Content Manager: The Role Most Companies Get Wrong

A content manager is the person responsible for planning, producing, and overseeing content across an organisation’s marketing channels. In practice, the role sits somewhere between editorial, strategy, and project management, and that ambiguity is exactly why so many companies fill it badly.

Most job descriptions for this role focus on output: publish schedules, word counts, social posts per week. The companies that get the most from a content manager define the role differently. They treat it as a commercial function, not a production one.

Why Most Companies Misdefine the Content Manager Role

When I was running agencies, I saw the same pattern repeat across clients of all sizes. A marketing director would decide they needed more content. They’d hire a content manager, brief them on the blog calendar, and measure success by how consistently posts went out. Six months later, they’d be frustrated that content wasn’t “working.” The content manager would be frustrated that nobody could tell them what “working” meant.

The problem wasn’t the person. It was the definition of the role.

Content management, when it’s done well, is a strategic function. It requires someone who can ask why before they ask what. Why are we creating this content? Who is it for? What do we want them to think, feel, or do differently after reading it? What does success look like, and over what timeframe? These are not editorial questions. They are commercial questions, and the content manager is the person who should be asking them.

Instead, most companies hire for execution. They want someone who can write, edit, schedule, and manage contributors. Those skills matter, but they are the floor, not the ceiling. A content manager who can only execute will produce content that looks busy and performs quietly.

If you’re thinking about how content fits into your broader growth programme, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the wider strategic context that makes content decisions make sense.

What a Content Manager Actually Does Day to Day

The day-to-day reality of content management is more varied than most people outside the role appreciate. On any given week, a content manager might be briefing a freelance writer, reviewing analytics to understand which topics are pulling traffic, working with the SEO lead on keyword priorities, coordinating with the design team on assets, and sitting in a product meeting to understand what’s coming to market in the next quarter.

That range is not a problem. It’s the point. Content sits at the intersection of audience, brand, and commercial intent. The content manager is the person who keeps those three things in alignment while the work gets done.

In practical terms, the role typically covers:

• Content strategy: Defining what topics to cover, for which audiences, at which stages of the buying cycle, and through which formats and channels.
• Editorial planning: Building and maintaining a content calendar that reflects strategic priorities rather than just available capacity.
• Briefing and commissioning: Writing detailed briefs for writers, designers, and other contributors so that execution matches intent.
• Quality control: Reviewing content before publication to ensure it meets editorial standards, reflects the brand voice, and serves the audience it was built for.
• Performance analysis: Tracking how content performs and using that data to inform future decisions, not just to report backwards.
• Stakeholder management: Balancing requests from sales, product, leadership, and other functions while keeping the content programme coherent.

That last one is harder than it sounds. In most organisations, everyone has an opinion about content. The sales team wants case studies. The CEO wants thought leadership. The product team wants feature announcements. The content manager’s job is to take all of that input and make decisions about what actually serves the audience and the business, rather than just accommodating whoever shouted loudest.

The Brief: The Most Underused Tool in Content Management

Early in my agency career, I watched a lot of content fail at the brief stage without anyone realising it. A client would ask for a blog post about their new product feature. The account manager would pass that request to a writer with two lines of context. The writer would produce something technically accurate and entirely generic. The client would be disappointed but couldn’t articulate why. The cycle would repeat.

The problem was never the writer. The problem was the brief.

A good content brief is not a title and a word count. It is a document that answers the questions a writer needs answered before they can do their best work. Who is the primary reader? What do they already know about this topic? What do they believe right now that we want to change? What action do we want them to take after reading? What tone is right for this piece? What sources should they draw on? What should they avoid?

When I started being more rigorous about briefing at iProspect, the quality of content we produced went up noticeably before we changed a single person on the team. The writers were the same. The time available was the same. The brief was better. That was it.

A content manager who invests time in writing strong briefs will consistently get better output than one who relies on talented contributors to figure it out themselves. This is not about micromanagement. It is about removing ambiguity before it becomes a problem.

