Or how about this. You are at a cocktail party and a stranger comes up to you and starts telling you how cool their marketing software company is. A little while later you are having a conversation with another stranger and they tell you that they recently purchased and are loving a different marketing software company. Whose recommendation are you more likely going to check out?

See the theme here? We humans are wired to believe a recommendation about a person or brand from a third party than from a person or brand themselves.

What does this have to do with influencers? Well, you can look at influencers as the third party people who recommend your brand to an audience who trusts their words. After all, it’s tactless and ineffective to tweet about how cool your own brand is, right? But when someone else does it, it’s okay. In fact, it’s the best form of marketing you can get—word of mouth.

You know you need influencers for a successful strategy and you know that Twitter is one of the channels that amplifies an influencers message making Twitter outreach a logical component of your marketing strategy.

Once you get through this guides and its links, you should be a professional at identifying the right influencers for your brand,  locating and engaging with influencers on Twitter and reaching out to them.

Maximize Your Twitter Profile

Before you start reaching out, you need to ensure that you appear seriously and professionally when people read your Twitter profile. Hence, right now is a great time to check in on your own Twitter profile before you do anything else.

• Give your bio a good edit to make sure there are no typos. Put in keywords that explain what you would hope to be found for in a Twitter search.

• Make sure your bio is concise. Tell exactly what your specialty is. But don’t let it be too dry, it’s okay to throw in a fun fact about yourself!

• Don’t bog your profile down with self-promotional links. Honestly, you may just want to link it to either your company or your portfolio.

• Give yourself a legitimate location. While listing your location as “funk town” or “earth” may be funny, I am not sure you’ll be taken seriously.

• When someone is checking you out on Twitter they are going to look to your most recent tweets so make sure you only tweet useful information. A good strategy before you ever hit “tweet” is to think about whether or not someone viewing your profile for the first time would want to follow you based on that tweet.

• Make sure your head shot is professional and of good quality. A blurry headshot screams laziness.

Define the Who

Before you can locate an influencer on Twitter you need to know what they look like. Thus, you need to outline your influencer and give it an image.

First, think about the types of Twitter users your target audience would follow. For example, if I’m promoting a book on parenting toddlers, I’m not going to reach out to Twitter users who actively tweet about raising teens because their audience is there to read their advice and anecdotes about teenagers, not babies.

When you think you’ve got a grasp on what type of person your audience would follow on Twitter then fill out the following three categories so that you can choose influencers who can speak to your ideal audience for you.

• Context: A contextual fit is first and foremost the most important factor when defining who to reach out. For example, if you are looking for influencers to tweet about your marketing automation software, you wouldn’t reach out to someone who tweets about fashion all of the time. Even if their bio says marketer. Because their audience is clearly there to read about fashion so you’ll need to refrain—no matter how many followers they have!

• Reach: Reach determines how far your influencer’s tweeted words carry. You may want to set a minimum number of followers that your ideal twitter influencer has before putting them on your target or reach outreach list.

• Influencer type:  When you read a tweeter’s bio, you should get a feel for their personality type. Maybe you are working on a nonprofit campaign and need an activist, or maybe you are advertising a fashion garment and need a trendsetter or perhaps you are enlisting a campaign for a technical piece of software and you need an authority on your niche.

Once you have outlined who your ideal Twitter influencer is, it’s time to locate them.

Tools to Help Your Twitter Searching

Searching for the ideal influencers manually using Twitter’s search function is not very helpful. Because of this there is an exhaustive amount of tools available to aid in your Twitter scouting. Here are some of the more popular ones.

Follower Wonk is probably the most popular. This tool allows you to search for influencers by keywords in their Twitter bios. You can even find Twitter influencers by location if your campaign involved your influencers going to a specific place like a restaurant to review or trade show to tweet about.

Social Bro is getting a lot of buzz and good reviews lately. Among many organization features, it will allow you to search for influencers based on whatever criteria you see fit.

Twellow is a free tool that allows you to search for influencers based on keywords they have in their Twitter bios and will return results with follower metrics for people in categories that you search for.

Commun.it helps you find influencers, cultivate relationships and manage your Twitter outreach. It has a basic free plan and you can upgrade to a more premium plan if you see fit.

