Content marketing, without a doubt, is one of the most promising careers you can choose if you are keen on writing and have a bit of experience under your belt as a blogger or a writer. To become a content marketer, you need to be more than just a writer. It requires abilities like being good at communication, having a good grasp on online trends and having a strong creative mind to reach the best results.

A good content creator knows all about the hows of building brand reputation, increasing conversion rate, generating leads, and maintaining a solid online presence. As it turns out, this is not an easy task, but it’s one of those dynamic careers that you would never get bored with it. In the following paragraphs, we will discuss the dos and don’ts of this exciting career.

Who is a content marketer?

A content creator’s main job is to monitor the client’s content plan strategies within their editorial calendar. Tasks like doing research, writing good emails, and creating trustworthy marketing graphics, videos and blog posts are but a few of a content marketer’s responsibilities. It is the content marketer’s job to choose the best strategy that suits the client’s needs to increase brand awareness with great quality content.

Content marketers have specific traits. They are original thinkers because their job requires a problem-solving and creative mind. They need to mock up the sort of content that is unique and attention-grabbing to increase audience retention and make sure they are putting it in front of the right people. Once the idea of how to approach a certain task is made, their next step would normally include extensive market research, SEO, social media engagements, and other web platforms according to the needs of their clients.

Some of the main content marketers’ duties include:

• Generating and attracting leads
• Devising brand awareness strategies
• Keeping readers interested
• Increasing conversion rate and turning leads into customers
• Changing one-time costumers into repeat buyers

What makes a good content marketer?

1. A great content marketer is ambitious:

We have two types of content marketers in this line of work. The first type treats content marketing as any other job and robotically does his job from 9 to 5 and calls it a day. You don’t want to hire this type of marketer.

The second type is a totally different specimen. They are ambitious by nature and thrive on creating and delivering the best possible content they can with any given topic. Ambitious content marketers are very passionate about the brand they’re representing and have a strong desire to transform their client’s brand into a leading brand in their own niche.

This type of content marketer has an unquenchable desire to not only write the greatest content ever but also to put it in front of every person that the content was designed for in the first place. Working with this type of person is very rewarding in so many aspects of a professional and/or personal life because they will induce positivity wherever they go.

2. A great content marketer has outstanding research skills:

Research is the first stepping stone in the content creation journey. All extraordinary content rise from exceptional research skills that are done by content marketers. If you want to be the best of the best in this field, you need to gather key data and related information before blindly diving into creating the content. For instance, content marketers conduct research on:

• Customers: It is crucial to understand your customers and gather as much information about them as you can; know their likes and dislikes in order to deliver a piece of content that is engaging. Demographic and psychographic data can help you gain an even deeper understanding of them.
• Competitors: In this research, you will be looking for forgotten gaps in their brand and try to implement them in your content, or analyze their content and see if you can do a better job than them. Also, studying your competition can give you a great insight into the roadmap you need to take when creating your own content. Points like what is working for them in achieving higher readership and brand awareness are also benefits of researching competitors.  
• Company: Every content marketer needs to understand the client’s company, their products, and their brand vision. Understanding the company you work for will help you develop the best content strategy that will lead to bringing the content and the brand on the same page.  

3. A great content marketer has excellent writing skills:

We sometimes get carried away when we write a piece of content. It is understandable that in order to write good content, we need to make it as if we are talking to the reader. But in the process, a content creator might lose track and make a few simple yet unforgivable language mistakes. Many think that grammar is the most important aspect of writing content, but even though good grammar is necessary, there are other aspects you need to focus on as well.

Aspects like how to choose your tone, when to be serious or spice up your articles with a bit of humour, the etymology of the words used, and so forth. It is the content marketer’s job to fine-tune ordinary content and turn it into something that can easily entice visitors to stick around and read what you have to say.

4. A great content marketer is the best storyteller:

One essential component of effective content marketing is how great you are in storytelling. Without the right approach to presenting your services and products, you can’t expect to reach your goals. Even if you’ve done your homework and gathered all the required data, that still doesn’t make you the most successful business out there.

Using stories is the best way to engage with your audience and establish a trustworthy relationship between them.

Storytelling will help you:

• Establish an emotional connection between you and the audience.
• Deliver your message in a more applicable way.
• Increase readership and acquire new visitors
• Increase conversion rate by giving a vibe of being trustworthy.

So, your products alone won’t make all the sales. Sometimes it is your mastery over storytelling that will boost your sale across all your platforms.

5. A great content marketer thinks about value:

The Audience is always the best judge. If you post a random post just for the sake of publishing something, you will get punished by them. So, content marketers should focus on value and always choose quality over quantity. A good content marketer is also a good judge of character. They can understand what readers need to know or what sort of information they are interested in.

One good practice in achieving valuable content is putting yourself in their place when you’re creating the content. This will help your content become less advertise-focused and resonates better with your readers.