Content Strategy vs. Content Production: Where the Real Work Is

There is a version of content management that is almost entirely operational. Publish schedule maintained, contributors managed, posts going out on time, social captions written. This version of the role can be done competently without ever thinking strategically about whether any of it is working.

There is another version that starts from a different place entirely. What do we want content to do for the business? Which audiences are we trying to reach, and are we actually reaching them? Which topics are we credible on, and which ones are we producing content about because they’re easy, not because we have anything distinctive to say?

The second version is harder. It requires the content manager to have opinions, to push back on requests that don’t serve the strategy, and to make decisions about what not to produce as well as what to produce. Most organisations say they want this version and then make it very difficult for the person in the role to operate that way.

One thing I’ve noticed from years of working with content teams is that the best content managers are comfortable with constraint. They don’t try to cover every topic or serve every audience. They pick the territory where the brand has something genuine to say and they go deep. That discipline is what separates content programmes that build real authority from ones that generate traffic without trust.

Understanding how to think about market penetration is useful context here. Content that only reaches people already searching for your brand is capturing existing demand. Content that reaches people who didn’t know they had a problem you could solve is creating new demand. Both matter, but they require different approaches, and a content manager who doesn’t understand the distinction will default to the easier one.

Demand Capture vs. Demand Creation: A Distinction Content Managers Need to Make

I spent a lot of my earlier career overvaluing lower-funnel performance. When you’re managing large ad budgets and you can see conversion data in real time, it’s easy to believe that the last click is where the value is. It took me longer than it should have to appreciate how much of that conversion was going to happen anyway, and how little of it I was actually creating.

Content has the same problem. A lot of content programmes are built almost entirely around search intent: find the keywords people are already using, write content that ranks for them, capture the traffic. That is a legitimate strategy, but it is not a growth strategy. It is a harvesting strategy. You are picking fruit that is already ripe.

Growth requires reaching people who are not yet looking for you. That means content that addresses problems your audience has before they’ve named them, that builds familiarity with your brand before there is any purchase intent, that earns attention in contexts where people are not actively searching. This is harder to measure and harder to justify in a quarterly review, but it is where content creates real commercial value over time.

Think about it this way. If someone is already searching for your product category, you’re competing with every other brand in that category for the same piece of intent. If you reach someone earlier, when they’re thinking about the problem rather than the solution, you have the opportunity to shape how they think about it. That is a very different kind of competitive advantage.

A content manager who understands this will build a programme that covers both ends of the spectrum, rather than defaulting entirely to what’s easiest to measure. Sustainable growth requires both demand creation and demand capture working together.

How to Structure a Content Team Around a Content Manager

The structure of a content team depends heavily on the size of the organisation and the volume and variety of content required. But there are some principles that hold across most contexts.

The content manager should sit close enough to strategy to understand commercial priorities, and close enough to execution to maintain quality. In smaller organisations, that often means the content manager is doing a lot of the writing themselves. In larger ones, they are primarily a commissioning and quality-control function, with writers, designers, and other contributors doing the production work.

What tends to go wrong is when the content manager is too far from either end. Too far from strategy, and they’re producing content that doesn’t connect to anything. Too far from execution, and quality slips because nobody with editorial judgment is close enough to the work.

When I was growing the team at iProspect from around 20 people to over 100, one of the things I paid attention to was where content sat in the organisational structure. The teams that performed best were the ones where content had a clear line to commercial objectives, not ones where content was a separate function that produced things in isolation and hoped for the best.

The BCG framework for commercial transformation is useful here. Content is not a standalone discipline. It is part of a go-to-market system, and it works best when it is integrated into that system rather than running parallel to it.

In practical terms, that means the content manager should have regular touchpoints with:

• Sales: To understand what objections come up in conversations, what questions prospects ask, and what content would make their conversations easier.
• Product: To understand what’s coming to market and how to build content that supports launches without just being a press release.
• SEO: To align content topics with search demand without letting keyword volume be the only driver of editorial decisions.
• Brand: To ensure that content reflects the brand voice and positioning consistently, especially when multiple contributors are involved.
• Analytics: To track performance in a way that informs future decisions rather than just producing retrospective reports.

