Do you want to know what a content manager does? This article will help you understand their career, role, skills, and responsibilities. Let us first understand what it entails to be a content manager.

Who is a content manager?

Content managers are similarly known as Content Marketing Managers. They are professionals who oversee marketing strategies and engage with customers.

A content manager aims at developing the company’s brand and works on establishing an online presence for his organization.

A content manager is responsible for ensuring that customers are happy with the company’s products or services.

A content manager edits articles, updates old content, and overseas that content is well presented on the organization’s website.

 A content manager builds and implements the content calendar and ensures that the organization’s online marketing schedules are smoothly run throughout the year.

The content manager ensures that interesting content is uploaded to the website. They are actively involved in managing the content that is presented on various social media platforms within the organization.

Now that you have some idea of who a content manager is, let us see what their role entails.

Responsibilities of a Content Manager.

• Involved in content management and development
• Creation and development of content strategies
• Involved in content creation and publishing
• Management of content consistent across their social media platforms.
• Knowledgeable in optimizing content using Search Engine Optimization
• Makes clear communication of all released content
• Marketing and Promoting audio, video, or written content
• Manages composition from the content creation team.
• Creates, manages, and monitors the daily content marketing calendar
• Evaluating, analyzing, and translating website traffic reports
• Ensures compliance, by following the regulations, and laws of the industry.
• Collaborating with the management, finance, marketing, technical, writing, and videography teams.

The responsibilities of the content manager are not only limited to these key points that I have mentioned above.

As a content manager, you will also be involved in other aspects of the role that include skills to easily navigate the challenges.

To understand more about these skills, let us have a look at what extra knowledge a content manager needs to have.

The skills and knowledge of a content manager.

Having the ability to perform the role of a content manager will need you to have the skills and knowledge related to the job.

First, it would be of value for you to invest in a professional course at your local university.

This degree will provide you with a certificate that shows your educational knowledge about the content manager position.

Below are the skills that you can invest in acquiring.

• A content manager can have a bachelor’s degree in marketing, Sales, communications, journalism, and Entrepreneurship.
• The role may require previous experience of 1 – 3 years
• The ability to understand digital marketing and its concepts is essential.
• The usage and application of SEO and Keywords.
• Knowledge and proficiency in using MS Office tools.
• Experience in copywriting skills.
• The passion for writing lengthy articles.
• Ability to create diverse kinds of content types for social media pages.
• Excellent grammatical skills, emphasizing punctuation, spelling, coma, quotations, hyphens, and colons.
• Analytical and relational skills.
• Experience and knowledge of plagiarism policies.
• Able to create genuine, original content.
• Proficiency in written, verbal, listening, and communication skills.
• Experience in content management systems and resources.
• Can create and manage social media campaigns.
• A keen eye for great content and is highly creative
• Able to run and manage various projects simultaneously.
• Skilled in planning, organizing, and monitoring teams.

Benefits of having the right skills for any job post.

We all know how important it is to be at your best when searching for a new job.

When looking for a new job, you need to get down and do your research and have a higher advantage as compared to the other applicants.

One way you can ensure that you are prepared for the position is by having the right skills and knowledge for the job and role you are seeking.

Here are some benefits of having the right skill sets while applying to any position:

• It gives you an upper hand as compared to others seeking the same position.
• It gives you the confidence to express your ability during the interview.
• It separates you from others who do not have your skills.
• It allows the employer to see your worth and the value you would add to the organization.
• It gives you a sense of confidence and the assurance that you may get offered the position.
• It positions you for consideration to move to the next level of employment.
• Having the right skills and knowledge opens you to more opportunities and avenues for better positions.
• Skills and knowledge can allow you to get the promotions you might be pursuing.
• They exemplify your ability to portray your leadership ability.
• They create an immediately memorable reputation for your prospective employers. This makes it easy for interviewers to remember you.

How to prepare for a content manager role.

Consider that you have just completed your degree in Business or marketing, and you have seen an attractive job posting for a content manager.

You are wondering how to qualify for your first interview. You feel discouraged because you do not have the 1 to 2 years of experience the role is seeking.

I would encourage you to begin using the following tips to build your experience.

1. Try to apply for internships with a digital marketing firm.
2. Begin exploring the internet for free resources that can help you gain more information.
3. Join writing groups and Forums that give you more insight and trends of what’s going on in the content management world. For example, reading and chipping in on answers in Quora, FB, and LinkedIn groups can be resourceful and rewarding.
4. Explore resources that offer free courses, workshops, and knowledge that can help build content management skills. See below for more on this.

Resources that build your content management skills.

Getting a formal training and certification in a college or University is the best way to acquire content management skills and knowledge. Never-the-less, you would still need to actively practice what you learned in class.

What good will it benefit you to have a college degree or diploma, when you do not have the interest to apply your knowledge practically?

It’s like having a driver’s license with no vehicle, to drive. You would lose the confidence to steer the vehicle or the skill to navigate on the roads.

To build your content management knowledge and skills, you can apply the following tips:

To gain leverage on your writing skills you may want to begin a  blog.

Create interest in writing articles regularly.

Try ghostwriting articles as a freelancer for other blogs.

Platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, WordPress.org, Quora, Wix, and LinkedIn are avenues where you can practice your writing.

Opening some social media accounts on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest would be a great start.