Following hashtags will reveal influencers in a targeted genre or niche. If you are looking for influencers who actively twee about fashion then you would follow fashion related hash tags to identify who is talking loudly about fashion.

Use Fakers to ensure genuine followers. The world of social media is transforming communication and marketing in many good ways. But with any good thing there come negativities. We already know that some “influencers” have fake followers so using Fakers can help you run them through the filter of “sincerity.”

Staying Organized

Keeping your outreach campaign organized from the very beginning will provide a strong backbone that will strengthen every step of your campaign. Organization in Twitter outreach primarily revolves around nurturing and maintaining your relationships with your target influencers.

Here are some tools to help keep your organization intact.

Use Twitter Lists, a list that you can put any Twitter user in to, to monitor your relationships with influencers. You can view tweets by list which will allow you to more closely monitor your targets and interact with them.

HootSuite is free if you are only managing one account but upgrading isn’t terribly expensive.  HootSuite allows you to stay organized, follow hashtags, schedule tweets, track who is mentioning your brand and more.

Buffer helps you manage your Twitter account and allows you to schedule your tweets. Their free plan is awesome.

Unique Tweets to Grab Attention

Active engagement on Twitter with your targeted influencers will lead to awareness of your brand’s presence which leads to a much better response rate when you reach out. Reaching out to gain a relationship through a single tweet can seem a bit abrasive; sometimes you need to be creative in your tweets to grab your targeted influencers’ attention.  Here are some creative ways to do so:

• Incorporate a tweet or link to a blog post of theirs (if they have a blog) in your own blog post. You can then tweet at them that you recommended their words in your post and include the link of course! This strokes their ego and puts you on their radar.

• Instead of simply retweeting their posts, write your own shout out and tweet their posts with their Twitter handle so that they see it.

• Respond to the posts they tweet with a question that sparks a discussion. This has proven to be one of the most effective ways to get an influencer to engage with you.

• If you are following certain hash tags, you know some influencers in your space are following those hash tags as well. By tweeting often—but not obnoxiously—using these hash tags will be sure to at least make your influencers aware of your existence.

• Be bold and tweet at your targeted influencer a simple introduction or invitation to collaborate.

Don’t Overlook Advocacy

It’s been established that tuning in through your Twitter tool of choice can help you find influencers. Organization and Twitter monitoring can help you get to know your influencers. Creative tweets can help you grab their attention. But one thing that too often gets overlooked is brand advocates aka influencers that are already in place!

By following mentions of your brand, you have probably already seen people tweeting about how much they love your brand. Reward or at least acknowledge these mentions in order to keep them coming. You can do this by tweeting a sincere thank you to sending them a product from you company to offering a commission for those mega advocates.

Advocates are often your loudest influencers because they have aligned themselves with your brand organically. They also are obvious in their passion for your brand which shows in their mentions and makes their own network want to look in to your brand to see what all the fuss is about.

Reaching Out

After you’ve engaged with and stroked the egos of your targeted influencers, it’s time to reach out and be transparent about your goal. If, through your tracking of your targeted influencers, they’ve posted links to their personal blogs or have a link in their Twitter bio, check out the blog and see if you can find their email address. You need more than 140 characters to appropriately reach out. Because any “pitch” or “post engagement contact” should contain the following:

• Find the person’s first name and address them by it
• Get to the point and state why you are reaching out
• Don’t ask them to just do something for you, offer something to them as well
• Reference a tweet or post that says why the two of you are a good fit to work together

If you can’t locate an email address, tweet your request. Keep it friendly and to the point. Here are some examples:

• Hey @twitter_user, I think we should collaborate, what do you think?
• @twitter_user, I love your stuff, can we talk about working together?
• @twitter_user how does one perfect fit such as myself go about working with you?

Stay Informed

You’ve already grasped by now how quickly social media and marketing trends change. Here are some resources to keep you informed as well as to stay in the loop concerning Twitter outreach.

In the event that you are new to Twitter and need help setting up your account and grasping the basics before reaching out, check out this guide on Kissmetrics blog.

Social Media Explorer, a resourceful blog will keep you up to date on all the tips, best practices and tools when it comes to all things social media.

