Content Marketer Hiring: What Job Descriptions Get Wrong

A content marketer is a specialist responsible for planning, creating, and distributing content that attracts audiences, builds trust, and moves people toward a commercial outcome. The role sits at the intersection of editorial thinking and business strategy, and when it works well, it compounds over time in ways that paid media cannot replicate.

But most organisations hire content marketers badly, brief them worse, and then wonder why the function underperforms. The problem is rarely the person. It is the frame they are handed on day one.

What Does a Content Marketer Actually Do?

The job title has been stretched so far that it now covers everything from social media copywriting to full-funnel SEO strategy to thought leadership ghostwriting. That breadth is part of the problem. When a role can mean anything, it tends to mean nothing in practice.

At its core, a content marketer does three things. They identify what an audience needs to know, believe, or feel at a given stage of a decision. They create or commission content that delivers that. And they ensure that content reaches the right people through the right channels at the right time. Everything else, the tools, the formats, the publishing cadence, is execution detail.

Where organisations go wrong is treating execution detail as the job description. I have reviewed hundreds of briefs and job specs across agency and client-side roles over two decades. The most common failure is a list of deliverables masquerading as a strategy: “produce four blog posts per month, manage the social calendar, write email newsletters, support the sales team with collateral.” That is a production schedule, not a content strategy. And it attracts candidates who are good at filling a calendar, not candidates who can build an audience.

The distinction matters commercially. A content marketer who thinks in terms of output will optimise for volume. A content marketer who thinks in terms of audience will optimise for trust and reach. Those two orientations produce very different results over a 12-month period.

Why the Hiring Brief Is Usually Wrong

Early in my agency career, I watched a client hire three content marketers in 18 months, each time frustrated that the previous person “wasn’t strategic enough.” The job description never changed. It was a list of tasks, the same list each time, and each candidate was assessed on their ability to execute those tasks. The problem was not the candidates. The problem was that nobody had defined what strategic looked like for that business, what audiences they were trying to reach, what those audiences needed to believe, and how content would contribute to revenue over time.

This is more common than most marketing directors would like to admit. Content marketing gets added to the headcount plan because a competitor is doing it, or because organic traffic has flatlined, or because the sales team needs more collateral. The hire is reactive, the brief is thin, and the success criteria are borrowed from whoever last wrote a think-piece about content marketing ROI.

The strongest content marketers I have worked with, both in-house and agency-side, shared one quality: they pushed back on the brief before they accepted it. They asked what the business was trying to achieve, who the audience was beyond a demographic label, and what success would look like in 12 months. That pushback was not awkwardness. It was the job.

If you are building a go-to-market function or scaling a content capability, the wider strategic context matters as much as the individual hire. The Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers how content fits into a broader commercial architecture, because content without a distribution and positioning strategy is just publishing.

The Editor Mindset Versus the Marketer Mindset

There is a tension at the centre of the content marketer role that rarely gets named directly: the tension between editorial thinking and commercial thinking. Both are necessary. Most job descriptions only ask for one.

Editorial thinking asks: what does the audience want to read, watch, or listen to? What is genuinely useful, interesting, or credible? What would make someone come back? Commercial thinking asks: what does the business need the audience to understand, believe, or do? Where does this content sit in the decision experience? How does it contribute to pipeline or retention?

Content marketers who only think editorially produce excellent content that nobody acts on. Content marketers who only think commercially produce content that reads like thinly disguised sales material and builds no audience at all. The skill is holding both frames simultaneously, which is harder than it sounds and rarer than job descriptions acknowledge.

I spent time judging the Effie Awards, which are specifically designed to evaluate marketing effectiveness rather than creative quality. The content campaigns that performed consistently well were not the ones with the highest production values or the most ambitious editorial vision. They were the ones where someone had clearly thought through the audience’s decision experience and placed content at the exact point where it could shift belief or behaviour. That is the editor-marketer hybrid in practice.

What Content Marketing Is Not

Part of setting a content marketer up for success is being clear about what falls outside their remit. Three things get conflated with content marketing so frequently that it is worth addressing them directly.

The first is sales enablement. Collateral that helps a salesperson close a deal is valuable, but it is not content marketing. It is sales support. It serves a different audience (the salesperson and the late-stage prospect) and operates on a different timeline. Asking a content marketer to own this alongside a top-of-funnel content programme is asking them to serve two masters with different success criteria. Something will be deprioritised, and it is usually the longer-term audience-building work.