Measuring Content Performance Without Chasing Vanity Metrics

Traffic is the most commonly reported content metric and often the least useful. A piece of content can pull significant traffic and contribute nothing to the business. A piece of content can reach a small number of exactly the right people and have a disproportionate commercial impact. Traffic tells you how many people showed up. It doesn’t tell you whether it mattered.

The metrics that matter depend on what the content was designed to do. If it was designed to generate leads, measure lead quality and volume. If it was designed to support sales conversations, measure whether it’s being used and whether deals that use it close at a higher rate. If it was designed to build brand awareness in a new audience, measure reach and engagement in that specific audience, not aggregate numbers.

One of the things I took away from judging the Effie Awards was how rarely companies could articulate a clear chain from marketing activity to business outcome. They could tell you what they spent and what the campaign produced in terms of impressions or engagement. They struggled to tell you what changed as a result. Content has the same problem at a smaller scale.

A content manager who is serious about measurement will define success criteria before content is produced, not after. They will agree with stakeholders on what “working” looks like for each piece or programme, so that the conversation about performance is grounded in something specific rather than a general sense of whether things feel like they’re going well.

That doesn’t require perfect attribution. It requires honest approximation. Are we reaching the audiences we said we wanted to reach? Is content supporting the conversations we said it would support? Are we building authority in the areas we identified as strategic? These questions don’t need a perfect measurement framework to be answerable. They need someone willing to ask them consistently.

Tools like behavioural analytics platforms can add a useful layer to content measurement by showing how people actually interact with content, not just whether they arrived and left. But the data is a perspective on reality, not reality itself. The content manager’s job is to interpret it, not just report it.

The Relationship Between Content and Go-To-Market Strategy

Content doesn’t exist in isolation. It is one of the primary ways a company communicates its positioning, demonstrates its expertise, and earns the attention of the audiences it wants to reach. That means content decisions are, at their core, go-to-market decisions.

Which topics you cover signals what you stand for. Which audiences you write for signals who you’re trying to serve. The tone and depth of your content signals how you want to be perceived. These are not just editorial choices. They are positioning choices, and they compound over time.

I’ve seen companies produce content that was technically fine but strategically incoherent. They’d cover every topic in their industry, write for every audience, and shift tone depending on who had last made a request. The result was a content library that was impossible to describe in a sentence, because it didn’t stand for anything in particular. That is not a content problem. It is a strategy problem that shows up in content.

When content is aligned with go-to-market strategy, it becomes a compounding asset. Every piece you publish either reinforces your positioning or undermines it. A content manager who understands this will make different decisions about what to produce, and will be better equipped to explain those decisions to stakeholders who want to add noise to the programme.

There’s more on this in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub, particularly if you’re thinking about how to build a content programme that contributes to commercial growth rather than just filling a publishing schedule.

What Separates a Good Content Manager from an Average One

I’ve worked with a lot of content people over the years. The ones who made a real difference to the organisations they worked in had a few things in common that had nothing to do with writing ability.

The first was commercial curiosity. They wanted to understand how the business made money, which customers were most valuable, what the sales cycle looked like, and what the actual barriers to purchase were. They used that understanding to make better editorial decisions, not just to sound informed in meetings.

The second was editorial courage. They were willing to say no to content requests that didn’t serve the strategy, to push back on briefs that were vague or contradictory, and to have the conversation about why a particular piece wasn’t worth producing. That kind of pushback is uncomfortable, but it’s what keeps a content programme coherent.

The third was audience empathy that went beyond personas. They didn’t just know that their audience was “marketing managers aged 30 to 45.” They understood what those people were worried about, what they were trying to prove to their bosses, what questions they were embarrassed to ask, and what made them trust a source. That depth of understanding showed up in every piece they commissioned or wrote.

The fourth was comfort with ambiguity in measurement. Content rarely has a clean attribution story, and the content managers who performed best were the ones who could make a coherent case for the value of their programme without needing a perfect data trail. They understood that honest approximation is more useful than false precision.