Social Media Examiner is a great blog to follow for any marketer who wants to increase their company’s sales and improve their brands image with the help of social media.

Sprout Insights has some great tips on Twitter.

Check out this guide from HubSpot on best practices when using Twitter hashtags.

Do you have any resources, tips or tricks to share on Twitter outreach? If so, let’s get a discussion going in the comments below!

We are very excited to be attending the upcoming startup conference in Bangalore, India, called UnPluggd on 8^th June, 2013. It’s the biggest of its kind and will have some of India’s best entrepreneurs participating and sharing with others their own startup journeys. There’ll be a wealth of information to be exchanged here and many new contacts to be made.

We are hoping to have a great time at the event and meet like-minded people.

If you want to fix an in-person meeting with us, contact us now.

Well, the wait is finally over.

Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, announced last night (May 22, 2013) on his personal blog that Penguin 2.0 has been rolled out. He also mentioned that about 2.3% of English-US queries have been affected and they have completed rolling out the update for International queries as well.

Penguin 2.0 was supposed to be the biggest update Google has ever rolled out, so we are looking forward to see the changes introduced in this update. We will keep posting here about this update as soon as we find something to be shared. In the meantime, you can read our recent post on 8 Pro Tips to Dodge Penguin 2.0 Penalization based on our experience and research.

There have been a total of four updates that Google has rolled out regarding Penguin. They are:

• Penguin 1 – April 24, 2012 (impacting ~3.1% of queries)

• Penguin 2 – May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)

• Penguin 3 – October 5, 2012 (impacting ~0.3% of queries)

• Penguin 4 – May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)

Let us know in the comments below what changes you see after this latest and biggest update from Google. We will do our best to help you out in any way we can.

He also announced that they are in the early stages of working on a more sophisticated, data-based link analysis algorithm, which may do for links what Panda did for content. That one’s still in its early days, but it’s also worth keeping in mind.

While there have been several incremental Penguin updates since it was first introduced, we are being told that this one is more like a major overhaul.

If you aren’t prepared yet, you better get moving. This could get ugly.

If you aren’t designing your site (and more importantly, your link profile) with users as the primary target, expect to be penalized. If this update isn’t the final straw, there’s always another one coming down the pipe. If you are building a site for the search engines first, you will inevitably generate artificial signals. There’s no way around it. A site designed for search engines is designed to leave signals.

These should come before you even start thinking about the search engines:

• Choose a domain based on branding, not keywords. If you already chose a keyword-driven domain name, it’s time to switch. Not just because of coming Google updates. You need a brand name that sticks, that people remember long enough to tell their friends about it. If a redirect is going to cripple your company, your company is going to get crippled anyway. You need to start thinking about ways to stand out.

• Design with an appealing UI and an enhanced UX. If a site doesn’t look professional, nobody’s going to take it seriously. If the interface doesn’t create an enjoyable, memorable experience, don’t expect growth or customer retention, and don’t expect the search engines to take you seriously in the long term.

• Keep the page load time low. A long page load time makes users bounce, and if users pogo-stick back to the SERP and look for a better search result, expect your rankings to drop. Users and search engines alike have no reason to trust a site that doesn’t spring a few extra bucks for swift hosting, or design with slower connections in mind.

• Focus on content with a unique selling proposition of its own. The fact that content isn’t plagiarized doesn’t mean that it’s actually unique. Focus on defining a unique need and build your content around that need. Anything else is a waste of space. Users have no time for redundant content.

• Internal links should be navigational or focus on a call to action. We all know exact match anchor text is a bad idea when it comes to external links, but this still gets abused very often with internal links. Always link with the user in mind first.

• Don’t abuse the title tags, meta descriptions, alt tags, or content by flooding them with keywords. Identify your keywords and use them where it makes sense, but don’t waste your time trying to force them into every tag. In our experience, the only keyword placement that really matters is the title tag, and if it looks even a bit odd the placement can actually work against you, even if it’s only in click-through rate. Viral titles with no keyword placement can have just as much SEO value as strategically chosen keyword titles. A mix of both kinds of titles is best.

This is the big one, since Penguin’s top target is link spam. And this is where we take a stance that can make a lot of SEO professionals mad, by reminding them of Google’s actual stance on what counts as a link scheme:

Any links intended to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme.