The second is social media management. Social is a distribution channel and a community function. It requires different skills, a different cadence, and a different relationship with the audience than long-form content strategy. Some content marketers do both well. Many do not, and the roles are distinct enough that bundling them together is a false economy in any organisation above a certain size.

The third is PR. Earned media and owned content are related but not the same. A content marketer who is also expected to manage media relationships, write press releases, and handle journalist outreach is carrying a workload that belongs to at least two separate disciplines. Again, some people span both. But treating them as equivalent in a job description sets expectations that are difficult to meet.

The relationship between content and market penetration is worth understanding here. Content marketing is most powerful as a reach and trust-building mechanism, which means its primary value is upstream of conversion, not adjacent to it. Conflating it with conversion-focused functions dilutes that value.

The Distribution Problem Nobody Talks About

I have a fairly blunt view on this: a content marketer without a distribution strategy is a writer with a publishing platform. The content might be excellent. It will still not reach anyone.

Distribution is where most content programmes fail, and it is the part of the job that gets the least attention in both job descriptions and performance reviews. The assumption is that if the content is good enough, the audience will find it. That assumption was questionable ten years ago. It is close to fantasy now.

When I was running an agency and we were building out content capability for clients, the question I kept coming back to was: how does this reach someone who has never heard of this brand? SEO is part of the answer, but only part. Organic search captures existing demand. It does not create new audiences. Email reaches people who are already engaged. Social amplification depends on existing followers. None of those channels, on their own, solves the reach problem.

The content marketers who genuinely moved the needle were the ones who had a clear answer to the question: how does this content reach someone who is not already in our orbit? That might mean paid amplification, editorial partnerships, community seeding, or building distribution into the content format itself (something that encourages sharing or embedding). The specific answer matters less than having one.

Research from Vidyard on GTM team pipeline points to a consistent finding: untapped revenue potential sits with audiences that have not yet been reached, not with better conversion of existing traffic. Content marketing is one of the few scalable mechanisms for reaching those audiences without paying for every impression. But only if distribution is treated as a first-class concern, not an afterthought.

How to Brief a Content Marketer Properly

The brief is where most content programmes either gain traction or lose it. A good brief for a content marketer answers five questions before it asks for anything.

First: who is the audience, specifically? Not “marketing professionals” or “SME decision-makers” but a description of what that person knows, believes, and is uncertain about at the point where content can help them. The more specific this is, the more useful the content will be.

Second: what do we need them to believe or understand that they do not currently? This is the belief gap that content needs to close. It might be about the category, the problem, the solution, or the brand. But it should be one specific thing, not a general improvement in brand awareness.

Third: where are they in the decision process? Content that works at the awareness stage looks and reads very differently from content that works at the consideration stage. Mixing them up, or trying to serve both with the same piece, usually produces content that does neither well.

Fourth: how will this reach them? Not “we will publish it on the blog” but a specific answer to the distribution question. If the answer is unclear, that is a signal to resolve before commissioning the content.

Fifth: how will we know if it worked? Not just traffic or time-on-page, but a metric that connects to the belief gap or the commercial outcome. This is harder to define than a pageview count, but it is the only measurement that tells you whether the content is doing its job.

When I handed over the whiteboard at Cybercom during a Guinness brainstorm, the thing that kept the session productive was not the ideas themselves. It was having a clear brief about what the campaign needed to achieve and who it needed to reach. Without that, a brainstorm is just a room full of people saying things. With it, even a junior person with a whiteboard pen can steer the conversation somewhere useful.

Measuring Content Marketing Without False Precision

Content marketing is one of the harder marketing functions to measure cleanly, and the industry has responded to that difficulty in two unhelpful ways. The first is to measure everything that is easy to count (pageviews, social shares, email open rates) and present that as evidence of value. The second is to claim that content marketing cannot really be measured and that you just have to trust the process.

Both of those positions are a way of avoiding the harder work of honest approximation.

The metrics that matter for content marketing are the ones that connect to the belief gap and the commercial outcome. Organic search visibility in target categories tells you whether the content is reaching people with relevant intent. Return visitor rates tell you whether the content is building an audience rather than just attracting one-time traffic. Newsletter subscriber growth tells you whether people trust the content enough to invite it into their inbox. None of these are perfect proxies. All of them are more meaningful than raw pageviews.