I remember the first time I was handed a whiteboard pen in a client brainstorm and told to lead the session. My instinct was to defer. The more useful instinct, which I eventually developed, was to have a point of view and be willing to defend it. That’s what the best content managers do every day, in every brief they write and every editorial decision they make.

Scaling Content Without Losing Quality

At some point, most growing organisations face the same pressure: produce more content, faster, without spending more. The response is usually to bring in more freelancers, or to start using AI tools to speed up production. Neither of those things is wrong in itself, but both can cause quality to slip if the content manager isn’t paying attention to the right things.

Scaling content successfully requires two things to be in place before you add volume. The first is a clear editorial standard: a documented sense of what good looks like for your content, what your brand voice sounds like, and what the non-negotiables are for every piece you publish. Without that, every new contributor will interpret the brief differently, and the content library will become inconsistent.

The second is a quality review process that can scale without the content manager reviewing every word. That usually means building a small number of trusted senior contributors who can self-manage to the standard, combined with a spot-check approach for newer contributors until they’ve proven they can work to the required level.

What doesn’t scale is a content manager who is the only person capable of maintaining quality. If every piece needs to go through one person before it’s publishable, you have a bottleneck, not a content programme. The content manager’s job, as volume increases, is to build systems that maintain quality without requiring their personal involvement in every output.

The BCG work on scaling agile organisations is worth reading in this context. The principles around distributed decision-making and clear standards apply to content teams as much as they do to product teams. The goal is to give contributors enough context to make good decisions independently, rather than creating a system where every decision escalates upward.

AI and the Content Manager Role

AI writing tools have changed the production economics of content significantly. They have not changed what good content requires.

What AI does well is produce competent first drafts at speed, generate structural options, and handle the more formulaic parts of content production. What it doesn’t do is have a genuine point of view, understand the nuances of a specific audience, or make the editorial judgment calls that separate content that builds trust from content that fills space.

The content managers I’d want working with me are the ones who use AI as a production tool while maintaining full editorial control over the output. They are not the ones who treat AI as a replacement for thinking. The risk with AI-assisted content is not that it will be obviously bad. It’s that it will be consistently mediocre: technically correct, structurally sound, and entirely forgettable.

Forgettable content is a cost, not a contribution. It consumes resources, dilutes your authority in the topics you cover, and trains your audience to skim rather than read. A content manager who understands this will use AI to do more of the work they were already doing well, not to lower the standard of what gets published.

The question worth asking is not “can we use AI to produce more content?” It’s “what would we produce if we had more capacity, and is that the right question to be asking?” Sometimes the answer is that volume is the constraint. More often, the constraint is clarity about what the content is supposed to do, and adding volume without addressing that will just produce more of the same mediocrity, faster.

Hiring a Content Manager: What to Look For

If you’re hiring for this role, the most common mistake is to focus the hiring process on writing samples and miss the strategic thinking entirely. Writing quality is table stakes. The question that matters is whether this person can connect content to commercial outcomes.

In interviews, I’d want to know how a candidate has made editorial decisions under pressure. What did they choose not to produce, and why? How did they handle a stakeholder who wanted content that didn’t serve the strategy? What does their measurement approach look like, and how do they talk about content performance to people who don’t care about content?

I’d also want to understand how they think about audience. Not demographics. Actual understanding of what the audience is trying to do, what they’re worried about, and what would make them trust a source. A content manager who can articulate that clearly, for a specific audience in your market, is worth significantly more than one who can produce polished copy without that foundation.

The brief test is useful here. Ask a candidate to write a content brief for a specific piece, given a realistic business context. What they include, what they ask, and how they frame the creative challenge will tell you more about their strategic capability than any portfolio review.

Finally, look for someone who is genuinely curious about the business they’re joining, not just the content opportunity. The best content managers are interested in how companies make money, where growth comes from, and what the barriers to purchase are. That commercial curiosity is what allows them to make content decisions that connect to something real, rather than producing work that exists in a strategic vacuum.

For a broader view of how content management connects to pipeline and revenue generation, the Vidyard Future Revenue Report offers useful data on how go-to-market teams are thinking about content’s role in the revenue process.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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