The 5 Most In-Demand Content Marketing Skills in 2021

Today’s digital era is creating a new world, and more than ever, brands are prioritizing digital channels to connect with their target audience and drive bottom-line growth for their business. As a result, the demand for high-quality, creative, human talent and newfangled digital skills are increased.

For instance, every year Google fills more than 6,000 job roles. (Google receives more than 1 million applications every year but, hires less than 1% from them.)

Recently, QuestResearch Group conducted a Study at Kaplan University, and published the results in Forbes, found that:

“There is a very little number of people who believe in the work readiness of university graduates. And, just 6% of university trustees, 11% of C-level executives and 13% of U.S. adults strongly agree with statements about the work readiness of university graduates.”

Maybe traditional education methods failing to prepare our next generation for what’s really essential to succeed. That’s why self-built skills are becoming more and more important.

So, Good News? A university degree isn’t always a prerequisite to success.

In fact, big brands like Google don’t even require a degree and they’ve been open about online career certificates instead. Also, brands like Apple, IBM, Tesla, and even Hilton, Costco, Bank of America, Whole Foods are following the same and don’t require a degree.

That means you can get a great job without a university degree! But how?

You need to build real, market-ready skills.

5 Market-Ready Skills to Win a Placement in the Content Marketing Industry.

1. Having a Good Understanding of Brand Content Strategy

Unless you understand the mechanics of content strategy, you can’t get any content marketing job. The content strategy is barely 10 years old, but, the base foundations of its techniques go back hundreds of years.

If you’ve no idea about brand content strategy, there are six core factors that build a brand content strategy.

The Six Core Factors of Brand Content Strategy

1. Knowing how to define a content strategy and the different parts of content strategy.
2. Get to know your target audience and build a brand differentiation factor.
3. Discover a strategy to find and put together great keywords
4. Knowing the ways to build authority with a dedicated brand website
5. Knowing the tactics to consistently create well-optimized awesome content
6. Having an organized process and system to manage and maintain the content and content strategy (editorial calendar, promotional strategy, etc.).

The above six steps don’t sound light, right? Because truthfully, they aren’t.

If you’re new to content marketing but want to be taken seriously in this industry and build your skillsets, consider getting a mentor and investing in a course led by industry-best practitioners to learn how to build a content strategy. Another best way is to join an internship in a job where you can learn and practice real-time tactics to build these content marketing skills.

2. Having a Better Understanding of SEO

There are valid reasons why more marketers and brands are focusing on SEO:

• More than 90% of US traffic generates from Google – Especially through Google search, Google Images, and Google Maps.
• SEO helps to drive nearly 11X as much traffic as organic social media
• Nearly 68% of all online experience starts with a search engine.

Inbound SEO content is a win in today’s scenario because over the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020 to present), Google search traffic spike up to 6 billion searches/day from 3.6 billion searches/day. In short, the number of people using Google to search for answers to their questions has increased to a greater level.

SEO skillset revolves around things like knowing how to write and optimize content for search, maintain and update older content, monitor your content performance, and effectively using tools like Google Analytics, Ahrefs, SEMrush and Yoast. Basically, companies that hiring content marketers are looking for a good understanding of SEO.

So, building your knowledge and skills in SEO is essential. To enhance your SEO knowledge you can find and follow SEO experts and take an SEO course.

3. Having a Great Understanding of Online Content

Can you quickly identify great online content?

If you haven’t sharpened your content recognition skills, you can’t survive in the content marketing industry for a long time. Brands are expecting their content marketing team to produce quality content. So, sharpen your content recognition skills and get to know how to identify good content across these content formats:

• Product Descriptions
• Social Media Posts
• Blogs
• Headlines
• Web Content
• Meta Content
• Emails
• Ebooks
• Case Studies
• Lead Magnets
• Whitepapers
• Video Scripts

Regardless of the industry, all of these above content formats are used across a wide variety of content marketing campaigns. So,  if don’t have good content recognition skills, build them by joining an internship at a content marketing agency, take a lower-paying gig in exchange for building your content- skills, or investing in an online content writing course.

4. Having the Ability to Do In-Depth Research

‘Sourcing a statistic” in your content isn’t working any longer.

You should know the ways to find the original study, plus make sure you’re never linking to anything that’s outdated.  For instance, if you’re sourcing a link to a study from 2019 in your blog post, depending on your industry, it’s quite possibly outdated and won’t add authority to your blog post.

You need to research a bit more deeply than an average person to find great sources and statistics for the content you build or manage in a content marketing campaign.

Statistics and facts matter more than before because now trust is one of the most important buying factors consumers consider when purchasing a product/service from a brand.

5. Commitment & The Ability to Stick with It

This is a simple yet most important trait for a content marketer.

Above all, the success of a content marketing campaign depends on the commitment of the person who is spearheading the campaign.

The founder of Content Marketing Institute, Joe Pulizzi has said that it takes 12-18 months to see the success of content. Also, Pulizzi said that one of the biggest reasons for content marketing failure is that the brands don’t have patience and kills their campaign too early, even, it sounds crazy, it’s the true fact.

If you’re heading into the content marketing industry, you should be committed and build your ability to stick with it until you achieve the results. Simply, be a proponent for a brand’s content marketing success.

Conclusion

There are many other content marketing skills. But, these five are extremely important content marketing skills to master. Now you have the path to build your content marketing skills. Once you built these skills, you’re ready to hustle your dream content marketing job.

Go ahead and prosper your career!

AboutAbirika Soolabanee

Abirika Soolabanee working as a Senior Manager - Inbound Marketing & Branding at Prime One Global. She is a certified content and Inbound marketer with five years of experience. Bringing expertise in content marketing, inbound marketing, branding, blogging, copywriting, SEO, keyword research, and research & analytics. She is passionate about Inbound Marketing, Branding and Blogging. She writes in-depth articles and guides about digital marketing trends, technologies, and other lifestyle topics since 2018. Through her writings, she loves to help people in all aspects of their life.