Attribution is the more contentious question. Content marketing, particularly at the awareness and consideration stage, rarely gets clean attribution credit in most measurement frameworks. Someone reads three articles over two months, then converts through a paid search ad, and the model gives the credit to the paid channel. That is not wrong exactly, it is just incomplete. BCG’s work on commercial transformation makes a relevant point here: organisations that over-index on measurable short-term signals tend to underinvest in the activities that build long-term commercial advantage. Content marketing is one of those activities.

The practical answer is to run content measurement at two levels. At the programme level, track whether organic reach, audience size, and category visibility are growing over time. At the campaign level, track whether specific content is moving the belief gap it was designed to close. Combine those two views and you have a measurement framework that is honest without pretending to be more precise than the data allows.

When to Hire In-House Versus Agency

This is a question I fielded constantly when running an agency, and I will give you the same answer I gave clients who asked directly: it depends on what you are trying to build, not on what is cheaper in the short term.

An in-house content marketer has one significant advantage: proximity to the business. They can sit in product meetings, hear customer conversations, and develop a depth of category knowledge that an agency team working across multiple clients cannot replicate. For businesses where content is a core growth mechanism, that proximity is worth paying for. The knowledge compounds in the same way the content does.

An agency or freelance model has a different advantage: breadth. A content team that works across multiple industries and business models brings pattern recognition that an in-house person, however talented, takes years to develop. They have also usually built distribution relationships, editorial networks, and SEO infrastructure that would take an in-house hire time to replicate from scratch.

The model I saw work most consistently was a hybrid: a senior in-house content marketer who owned the strategy, the brief, and the editorial calendar, working with an external team for production, SEO, and specialist formats. The in-house person provided the business context and the quality bar. The external team provided the bandwidth and the technical capability. Neither could do the full job alone.

Understanding how content fits into a broader growth architecture is worth exploring in more depth. The Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy section covers the strategic layer that content marketing needs to sit within to generate commercial return rather than just editorial output.

The Skills Gap That Matters Most

If I were hiring a content marketer today, the skill I would weight most heavily is not writing ability, SEO knowledge, or content strategy experience. It is commercial curiosity: the ability and inclination to understand how the business makes money, who the customer is and why they buy, and where content can genuinely influence that process.

Good writers are not rare. People who can write clearly and also think rigorously about business problems are considerably rarer. The content marketer role, done well, requires both. And most hiring processes test only the first.

The interview process that I have seen work best is simple: give the candidate a real brief, a real audience, and a real business problem, and ask them to come back with a content approach. Not a sample article. A content approach: who they would target, what belief they would try to shift, what format and channel they would use, and how they would know if it worked. That exercise tells you more about a candidate’s commercial thinking than a portfolio review and a competency interview combined.

The secondary skills that matter, and that are often underweighted, are editorial judgment (the ability to say no to content that does not serve the audience or the strategy), distribution thinking (the ability to get content in front of people who are not already looking for it), and measurement literacy (the ability to read data critically rather than just report it). Forrester’s analysis of go-to-market struggles consistently identifies the gap between strategy and execution as the primary failure point, and content marketing is no exception to that pattern.

The growth hacking literature is worth reading critically here, not because the tactics are always sound, but because it forces content marketers to think about growth mechanisms rather than just content quality. The question is not only “is this good content?” but “how does this content contribute to reaching more of the right people over time?”

What Good Looks Like in Practice

The best content marketing programmes I have seen share a small number of characteristics. They have a clear point of view that is specific to the brand, not a generic position on the category. They produce content that the audience would seek out even if the brand name were removed. They treat distribution as a strategic question, not a publishing afterthought. And they measure what matters to the business, not what is easiest to count.

They also have a content marketer at the centre who is given the authority to push back on briefs that do not meet those standards. That authority is not always comfortable for the organisations that grant it. But it is the thing that separates a content programme that builds commercial value from one that fills a calendar.

The compounding nature of content is real, but it is not automatic. It requires consistent editorial judgment, disciplined distribution, and a measurement framework that is honest about what the content is and is not achieving. When those three things are in place, a content marketer is one of the highest-leverage hires a growth-oriented business can make. When they are not, the role tends to drift toward production and away from strategy, and the business wonders, again, why content is not delivering.

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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