Do you know the difference between features and benefits? See how to leverage this type of analysis as the basis of your content marketing.
What comes first - content or design? >> Are you sick of cramming content into a character count? You shouldn’t have to! Here’s why content should always come before design.
The content marketing terms you need to know >> These terms will help you clearly communicate your content strategy.