On these platforms, you can learn a wealth of skills and how to create posts, generate audiences and attract new followers.

In my article, “Creating content that attracts the right audience”, I explain how it is important to create your content, that is target-specific. The right content will attract the right audience. That is the principle that forms the foundation for well-deployed content marketing.

To learn how to create or edit a website while you do not know coding, you can begin by signing up with WordPress.org and Bluehost.com.

To build a blog you need a web builder, which comes with user-friendly creator tools. That does not mean that the role of a web developer is reduced.

As there has been an increased demand for personal websites since the early 2000s, web-building tools have equally provided easy self-build web platforms.

WordPress being the platform that allows you to construct your website, comes with free and paid themes to properly display your website. It also has plug-ins, known as add-ons or extensions.

Plug-ins are software extensions that add functionality to a host program to help build a better website.

Web builders have HTML Code interfaces that web developers can choose to code with, instead of the text interface.

There are many web building and web hosting platforms. but I will recommend WordPress and Bluehost as those are the platforms that I use for my blog.

Bluehost is a web hosting platform that is used for hosting sites online. To have a website you need a web hosting platform and a domain.

Coding for beginners is largely a broad subject. To ensure we stay on track, I have focused on the basic aspects of creating a website.

To learn how to use Key phrases and SEO, you would need to keep writing and blogging.

Keywords are phrases that people look up online when trying to find information on a specific topic, product, or service. Keywords and phrases can be short or long.

Short key phrases or words, tend to have a higher search volume, than when they are long. Longer keywords are known as long-tail keywords. They become specifically targeted to, a lower search volume.

SEO focuses on the process of increasing traffic to your website.

SEO rearranges and rewrites the data you are presenting intending to improve the efficiency of retrieving information.

SEO  works on improving and increasing the visibility of your website to attract unique web visitors.

Visitors who search for content related to your brand can easily and quickly be directed to your website content.

My article, “The Reasons why SEO will Benefit your Brand in Marketing”, defines what SEO is. It speaks about the benefits of using SEO to grow your business.

Some tools that help you to understand how SEO works are also listed in the article. To mention a few, there is Google Analytics, KW Finder and Ahrefs.com

When you have identified a few Keywords and phrases that define your work, you can add them to your Blog paragraphs, your SEO metadata, your home page, the About page, and your blog post URL.

Placing your SEO keywords and phrases strategically on your website and social media pages will draw the intended audience to your content.

• Learn how to determine your purpose when creating content.
• Create a niche and know your audience
• Establish a scheduling or publishing plan
• Keep an inventory of all your published material
• Get the right digital tools to help you to analyze your SEO and monitor your content.
• Learn how to publish quality content
• Have a keen eye, for current trends. Keep watching what others are doing. Have an interest to learn as you move along.

As you think of developing graphical skills for your content creation tasks, you do not need to be an expert.

Many content Managers have had to learn their graphic skills off the internet on YouTube and from related groups or forums.

You could begin to use Canva and PicMonkey to create images and short videos that can be used for your content marketing on social platforms.

If you need to create logos, flyers, banner posters, invitations, business cards, templates, and more, you can DIY on Canva, and it’s very easy and user-friendly based.

PicMonkey has photo editing tools that can resize, adjust exposure, and filter images. PicMonkey’s graphic designing tools are user-friendly and easy to navigate.

It is ideal to know that you can also use these tools on your mobile devices, tablets, and not just the desktop.

While preparing yourself for the content manager role, you may want to take some basic coding online courses. A quick search online shows some of the courses that can benefit you here:

• Canva is used for creating posters, banners, pins, images, videos, GIFs, websites, booklets, and much more. Canva as a designing tool, helps you level up your skills, even as a beginner.

• Grammarly can be linked to Gmail, MS Word, LinkedIn, or other mail platforms to help you write well without errors. It checks and corrects your English spelling, sentences, and punctuation.

• Trello is a tool used for enabling visual tools that empower your team to manage any type of project, workflow, or task tracking.

• MS Word by Microsoft can be helpful as a comfortable place to begin your written articles. It’s a processing tool that helps make professional-quality documents, letters, and reports.

I use MS Word not only to process my documents and articles, but I save a lot of editorial time by using its unique dictation and read-aloud features.

• Pexels is a valuable resource for content creators, bloggers, and anyone who wants to get free stock photos and videos. You can download these images and videos and use them to create your content for free.

• Google Analytics is a vital tool that provides you with reports on your progress as a content manager.  The Google analytics platform collects data from your websites, Apps and social media platforms to create reports that provide insights into your business progress.

•  AdSense provides the means for your publications to earn money from their online content. Based on your content and page audience, AdSense matches the ads placed on your site to suit you.

• Yoast SEO is a resource that will improve your reader visibility. Yoast is a WordPress plugin that helps your content to be discovered on engines like Google or Bing. It helps your site to perform better and makes your content gain higher standards of SEO readability.

As you contemplate becoming a content manager do not limit yourself to being employed at a firm.

Bloggers, writers, and digital marketers are some positions that relate very closely to the content manager role.

The difference may be that with the content manager position, your role might handle more than one or two websites for an organization.

Alternatively, you may choose to be a freelance content manager for several companies for whom you handle their content.

Hopefully, this article has been a valuable resource in giving you an idea of what it entails to become a content Manager. Let us hear your views of what you have learnt from it.