Ditch The Silos – How to Build a Great Content Marketing Team

Last month I attended SES in San Francisco and saw some great presentations, as always covering the ever-changing world of search. Having recently launched a content marketing agency, the session that stood out to me the most was the convergence of search, social and content marketing – with some great presentations from Chris Winfield and Arnie Kuenn.

Search, Social & Content Has Merged into a Single Process

I’ve recently written about how to transition of a team from SEO into content marketing - and in my opinion, the best content marketing teams merge all things search, social, CRO, PR, paid media etc into a single team.

These days, if all you focus on is SEO, you’re probably not actually that good at it. That’s because you’re missing the point that you need to acquire high-quality, natural links, create a social buzz/awareness, reach a targeted audience, and convert those into customers/leads.

The Best Teams are Integrated & Work Together



You’ll often find the best in-house teams and agencies will have a mix of all of these skills – SEO, social, PPC, CRO, etc.

Even in content marketing, you have to break down the silos. When we started delivering content marketing projects, our approach was to break projects into three key deliverables:

• Content Auditing and Strategy
• Content Development
• Blogger Outreach and Social Promotion

In theory this works very well and means you can tackle each key section of a project with a specialist in each area. But we quickly realized we were making a mistake in efficiencies of managing the process and getting the best results.