4 Roles You Need for Effective and Vibrant Content Marketing

Get these four roles right and your content marketing is going to pop

How do you execute an effective content marketing strategy for a B2B company in 2022? If you’re not familiar, content marketing is basically using content videos, articles. Things that you create to help educate your prospects, your potential buyers about the product, about the segment or the industry that you’re in, what they need to understand during the buying process.

And your goal with content marketing is to be that trusted source to be the guide in their buyer journey. And so when they’re ready to buy, they’re more willing to purchase or hire you because you’ve been helpful along the road. The challenge with it is it’s much easier to just put a little bit of money behind, you know, a pay-per-click ad or even just put together you know, a couple of static images and throw it on to Facebook and LinkedIn.

It’s a lot more challenging to create monthly content marketing, mainly because it just takes more time. And a lot of companies don’t have a good strategy for actually getting that content out into the world once it’s created. So they write a blog post and it just sits on their website and nobody ever reads it. What we’ve found is really when you’re correctly executing a content strategy, there are four roles that you have to have covered within your company.

And those are the architect, the expert, the creative, and the publisher. And this concept is it’s adapted from Chris Walker at refined Lee labs. I heard it on one of his podcasts, but I think it’s, it’s really a helpful way to think about it. I’m going to go through each of those roles and explain what they need to, what they need to cover.

You don’t necessarily need a different person in each of those roles for effective content marketing. Sometimes one person will cover more than one. If you’re at a startup, you know, or a solopreneur, you’re probably having to fill all of those roles. That’s just the way it has to be. But it’s helpful to think of them as kind of distinct responsible.

1. The Architect

Engineering and strategizing great content marketing

So let’s start at the top with the architect. So the architect, they’re the person that is in charge of making sure everything is working. They’re the one that is figuring out what is it that we’re going to create? Why are we creating it? Who are we targeting? What topics are we going to hit? Where is it being sent out?

This is the strategy person. Their job is to think about the big picture. You need this person, basically, because a lot of times the other roles are not concerned with strategic thinking. Maybe it’s just not in their wheelhouse or they need to be more concerned with creating the actual content — things that the architect won’t do. The architect is the thinker. They’re the ones with the time or the brain space to really think about that big picture.

2. The Expert

Giving you the raw data needed to make an effective post

I have a content marketing agency and we’ve done content for clients in the past. And one of the things we’ve really learned is it’s basically a waste of money for you to go and hire a copywriter that doesn’t know anything about your industry and say, “Hey, just write some content about it.”

You have to have a subject matter expert who has authority in the space being the voice and the starting point for that raw content. If you’re hiring an agency to do content for you, an owner, or a high-level person in the company has to be involved in being that subject matter expert.

And generally, when we think about a content strategy, especially if you’re using video, you’re going to want a personality to be the face of the company and be that expert. An expert is not going to have time to do all of the writing of the content or creating the videos and editing them and all that. That’s why you have The Creative.

3. The Creative

Packaging your content into something shiny and fun

The creative is the person who’s in charge of packaging the content. So it’s often a writer or a video producer could be, you could have a graphic designer involved. It might be a creative team, but generally my, my viewpoint is there should it be a person who is in charge of making sure that it’s packaged and that whatever content you’re creating looks and sounds good when you put it out into the world.

So, for example, I’m creating, I’m recording this video. Now I’m going to hand it off to my creative team. They’re going to edit the video a little bit. They’re going to put our logo on it. They’re going to write a blog post out of this. All of that. That all falls under the creative side of things. It’s the person who’s actually creating the stuff.

4. The Publisher

Expertly placing your content where folks can find it

And then finally, you’ve got the publisher. The publisher is the person who’s in charge of getting your content out into the world. They’re the platform expert. They’re the ones that are getting it posted to Facebook and LinkedIn. They’re getting videos uploaded to YouTube. They’re getting a blog post onto your website and turning it into an email that goes out to your list in your weekly newsletter. Basically, they’re just making sure that this content does get out into the world.

They’re the ones often who are interacting with the audience on the various social networks. They’re thinking about how are people responding now? This is where these roles come back full circle. Often it loops back around because that publisher role who may be in charge of reporting and saying, “Hey, you know, we got a lot of views on this video or this one seems to be really popular.”

They’re bringing that information back to the architect. Who’s then thinking, “Is this working? Are we creating the right content?” The architect is then coming up with new titles for the expert to talk about, and then the creative is writing those blog posts or creating those videos and they’re handing it off to the publisher.

Identifying these four roles is going to transform your content game. What happens when you don’t? Well, it’ll be a struggle

We found basically, if you don’t have each of these roles covered, something gets missed. Right? This is the biggest pitfall that we see is you have a creative person who’s in charge of writing, but they don’t have these other supporting mechanisms.

And so they sit down and basically are like, well, what am I gonna do? I have to come up with something because they haven’t gotten the information from the expert and the architect hasn’t decided, you know, a good content calendar to lay out and then, you know, maybe they get the blog posts published, but it never gets on the social media.

It never gets sent out to the email because there’s not a publisher person in that role to make sure it gets out. So I hope this was helpful. If you have any comments, comment below this video or give us a