Startup, Marketing Team of 1, Little-to-No Content Marketing Budget
When you’re a solopreneur or have just one person dedicated to marketing, it’s pretty clear who runs content marketing — you’re a full-funnel marketer.
In terms of your content marketing responsibilities, your job is to:
- Create content — written and visual, long-form (often placed behind a form) and short-form (publicly available, like a blog post)
- Optimize that content for SEO
- Manage social media
SMB, Marketing Team of 3, Some Content Marketing Budget
When the marketing team starts to grow, who leads content marketing gets more interesting. With a team of three marketers, you can approach content marketing a couple ways. Either one person can own content marketing activities, while the other two own activities that align more with the middle- and bottom-of the funnel. Or, two people can own content marketing activities, while the third owns the rest.
For what it’s worth, HubSpot’s CMO recommends the latter:
“The best way to help your sales team is to build brand awareness and create content that generates a lot of leads over time. An increase of twice as many leads means twice as many quality leads — as long as you have software that lets you filter those incoming leads efficiently. That’s how you build a successful sales and marketing machine,” explains Mike Volpe.
At this stage, the work of the one or two content marketers on your team remains about the same as it does with a team of one — content creation, SEO, and social media. Even if you decide to dedicate two hires to content marketing as Volpe suggests, to bifurcate responsibilities between those two employees is premature. Both employees should contribute to all three responsibilities, and leadership of the content marketing program is shared between those employees.
Mid-size, Marketing Team of 9, Dedicated Content Marketing Budget
This is where things get really interesting. If you’ve got a marketing team of about nine people, the recommendation is still to over-invest in content marketing activities that grow the top of your funnel.
With five employees dedicated to content marketing, it’s now time to bifurcate responsibility. Here’s how you can break it down:
- Blogging: Two employees
- Long-form/premium content: One employee
- SEO: One employee
- Design: One employee
At this stage of growth, there’s likely a CMO or other head of marketing to whom all these employees report. Thus the CMO should be leading the content marketing program, though the day-to-day activities will be carried out by the team of five.
Large/Enterprise, Marketing Team of 18, Sizeable Content Marketing Budget
With a marketing team size of around 18, your content marketing team will be staffed with all the same roles — bloggers, long-form content creators, SEO specialists, designers — just multiplied. Aim to have three bloggers on staff, and two employees for each of the other roles. It’s wise to have one of those bloggers have expertise in editing, too, so there’s someone dedicated to maintaining content quality as output increases.
At this stage of growth, it’s also time to assign dedicated leadership to your content marketing team — unless you want two dozen people reporting to the CMO. Many organizations hire a Director of Content, VP of Content, Chief Content Officer, or Editor-in-Chief to lead the entire content marketing team. This individual sets the vision for the team, secures budget, hires the right talent, contributes content ideas, solves for growth, and helps coordinate with other leaders across the marketing organization so content marketing doesn’t become too siloed.
Some companies may have marketing teams of far more than 18. Here at HubSpot, for example, we have a team of nearly 100. Even so, we stick to a team structure quite similar to the structure an 18-person marketing team might use — with one modification. Design is broken off of the Content Team, and relegated to a separate team. This might make sense for your organization, too, if you find that:
- Designers need to fulfill requests for employees on every team — making them more full-funnel marketers than dedicated top-of-the-funnel marketers.
- You’ve hired content creators that are capable of doing some design on their own — simple things like laying out ebooks, creating social images, or doing some basic front-end design work.
- Your content marketing budget includes room for an agency retainer, or contracted design work from third-parties as needed.