Content Marketers: What’s Happening in Hiring
- Updated on: 2017-06-30
- Read original article here
Hiring a new member for your content marketing team seems like a great thing. After all, whether you’re expanding the team or replacing a departing employee, you’ll have more resources to execute a successful content marketing program.
But finding and attracting quality creative content team members is a job unto itself. It’s a challenge faced by 45% of advertising and marketing executives, according to a survey of 400 U.S. industry leaders by The Creative Group.
In this post, we dive deeper into the data about content marketing hiring. We will explore talent costs, regions with highest demand, and how companies work to retain employees.
Which U.S. cities have the greatest number of content marketing jobs? Here are the top 20 with the greatest number of content marketing jobs, according to Conductor’s Inbound Marketing Jobs Salary Guide 2017:
Starting salaries for content jobs are on the rise, as reflected in The Creative Group 2017 Marketing Jobs Salary Guide:
Data analysis, and content writing and editing are the most important skills companies are looking to hire this year, according to 2016 Digital Content Survey, Altimeter, a Prophet company.
Here’s how respondents who were asked the four most important skills they were looking to hire in 2017 listed priorities:
Roles in content marketing blend creative, technology, and analytics so companies seek individuals with more than one area of expertise.
As the authors of The Creative Group 2017 Salary Guide wrote:
That insight is mirrored in Conductor’s Inbound Marketing Jobs Salary Guide 2017, which reveals almost one in two content jobs (46.7%) requires SEO skills. These roles include content marketing specialists, content managers, content directors, and marketing manager positions.
With content marketing talent in high demand, companies seek to reduce turnover. The Creative Group survey revealed that more than half of advertising and marketing executives (52%) said they are concerned about retaining their current creative staff in the next 12 months.
They also shared their talent-retention activities. Here are ones cited by at least half of the group:
The Creative Group, an employment agency, reports that the following positions are fast becoming crucial assets on the marketing team.
Creative technologist: Serves as a liaison between design and development teams; scopes digital projects
Digital strategist: Develops user-experience (UX) strategies, including information design, online content strategy and lead generation tactics for web, mobile, email, social, and digital advertising media
Content strategist: Develops content strategy based on a company’s business objectives and end user’s needs
Writer: Composes clear, concise, and grammatically correct content using different writing styles that appeal to various target audiences
Digital/interactive marketing manager: Oversees the daily operation of a company’s website and email marketing program, and provides analytics review
As you can well know, hiring and retaining creative talent is not an easy task. It requires a keen understanding of the marketplace – geographic, industry, skills – and a strategic approach to ensuring that you not only pick great talent but you also keep them engaged.
Research in this article is reprinted with permission of The Creative Group, Conductor, and Altimeter.
Want to learn more about these roles and others? See The Creative Group’s 2017 Salary Guide, available here. A version of this article originally appeared in the June issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our bimonthly, print magazine.
