5 Incredible Qualities Your First Content Marketing Hire Must Have

Rob Yoegel, Content Marketing Director at Monetate (an OpenView portfolio company), identifies the amazing abilities and superhuman skills to look for in your first content marketing hire.

Have you looked around your company and realized that your content is scattered across the organization, with no one truly owning it? With content marketing becoming more and more of a priority (utilized by 91% of B2B marketers and representing 33% of marketing budgets on average), now is certainly the time to build a structure to effectively manage your content and the strategy behind it.
But where do you even start? The first thing you will want to do is hire someone to develop, manage, and implement a cohesive plan behind all of your content marketing. Obviously, you can’t fill that role with just anyone.
Whether it is a managing editor or a director of content, here are four incredible qualities the person stepping into that crucial function must have:

1) Mighty Management Skills

Whether you plan to build an entire content marketing department or need to outsource some work to freelancers from time to time, your first content marketing hire will need to be able to effectively lead a team.
He or she will be providing the leadership and vision necessary to execute a content marketing strategy, and everything will trickle down from them. The ability to communicate and manage is hugely important to ensuring that overarching strategy permeates not only members of the marketing team, but the entire company.

2) Spectacular Social and SEO Savvy

A key element of the role is going to hinge on ensuring your content is shared and promoted as much as possible, so it is important that they are active on multiple social media platforms. They will need to understand the nuances of getting your content out in front of your audience and recognize the value of being immersed in an online community.
The ideal candidate will also need to know a thing or two about SEO, otherwise all that great content will go undiscovered.

3) Clairvoyant Knowledge of Your Industry & Trends

It might seem obvious, but this is a hugely important piece. Having a background in your industry allows new hires to step in and immediately deliver content that is accurate and consumable by your audience.
Conversely, if they are new to your field, it is going to take them some valuable time to get up to speed and become comfortable with the subject matter that they’ll be dealing with day in and day out.

4) Unstoppable Extrovert Prowess and People Skills

The door to your director’s office shouldn’t just be open, it should be off the hinges! In your executive team and employees, you have a wealth of potential resources at your fingertips. These are people who are brimming with content, but you’ll need your new hire to help coax it out of them by establishing a dialogue with the entire company. Many of your employees will want to contribute their stories, but your hire will have to be the one to apply a little grease to the wheels.

5) What Quality Do You Think is the Most Critical for a Content Hire?

These obviously aren’t the only skills your new hire will need in order to overcome content marketing’s biggest challenges and get your initiative up and running. Add your top skill/quality to the list in the comments below!