5 Signs that You Need to Hire a Managing Editor

Lately I’ve had the opportunity to work with a couple of young companies that were just in the process of establishing their content marketing programs.
At both organizations, the executives had come to recognize the role that creating and distributing valuable content could play in generating and nurturing leads, driving conversions, elevating their brand, and ultimately closing sales. And, while they were prepared to start making an investment in content marketing in both cases, neither of the companies had any dedicated resources to support the effort.
At one of the companies, responsibility for content marketing fell to the CMO, the only marketing resource on staff and a man dealing with a host of other issues and challenges. At the other, where there is no marketing team to speak of, the task has fallen to one of the senior consultants, whose day job has nothing to do with marketing, let alone content.
You won’t be surprised to learn that despite their best efforts, both companies are struggling to get their programs off the ground.
The problem that these and so many other companies are facing is pretty straightforward. While they’ve gotten on the content marketing bandwagon in spirit, they’ve failed to recognize that to work successfully, it cannot be a pet project. It requires you to hire a dedicated resource, typically a managing editor, whose sole focus is content marketing.
Now you may be thinking, ‘But we’re a small company that doesn’t have a lot of content needs. Surely we don’t need a managing editor.” Or perhaps your thought process is more along the lines of ‘We can’t afford to hire a full-time resource, we’ll just have to make due.”
No matter what the reality of your situation may be, the bottom line is this. If you want to succeed at marketing, you need to be creating great content, and if you want to create great content, you’re going need a full-time resource.
Not convinced? Ask yourself the five questions below:

1.) Have you been talking about content marketing in your organization for three or more months but haven’t actually get your program off the ground yet?

2.) Is content marketing always in the back of your mind, but also always the first thing to get deprioritized on your to-do list?

3.) Are you ever a road block in your own program, delaying the process of getting content out the door because you just don’t have time to create or review and edit a piece of content?

4.) Did you at any point outsource your content marketing needs to an external agency, only to find out that you still had to invest a lot of time into managing your program and nonetheless didn’t get the results that you wanted?

5.) Is there an area other than content marketing where you’ve got more expertise and where, frankly, your time is better spent because it’s what you know best?

I don’t know you and I don’t know your business. But I do know that content marketing programs aren’t easy to pull off. If you’re going to do content marketing, than make the investment it takes to do it right. Once you start reaping the benefits, you won’t regret it. Conversely, if you don’t decide that content marketing is right for you well…good luck succeeding in this day and age, buddy!