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You’re aware that answering buyer questions will help your business become a trusted voice of authority in your industry and improve close rates. So, you hire a Content Manager to be the voice for your brand so that you can reap the benefits of consistent content production. However, the process of hiring a content manager presents a unique challenge to many business leaders like yourself. It’s not a role you hire for often, and candidates come in with vastly different professional backgrounds. So, how do you know whether your Content Manager is on the right track, and how can you give them the support they need to thrive?
In this article, you’re going to learn about five key focus areas to help you assess whether you’re Content Manager is on the right track.
Trusting Your Content Manager to be the Voice of Your Brand
One thing you’re going to want to avoid doing is over-managing.
Remember, you’ve hired your Content Manager because producing content consistently for your brand, answering buyer questions accurately, and holding regular meetings with your sales team is a full-time job that requires the sole focus of at least one person.
You might be tempted to over-manage your Content Manager. After all, they’re the voice of your brand, and this can hard to let go of.
However, if you truly want your Content Manager to thrive, you need to trust them to be that voice. If you don’t, you’re doing more harm than good.
So how much managing is too much?
You want to strike a balance between giving your Content Manager the freedom to be creative in their role while staying close enough to ensure everything is on track.
Here’s the things you should try letting go of (to an extent):
- Content ideation: you need to let your Content Manager ideate content. After all, their sole focus is content, so it makes sense that they (not you) should be leading the direction of content production. In saying that, it still may be worthwhile to have it passed by you for approval.
- The writing process: your Content Manager is a writer, and writers need the freedom to create. If you try to micro-manage the writing process, you’re probably doing more harm than good. Instead, include a review process so that you get the chance to review and suggest edits to the content for your Content Manager.
- Content Interviews: more often than not, your Content Manager is going to need to conduct content interviews with experts within your team to gather the necessary information to write certain articles. Avoid micro-managing (or even participating) in these meetings. For your Content Manager to truly thrive, you need to give them the space to connect with your team members and learn how to gather the information they need.
Sometimes to help someone grow, you must let go, and in doing so, you inevitably give them the room (and perhaps the push) they need to move forward.
In saying that, there are things you can do to ensure your Content Manager is on the right track. Let’s look at some of them.
1 on 1 Meetings Every Fortnight
Without these meetings, you might find your Content Manager steering away from your vision, like a boat without a captain.
1 on 1 meetings are essential to help the two of you to align and plan.
But, what should be included in these meetings?
First off, these meetings should not be about sharing itemised lists of everything your Content Manager has done. It’s less about micro-managing and more about collaborating.
In your meetings, you can follow a simple structure:
- Challenges: find out what’s holding your Content Manager back (if anything) from achieving their goals
- Milestones: when you hired your Content Manager, you probably had milestones mapped out (or at least in the back of your mind). For example, after the 6-week mark, you might expect your Content Manager to be handling a different level of responsibility than at the 3-month mark. Reviewing these milestones can be helpful to remind your Content Manager of where they need to go and of your expectations.
- Key KPIs: it’s essential to review your Content Manager’s key KPIs. In particular, how many articles did they publish within the last fortnight? If they’re not publishing 6 a fortnight, then you will need to find out why that is happening and help support your Content Manager to meet that KPI.
This structure establishes trust between you and the content manager and makes them aware of your desire to help them do their job better.
Implementing a Job Scorecard
A Job Scorecard is a way to measure whether your Content Manager is doing the right things.
It’s a great way to keep them on track and keep you confident that they’re moving in the right direction.
There’s no one set method for producing a Job Scorecard. For example, you could create a set of metrics you want to track in an excel sheet and use that as a scorecard, or you might simply refer back to your original job posting to build a structure of basic responsibilities and outcomes.
What metrics should you track in a Job Scorecard?
You should be tracking at least the following for your Content Manager Job Scorecard:
- Number of articles published per week
- Number of meetings held per month which include key members of both the sales and marketing teams
On top of these two core metrics, you might look at other things based on your circumstances. For example, if your Content Manager is responsible for producing social media content, you might include the ‘number of social media posts published per month’ as a metric.
An easy way to choose what to include on your scorecard is to write down a list of responsibilities for your Content Manager. You can then rate them on each of these based on their performance and discuss this with them in your next 1 on 1 meeting with them.
You should only need to do this once per quarter. If you do it more often than this it might not be enough time to see change, and if you leave it for too long, it means that you can’t remain agile.
Production Consistency
The most important sign that a Content Manager on the right track is their production consistency.
Simply put, are they producing and publishing three articles per week? (or whatever your established goal is).
This means writing three new articles every week and posting three articles on your website every week.
Why is this important?
Ultimately, the end goal of any marketing endeavour is revenue. With Inbound Marketing, this can be achieved by increasing traffic, generating leads, and using sales enablement content in the sales process.
However, it takes time for your content to rank on Google and to generate leads. Therefore, the best way to guarantee that your Content Manager is moving in the right direction is holding them accountable for producing and publishing a steady stream of high-quality content.
On top of this, you’re going to want to make sure that this content is tailored to the needs of the sales team. By answering customer questions that arise during sales calls and using the five most successful article topic frameworks to guide the ideation process, then traffic and leads will most likely take care of itself.
That’s why if you focus on making sure that your Content Manager is producing content consistently, then they’re most likely on the right track for the most part.
Culture
You shouldn’t only be relying on metrics to ensure your Content Manager is on the right track.
Remember, hiring a Content Manager is about organisational change. It’s about re-prioritising content as a key focus in growing your business.
This shift in priorities impacts all team members; experts will need to contribute to the content process via content interviews and sales team leaders will need to use content in the sales process and engage in regular collaborative meetings between sales and marketing.
As such, it’s important for your Content Manager to make everyone in your team feel good about being a part of the content process.
So, how do you check if your Content Manager is winning the hearts and minds of colleagues?
The answer is to gather anecdotal evidence from the Content Manager and other team members. You should be asking questions around how the Content Manager has grown and which projects or meetings were the most rewarding or frustrating.
This will give you a sense of what’s happening and how your Content Manager is influencing the culture in your business.
Keep in mind that although your Content Manager is responsible for upholding a culture of content, they can’t control everything. If sales team members aren’t brainstorming content topics, if subject-matter experts are dodging interviews, and if there isn’t total organisational buy-in for content in your business then this may speak to a larger problem than what your Content Manager can control. In this case, it might be beneficial to engage in a workshop with an external team to foster alignment.
So, what’s next?
When a new role that you have no previous benchmarks to compare to becomes a part of your business, it can be scary, and difficult, to know whether things are on track.
After all, if you have no benchmarks to compare to, how can you know whether you’re on track?
By using some of the guidelines mentioned in this article, you should be ready to make sure your Content Manager is doing the right thing.
Now that you’ve got your Content Manager doing what they need to do, you’re going to want to make sure you’re on track to generate revenue from the articles that they’re producing. Check out our article about why your articles might not be generating revenue and how to fix it here.