In other words, Google doesn’t want you to rank on links that you forcefully built: period. No ifs, ands, or buts. If you built the link yourself to manipulate SERPs, expect an algorithmic update at some point in the future to effectively no-follow it. That is Google’s stated goal when it comes to link manipulation. Pretending otherwise is naïve and even dangerous.

We went into more depth on unnatural links over at SEJ when we talked about recovery from the unnatural links penalty.

Many self-proclaimed “white hats” point and laugh at “black hats” who get burned for building spam links, when in fact their entire link profile is built on guest posts and other self-placed links. There are no “hats,” there’s just Google’s algorithm and Google’s webmaster guidelines. And if you are building links strictly to improve rankings, you are breaking the webmaster guidelines. This may sound harsh, but we all need a harsh dose of reality every once in a while.

There is a simple mantra to approach this problem that I’ve mentioned over and over. “Would I build this link if it were no-follow?” That’s all it takes. Ask that simple question before you place any link. If you’re not doing it, you need to start. Start now, because you need the referral traffic, and you need the assurance that your link will always be valid. Tape the mantra to your monitor.

We also admire what Cyrus Shepard has had to say on the subject. The type of link doesn’t really matter so much as your approach. The less control you have over the link, the more natural it is. Always vary your strategy and perform experiments to keep things natural, and to discover new tactics. There is so much more to link earning than placing links.

The first Penguin update hit anchor text hard, and we can expect it to take a second hit this time around. Now that exact match anchor text is pretty much out of date already, I suspect that partial match anchor text is next. It’s not that partial match anchor text will always count against you (that’s not even true for exact match). It’s that the ratios are going to hurt you. We think the following set of ratios is close to ideal:

• 60% brand, URL, and other non-keyword links
• 30% partial match links
• 10% exact match links

However, putting too much emphasis on the ratios is missing the point. If you’re spending too much time thinking about whether or not your link profile looks natural, it’s probably not natural, and that’s the real problem.

When you place a link yourself, I’m of the opinion that you should optimize for click-through, and that should be your main thought when you choose anchor text. Think in terms of the call to action and the context. Why place a link if it’s not going to send referral traffic? You know the answer to that question, and the implications.

Optimizing for clicks is a whole different ball game. You have to think like a PPC marketer, but without the split tests, and with a lot more context. The best way to approach this? Find out which internal links on your own site are getting the best click-through rate. Anchor text plays a big part in it, though context and location make a big difference too.

Throw these tactics under the bus and then set them on fire:

• Web directories that people don’t use
• Article directories and content farms
• Social bookmarking for any reason but traffic
• Forum and blog comments for any reasons but traffic or relationship building
• Web 2.0 platforms (HubPages etc.)

Some of these resources can still be useful as ways to grow referral traffic, develop authority, and build relationships, but none of them are useful as places to build links for search engine rankings. I absolutely believe that you should get involved in forums and blog comments, and social bookmarking at places like Reddit (approached carefully) can present an opportunity to go viral. But if you are actually trying to use links from comments and social bookmarks to boost your rankings, prepare to face unpleasant consequences.

I don’t feel that content farms or article directories have much use in any context. I won’t go so far as saying that it’s impossible to earn traffic or relationships from places like these, but there are other places on the web that get the job done more effectively.

There are still some web directories that people actually use, but they are very rare. Directories of any kind should make up a very small part of your strategy.

Most of your link earning efforts should go into producing linkable assets. The definition of “linkable asset” is vague, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Linkable assets are experimental tools, communities, interactions, and content that takes creativity and time to produce.

A quick case study. To kick off 2013, we published an infographic about all the Google algo updates in 2012. It has since earned close to 200 natural backlinks, which you can see in OpenSiteExplorer. This was not the most ambitious project we could have put together, nor can we really argue that it went Viral with a capital V. It’s just proof that if you have something worth promoting, traffic naturally turns into links, and consequently more traffic.

The first Penguin update took down link networks aggressively. We saw loads of webmasters wandering around in confusion, believing that link networks and content farms were how you were supposed to do SEO. We can expect similar actions with the revamped update.

