August 23, 2016 Mark Kauffman, CEO - UP Creative, Inc. 
In our industry, there’s no shortage of content marketers ranging from the blog-focused freelancer writer to the agency professional handling content for Fortune 500’s. The result is a ton of content, varying in quality, being pushed onto every online channel.
Similar to Olympic athletes, the content marketers who stand out are those with stronger, expertly tuned skill sets.
If you want to compete and get serious results, here are the ten skills you need to master. Luckily, YOU don't have to master them because your Sliding Social™ PRO + Marketing assistants already have for you!
1. In-Depth Research
Unless you’re the most knowledgeable subject matter expert, everything you create will need to have some research behind it. Any content marketer can browse popular sites, do a little research, and brainstorm some topics. Your Sliding Social Marketing Assistants go deeper by:
Businesses who want epic results will use a Sliding Social marketing team for exhaustive collection of data for their strategy and campaign. That persistence sets the best content marketing apart from the rest.
Trends come in a lot of forms. Every industry has trends and things that are on the minds of their audience at any given time. Industry trends are important to follow, but so are the trends outside your industry that capture the attention of your audience.
The Sliding Social™ Marketing Assistants constantly keep their eyes open for trending topics to stay ahead of the curve.
Being the first to jump on new industry trends to leverage them for your content campaigns is a great way to position yourself in front of a specific audience. But you can’t neglect other trending topics that make the top of the news and get listed in social channels with hashtags.
While some trends may be completely irrelevant to your business, others can be designed to create a correlation that puts your content in front of a much larger audience. Your Sliding Social Marketing Assistants are experts at this.
The average marketer does some social promotion when new content is published and leaves the rest to organic traffic from search. But if you want more reach and traffic from your content, you have to utilize every available channel for promoting new content. This is exactly what your Sliding Social Marketing Assistants do for your business.
When you have new content such as a video, your Sliding Social Marketing Assistants immediately begin promoting it through multiple channels. This promotion includes:
In addition to using those same channels, your Slding Social Marketing Assistants can also use tools for you like Quuu, Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, Vertical response, etc. to promote your content, send email notifications to subscribers, ask your connections and influencers you know to share it, and sponsor the content through over 20 social channels! Sliding Social Assistants will work on virtuallyt any 3rd party tool or subscription service you have for you!
Being able to tell a story is important, but knowing what to do with that story matters even more. Since every piece of content is created for a purpose, the most successful content marketers know how to analyze data to ensure that goals are being met and the content is performing well.
But, examining lots of data can be exhausting and inefficient, and the metrics you should ultimately watch for will vary based on your goals. To determine what the most important metrics for content marketing are for your business, your Sliding Social Marketing Assistants develop an efficient process for interpreting data, which can only come from really understanding what they're looking at.
Knowing how to read the data is what allows Sliding Social Marketing Assistants the ability to determine which topics to scrap and which top-performing topics you can repurpose into new, traffic-generating content.
Just 32% of content marketers have a documented content strategy. According to LinkedIn, companies with documented strategies are 36% more likely to succeed in their efforts. At Sliding Social, Marketing for busineses is ALL WE DO! Our strategy is 100% effective - We Guarantee It!
A clear-cut content strategy helps us define goals for you, track your research, plan your content, record your progress, match content to your audience and stages of the funnel, and stay organized for consistent and effective deployment. A detailed editorial calendar and content strategy are signs of an all-star content marketing team like Sliding Social Pro + Marketing systems give our clients.
Writing well for a digital audience might seem obvious, yet a lot of marketers struggle in this department. With more and more emphasis on content marketing and brands struggling to catch up, I still see marketers pushing quantity over quality.
Content marketing is more than just getting content written, and good writing is more than just avoiding grammatical errors and typos. The best content is high value, long form, and packed with so much value that it might resemble an overfilled water balloon on the verge of bursting. Sliding Social Pro + Marketing Assistants have their hands right on the perennial water facuet, insuring that 'ballon of content' gets filled to the exact sweet spot.
You could do perfectly fine and get great results without having any design chops, but you’ll have to draw upon some other resources, outsource design elements, and shell out money to make it all happen. Not with Sliding Social Pro + Marketing! Designing content is part of your service.
You don’t need a pricey Photoshop subscription and an employee to accomplish this. The Sliding Social Pro + Marketing Team does it for you!
57% of marketers say that creating a compelling story and making content more engaging are their main priorities, but 60% of marketers still struggle to produce engaging content for their audiences.
Storytelling can take a lot of forms, and there’s no magic outline for doing it right. The most successful content marketers are the ones who can elicit emotional responses from readers in ways that further connect them to the brand. You need a Professional and that's exactly what the Sliding Social Pro + Marketing Assistants are.
Sliding Social Marketing Assistants don’t put all their content marketing eggs in one basket. They rely on more than one form of content to reach your audience, because they know your audience digests content in different ways. Your customers read articles, listen to podcasts, watch video, scan infographics, examine case studies, and read through whitepapers for new insights.
Producing a variety of quality content gets you in front of a much larger audience.
Steve Jobs believed it was important to ask for help and lean on others when help was needed. More specifically he said, “Now, I’ve actually always found something to be very true, which is most people don’t get those experiences because they never ask. I’ve never found anybody who didn’t want to help me when I’ve asked them for help."
Sliding Social Pro+Marketing Assistants are here to help you!
This isn’t a full list of skills that every content marketer should have, but developing these ten skills is critical if you want to stand apart from the endless torrent of “so-so” content that’s being shoved in front of your audience’s eyes. This is what sets Sliding Social a part from everyone else. Our concept was to merely gve you another 'tool' or 'tip' but to develop an affordable solution for ANY size business to have a rock star professional marketing TEAM to be able to compete in today's corporate and franchise world. Our philosophy is to give your business the same marketing power as a compnay with a multi-million dollar marketing team at a cost you can afford.
What skill do you think is most critical for getting big results from your content marketing efforts?
