How To Craft A Spot-On Job Description For A Content Manager

Do you know how many companies are looking for content managers right now?

1,000? 10,000?

Well, on LinkedIn there are over 20,000 job offers for content managers.

Other platforms, like Indeed, show more than 56,000 job offers!

With that many opportunities (adding the fact that content management is a rather new profession, with a specific skills set), what should your company do to stand out and hire the most talented content manager out there?

A job description is the first impression potential hirings have about how mature your company is and what it expects of them.

In this post, we’ll explain you how to create a spot-on job description for a content management position.

We will take a look at:

what to avoid,
what to include
a practical template you can use.

Enjoy the read.

WHAT TO AVOID

To write this post, we manually reviewed over 100 job descriptions and found one main issue.

They require far too many specific skills that are not part of a Content Manager job scope.

Here’s an example — I have hidden the private information to save face. 🙂

For instance: should the content manager be responsible for editing and providing videos and images?

Possibly, but wouldn’t it be more efficient if he/she took care of having these assets sourced by designers and video makers?

As with any job description, you want to avoid to look for some kind of jack-of-all trades on steroids.

If anything, because they don’t exist.

Here 3 don’ts you want to keep in mind before writing the job description for your next content manger:

Use boisterous adjectives: adjectives like “superior” “outstanding” “excellent” complicate interpretation without adding anything to the context. For instance: how would you “quantify” “what “superior writing skills” are? Also, never heard of anyone looking for “inferior skills”, it’s kind of implicit.

Be too specific on the BA field: a good amount of the job descriptions we analised, asked for Journalism or Communications bachelors (plus editorial management experience). As it turns out, managing content for marketing purposes is a whole different beast than managing it for a news website or media companies.

As a journalist myself, I’ve done both, and I’ll take the risk and say that, sometimes, having a journalist background can complicate things, since you have to “unlearn” most of the things you are used to.

At Contentools, most of our high-performing content managers don’t have a journalism degree. Davide, who you may know for his contributions to this blog, graduated from Law School. Shocking? 🙂

(Over) Focus on artistic skills: the ability to deliver written content, visual assets, social media and even do some email marketing are part of the creative skills set a content manager must have.

But that’s just 50% of the whole. Your content manager should also have a scientific mindset, and be able to run tasks such as tracking performance and managing the budget the budget.

5 MUST HAVE SKILLS

To create a complete job description, you’ll like to have a good idea about what are the desirable abilities for your next content manager.

Here’s a list with the main ones.

1. Project Management Skills

A content manager establishes standards, workflows, systems, and processes for managing the content creation on a daily basis.

This includes creating new content, assigning content to freelancers or internal writers, editors and designers, managing a calendar to maintain a constant publishing schedule and distribution, promoting and measuring results.

He/she should also ensure all content is consistent (brand’s tone of voice and style) and optimized for search and user experience across all channels, both organic or paid.

The content manager should be able to coordinate and manage the content team, keeping track of tasks, workflows and deadlines.

Of course it’s even better when everyone does what’s necessary, without the manager having to chime in: that’s where the Content RASCI template would come in handy.

2. Ability to Learn and Change (Fast)

Side by side with project management skills, the best content managers I know have a scientific approach to anything new.

They’re always willing to test alternative approaches, techniques, tools and channels, keeping track of what they do and the results they collect as the process evolves.

Once they learn what they need and test their hypothesis they’ll find great pleasure in sharing their findings with the leaders, the team and sometimes even turning what they learned in content to share with the audience. Both in case of success and failure.

Since there are no 1-0-1 models or manuals for content marketing yet, discipline to stick to a routine for what’s working and researching to find new and better ways still are fundamental parts of the best practices out there.

3. Tech Savvy

Content marketing requires a specific tool set, that’s centralized by a content marketing platform and includes SEO, SEM, basic HTML and CSS to setup landing pages and CTAs. The content manager will also need to work with the company’s technical/IT support to implement essential tech systems (like marketing automation, email and social media management).

4. People skills

To manage the efforts of all writers, editors, producers, designers and video makers, the content manager will be required to use his or her best motivation and leadership skills.

The same goes for collaborating with the company’s team leaders on initiatives to identify content opportunities and tactics to deliver marketing results. Eventually he or she will also participate in the hiring of other team members.

5. Performance and Analytics

Last but not least, aligning content performance goals to achieve the company’s bottom line objectives for each month, quarter and year is part of the responsibilities of a content manager.

Is your goal to attract new leads? Or is it to convert the leads you already have in SQLs (sales qualified leads) and customers? The content manager should define tactics, follow appropriate KPIs and take actions accordingly to the specific goals your company might have.

Even if you include all these topics on your job description, you’d like to keep it short and sweet. Here’s a good example by FrontApp:

A SAMPLE TO COPY, PASTE AND ADAPT

All that said, here’s an effective job description sample you may want to adapt and use to look for your next content manager.

Job description: content manager @ [COMPANY NAME]

We are looking for a content manager to coordinate the creation and distribution of various types of accessible and downloadable content.

This role is at the core of the marketing team.

You will be in charge of expanding our content marketing efforts with the goal of driving traffic, engagement, and leads that result in sales and customer retention.

What you will do (responsibilities)

Develop and document the content marketing strategy.
Organize processes to guarantee deadlines and high performance for the entire content creation workflow.
Manage our editorial calendar executing targeted content for all our channels, including blog, social media, gained and paid.
Create and overlook the creation of recurrent free resources to drive leads and subscribers (including ebooks, guides, whitepapers, infographics, videos, templates and more).
Create and update email nutrition flows to fulfil our customer’s journeys.
Collaborate with writers, designers, technical team, product marketers, sales team, external influencers and industry experts to create and distribute content.
Establish KPIs and performance goals to evaluate and optimize content effectiveness.

Are you…

Passionate about [COMPANY NAME], our community and industry?
BA/BS degree or equivalent working experience?
Skilled in project management to prioritize multiple tasks and stakeholders in a fast-paced environment?
Familiar with Content Marketing Platforms (ie Contentools), WordPress, HTML, and CSS?
Aware of best practices of main social media channels (LinkedIn, SlideShare, Twitter, YouTube) with the understanding of which content approaches work on each and why?
Able to track data and using analysis to drive decisions and measure results?
Excited about discovering new techniques, testing them and sharing results with others?
A people person and a great teammate?

If you said YES to all of the above, you’re the content hero we’re looking for! [ADD CTA BUTTON]