How to Structure a Content Marketing Team

Building a content marketing team structure is both an art and a science. You need a mix of team members who specialize in the different elements of designing, developing, deploying, and promoting content. You need team members who appreciate structure and cadence. You need team members who understand the balance between making content that achieves traffic and engagement objectives and can drive revenue.  When you manage to effectively bring all those roles together, there is nothing your content strategy can’t accomplish.

In this article, I outline key content marketing team roles and structure. If your company is larger in size, you might be able to construct this whole team, but if your business is smaller, you certainly can pick the content marketing team roles that are most important to you an build your content marketing org chart from there.

Content Marketing Team Roles to Create the Ultimate Content Org Chart

Director of Content Marketing

Like any team within a business, you do need to start with an overall leader with whom the buck stops.  Someone who needs to provide the overall content strategy and direction for the team. For your content marketing team, you will want to position this role as the Director of Content Marketing. This role would be responsible for, but not limited to, the following tasks:

• Manages the entire content team

• Responsible for the entire P&L across content activities

• Coordinates with other cross-functional teams in the business to find ways to position content to help support overall organizational objectives

Content Operations Manager

The role of Content Operations Manager acts as the executioner of the Director’s strategic content plan. Duties of this role include, but are not limited to:

• Responsible for executing traffic, revenue, content, and production plan-building

• Work on plans to deliver traffic to high value inventory within the site

• Utilize metrics and monetization tools to optimize earning potential of content

• Grow unique visitor traffic through partnerships, new products, etc.

Revenue Manager

I am a strong believer in having content work towards producing revenue, whether that be indirectly through driving leads for your Sales department or directly through sponsorship and advertising. The Revenue Manager on your content marketing team will be responsible for things like:

• Managing revenue execution

• Build alternative revenue streams through content

• Responsible for packaging ideas for the Sales team to sell to prospects

• Work with sales to generate revenue opportunities

• Manage all advertising on the site, sponsorship packages, etc.

Product Manager

The Product Manager of the content marketing team plays an important role of project manager for the team by helping manage content production and the development of platform changes needed to house content.  Some key activities of this role include:

• Manages development team and development activities

• Brings product and feature build requests to stakeholders and the Platform team

Analyst

Metrics and analytics are extremely important to a content marketing team, so having a dedicated resource who is responsible for watching the numbers is key.  Some activities an Analyst would perform include:

• Monitoring and reporting on all content performance metrics

• Provide financial analysis for budgeting, operations, revenue management, and strategy

Editorial Director

It is important that you have eyes on every piece of content that your team publishes, which is why having an Editorial Director is a key role to fill.  This position performs the following duties:

• Responsible for every piece of content that goes up on the site

• Works to find ways to be continuously improving content on the site

• Major driver of daily traffic to the site

• Trains editors, writers, videographers

Development Lead

The Development Lead is a technical resource who guides the development team to deliver enhancements to the website platform to achieve content delivery objectives. This role would be:

• Dedicated to developing custom site features

• Responsible for working with organizational development team to ensure features are best practice

Design Lead

Content should be developed for the visitor in mind, therefore, having a designer on staff to properly layout the environment content resides in is important.  A Design Lead would:

• Lead all design elements including brand consistency

Social Lead

The Social Lead is responsible for two important elements of content. One being how social media integration is implemented within the content platform, and the second, promoting content in naive social media platforms. That is defined as follows:

• Ensures social media best practices on-site

• Manages the promotion of content across social media platforms

Editorial Calendar Lead

Your team needs to stay organized with all of this content being developed and promoted, which is where the Editorial Calendar Lead comes in.  Their role includes:

• Ensuring the editorial calendar is complete and up to date

• Works with the Sales team to identify upcoming opportunities that might be a good fit for content development and promotion

Email Marketing Lead

One of the key delivery channels for content promotion is email marketing.  Having an individual on your team who is embedded in the content process is important because they can quickly and efficiently get key content rounded up for email marketing campaigns.  This role would:

• Manages email newsletter publication

• Works with editorial team on highlighting content

Video Lead

Video continues its tremendous growth within content strategy, so having someone on your team who is responsible for making sure video plays a role in the majority of content planning is key.  To sum it up very simply, the Video Lead will:

• Work to spread video content throughout the site

Platform Lead

The Platform Lead is responsible for continuing to optimize and enhance the systems and processes in which content lives.  For example, one tool the Platform Lead might oversee is the Wordpress environment, if you use that as a content management system. They are making sure the environment is up to date, exploring new technologies to make managing content easier, etc.  They essentially are responsible for:

• Being the point person to work on new processes, major projects

SEO Lead

The final role I think you should consider for your content marketing team would the SEO Lead.  This role would perform the following:

• Responsible for ensuring that every piece of content that goes up on the site is optimized for SEO

• Trains editors, writers, and development team on SEO best practices

Customize Your Content Marketing Team For Your Needs

If the CEO of the company I was working for gave me a blank check to build a top-notch content marketing team, above is the structure I would use and the roles I would hire.  If you are a smaller team, or just getting started in content marketing, you can start with just a few of these roles and build from there once you show the ROI of your content marketing efforts.