Planning Your Content Marketing Team: Critical Positions and Salary Info

Content marketing is exploding in popularity, and with that, companies are trying to adjust their teams to support these initiatives. This leaves many marketing leaders wondering what should that team look like and how much they should pay?

Essential content marketing team members

Joe Pulizzi has a fabulous post that lays out the key players who should be on any content marketing team: 

1. Chief Content Officer / VP of marketing: This person is the “chief storyteller” in your organization, with the vision.

2. Managing editor: This person is the “day-to-day storyteller” who is responsible for managing the daily details and schedules. Oftentimes, he works with others to create the content.

3. Content creators: These are the sources you mine for content as well as the writers who bring the stories to life.

4. Content producers: These are the designers who make the content beautiful.

5. Chief Listening Officer: This person is the “air-traffic control” for your social media and other content channels. They are there to listen to the groups of customers, prospects, influencers and competitors.

You don’t need a single person to fill each of these roles, but to be effective, you should have someone in your team who is responsible for each of these skills.

Salaries of content marketers

As you are forming your content marketing team, you may need to hire people. The

2012 Salary Guide from The Creative Group is an annual guide that provides starting salary ranges for more than 100 interactive, design, marketing, advertising and public relations positions from the following categories:

1. Design and production

2. Interactive

3. Content development and management

4. Advertising and marketing

5. Public relations

While the titles don’t specifically match the ones that Joe uses to explain the key elements of a content marketing team, these skills will be covered by the titles included in this guide.

Of course, salaries vary based on location, so the guide explains how to plan for these variances and gives you variables for more than 130 job markets in the U.S.

One note: “The salary ranges represent starting compensation only, since factors such as seniority and work ethic make ongoing pay difficult to measure. Bonuses, incentives and other forms of compensation, such as benefits and retirement packages, also are not taken into account.”

The other section of this guide that I think is interesting is a quick look at some of the skills that are in high demand right now:

1. Online project managers

2. Search engine optimization (SEO)/Search engine marketing (SEM) specialists

3. User experience (UX) desigers

4. Video producers

5. Web analytics specialists

6. Web developers/designers

For an alternate look at salaries, check out Folio’s Editorial Salary Survey.  This covers three positions: Editorial directors/editors-in-chief, editors/executive editors and managing/senior editor. This breaks down average salaries by a number of variables including type of publishing (B2C, B2B, association), company revenue, number of hours worked and years of experience.

If you want to learn more about developing your content marketing team and executing projects, check out Managing Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose.