I’ve heard many times that inside every marketer is a frustrated writer. To be fair, we all probably have 5 or 6 partially written novels, several screen plays, and one or two sitcom briefs at the ready. With the high visibility of the content marketing “trend”, more and more confusion from outside of marketing is muddying the waters.
Take a look through job descriptions and postings and you’ll see a wealth of positions looking for content developers, and the descriptions inevitably include lists of long form, short form, creative, technical, training, and copy writing. All in one description.
That’s not how it works.
To hire a marketing writer you need to first assess the type of content your need, and what you can afford. Most marketing content requirements include a variety of long and short form content, copy writing, and even internal and external communications. Hiring successfully means that you first have to understand the difference in these, and that there are specialties in each.
Determine Your Content Needs
Do you need writers to write content for:
- Social media content
- Presentations
- Podcasts, webinars, educational content
- Content for Infographics
- Blogs
- Advertising and Direct Mail
- Emails & Newsletters
- Public Relations
- Articles
- Proposals
- Sell sheets
- Sales scripts
- Strategies and Marketing Plans
- Training programs
- Technical documentation
- Website Copy
- SEO copy
- …
the list is endless, and while there is some overlap, each has different nuances and requires different skills and approaches.
Prioritize
If your budget cannot support a specialist for each need, you need to set priorities, decide what is most important, and decide where you can compromise or seek freelance consulting services to fill the gaps as needed.
Hiring a marketing writer and expecting him or her to fill all roles is akin to hiring an IT person and expecting him or her to be all things from desktop support to interactive programmer and database engineer, or hiring a business leader who is as adept at B2B and B2C sales of consumer packaged goods and cloud based subscription services.
Sure, you can hire a “Diamond in the rough” with a whopping 3-5 years experience and expect to unearth a true gem (it’s possible, pretty rare, but as plausible as winning the lottery jackpot), but the odds are against you.