The World Series has come and gone for 2022, but there’s a lesson that content marketing leaders can learn from baseball’s top managers… How to identify the talent you want to call on when you need a home run.
Hopefully you have a few of these people in your “dugout”. But what is it about these people that makes them special? Top content producers all share several characteristics that set them apart from the rest of the pack. Here’s our list of those winning traits.
Top Content Producers Know Their Audience
As Hubspot’s Maggie Butler points out, the secret to successful content creation is “material that caters to the interests and challenges of a [company’s] target audience.” But world-class creatives don’t just study their target customers. Rather, they’re obsessed with them.
It starts with a deep dive into your company’s social media and content analytics. Then, your top producers likely sketch out a detailed portrait of each target segment, right down to a fictitious name that helps them put a human face on each buyer persona.
Image Source: Example of DivvyHQ Analytics Top Authors report
For the crème de la crème, audience obsession doesn’t stop there. They top it all off with a healthy dollop of empathy. Putting themselves in the shoes of their target customers gives your top creatives insights that seem almost psychic.
They Study Your Industry
The best creative talent keeps ahead of the curve when it comes to their knowledge of your company’s products and services. From keeping up on the latest trends to spending hours studying industry publications, the best content creators have a grasp of your company’s field that approaches even that of your subject matter experts.
Furthermore, they cite top industry publications and other authoritative sources in their own work. Showcasing your brand’s expertise in its niche builds trust in your audience — and top talent knows which sources to reference to maximize your content’s clout.
They Nail Your Brand Voice
Giving your brand a personality of its own helps to set you apart from your competitors on an emotional level. After all, research shows that customers who have a deep emotional bond with a brand are 52% more valuable than those without such a connection.
Image via Harvard Business Review
A distinctive brand voice is essential in putting a human face on your company. Involve your top creative talent in any branding discussions, and you’ll get more than your money’s worth back in content that builds an emotional bond with your audience.
In fact, you can employ their talent even more by tasking them to jot down words and phrases that reflect your brand’s voice. Then, document those phrases on an AI-powered content creation and governance platform like Writer that can flag content that doesn’t align with your brand voice.
With that guidance, your junior creatives can get up to speed with your brand voice faster than ever before. It’s a great way to leverage your top talent’s expertise at scale.
They Align Their Content with Your Corporate Goals
Top content producers are the first to meet with the CMO to find out what goals the company’s top brass wants to achieve over the next year. Then, they pump out content that aims to reach those objectives.
For instance, if your company is expanding into a new geographical area, your best talent will create localized content that meets the needs of the new market segments. If you’re promoting a new product, they’ll create content that shows how your latest offering can solve your target customers’ problems or satisfy their desires.
If they have access to your content analytics platform, they’ll keep a close eye on their content’s performance, revising it as needed to make it perform even better in its target market. In other words, they take ownership of their work — and the role they play in the company’s success.
They Collaborate with Other Top Talent on Content
No matter how much research they do, your best people know their knowledge is finite. For that reason, they engage in content collaboration with your subject matter experts, sales teams, and customer service staff to create engaging, well-informed content that performs well at every stage of the customer journey.
Furthermore, even your most productive content creators can come up empty during the ideation process. Having a dedicated ideation space on your content platform where they can solicit ideas from other top talent, priming the creative well when it inevitably goes dry.
They Have an Insatiable Sense of Curiosity
Walk into any top content creator’s office, and you can bet that you’ll see a full bookcase or two. Creatives have an innate desire to learn, so they devour information, study other content producers’ styles, and ask plenty of questions.
But they also balance that curiosity with critical thinking, making sure they back their conclusions with solid evidence. Taking the time to find original sources of information and constructing logical arguments, they make a clear case for the points they make.
They Are Great Storytellers
A great content creator can take even the most boring of topics and turn them into spellbinding copy. That talent pays off in spades, as a Headstream study shows.
People who love brand stories are 55% more likely to make a future purchase, while 15% of them will buy your product on the spot. And, if shares are one of your key metrics, know that 44% of people who connect on an emotional level with your brand stories will share them with their friends and colleagues.
For that reason, it’s essential that content operations leadership identify and promote content producers with superb creative chops, as Map & Compass’ Jessica Kandler advises. Otherwise, in today’s market, you might lose them to your competitor.
They Leverage Resources to Boost Their Productivity
Top content creators don’t waste time on re-inventing the wheel. They leverage every resource they can to streamline the creative process.
Whether it’s applying content automation to speed up the publication process across all your brand’s channels or creating templates that help them streamline routine tasks, your best creatives use every tool they can get their hands on to churn out more quality content in less time.
Those tools need to include a content marketing platform where your top performers — and those working toward bettering their talents — can ideate, plan, create, collaborate on, and publish content without leaving the platform. DivvyHQ does all of that and more.
With a dedicated ideation area and the capacity for content planning and production across the enterprise, this platform can turbocharge your top talent’s productivity and encourage up-and-comers to level up their skills.
And, you can try it free for 14 days with no obligation. Or, if you’d prefer a personal tour, request a demo. Don’t wait to get started!