I have little doubt that Google is going to expand the definition of “link network.” As we’ve mentioned, any link that you built yourself to manipulate SERPs can in fact be considered part of a link scheme according to Google’s guidelines. Anything that fits that description is fair game. I’d be very surprised if the new Penguin update successfully made all such links irrelevant, but I won’t be surprised in the slightest if some of the sites intentionally targeted by the new update won’t be what we historically consider link networks.

In particular, I have a sneaking suspicion that many so called “guest posts” are going to take a hit. What Google considers “black hat” or “spam” doesn’t have to match your definition. I still believe guest posts can be an incredible way to attract attention and secondary natural links, but if you’re doing it for the link alone I believe you’re doing it for the wrong reasons.

Link networks and snake oil salesman will only hurt you in the long run.

If you’re buying links to manipulate rankings, I don’t envy what’s likely to happen to you after the update. It’s almost always easy to spot a paid link, and if it looks completely natural, all you did was spend money on a link you could have earned naturally (for free).

But if you aren’t buying no-follow links, you might want to consider it.

For starters, any natural link profile has a pretty decent helping of no-follow links. More importantly, no-follow links can be one of the best ways to build cumulative referral traffic. Referrals are underrated, and the only source of new leads if you do get hit by Penguin 2.0.

Referral traffic gets a bad rap, in large part because most people only see temporary bursts of it. This is because they place all the emphasis on viral content, blogs, and social networks, three things that rely extensively on freshness. But referral traffic from certain sources can last for a very long time. In particular, resources tend to get visited over and over. A listing in a resource is likely to bring referral traffic for the long haul.

When you focus on these kinds of links, you can grow your baseline referral traffic in addition to bringing in traffic bursts.

Of course, it’s very difficult to build do-follow links from resources that actually get used or to earn them naturally. That’s why I recommend buying no-follow links from resources, or site-wide links from heavily visited sites. This can be a great way to diversify your traffic streams.

As an aside, we also mentioned that simply pummeling your site with traffic can be a way to build natural links when we discussed 7 unusual link building tactics for ecommerce. Buying no-follow links can be a great way to pull this off, if executed properly.

Many SEOs think about content marketing strictly as a way to build links. The really great ones think about it as a way to drive referral traffic and secondary links. But the hardcore content marketers go deeper, using content to boost overall brand impressions.

While the Penguin update is designed to target link spam, this is by no means divorced from content. The content on a site has a lot to do with whether or not links from it are considered spam. Without a sound content strategy, you can’t build or attract links that survive search engine updates.

Producing content with impressions in mind is a game changer. Research suggests that 99 percent of Facebook-attributed sales come from brand impressions, not clicks. There’s reason to suspect bias here, but the implications are clear. As traditional advertisers have long known, brand impressions can have a dramatic influence on sales. Users don’t necessarily need to click on anything to be persuaded to make purchases later on.

This should dramatically influence the way you think about outreach, guest posts, and online collaboration. It means that you don’t always need a link in order to dramatically influence your exposure. A guest post isn’t just a platform for links and referral traffic. It’s a place to get seen in the first place.

Why do we as SEOs want websites to rank? So that we will get massive traffic that we can turn into leads. Think about it. When you collaborate with a high traffic blogger, you get to borrow that massive traffic on their platform. It’s a shortcut to the end goal.

Don’t get me wrong. In the end you always want to have an online home you can call your own. Just keep in mind that brand impressions on somebody else’s site are almost as useful as brand impressions on your own site. Take advantage of that situation, and use the opportunity to build trust and customer retention.

See our ultimate guide to content marketing for more on this.

Social networks and spam do not mix well. If your website is too divorced from the social space on the link graph, there’s a much higher chance you have a low quality site. When Penguin 2.0 inspects your site, no social presence could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Social alone isn’t going to decide the fate of your site, but it could push you above or below Google’s tolerance thresholds.

Mastering social media also gives you recourse if your site does take a hit from the update. It gives you influence and reach that lets you retain your customers, grow your base, and perhaps even persuade the search engines that they made a mistake.

As you are no doubt aware, a presence on Google+ can also have important implications for SEO. At the very least, it gives you a face photo in the search results, which makes your result stand out. Many speculate that authorship will also become a ranking factor. Sites too distant from the author graph will more likely be considered low quality. Google has access to user activity, and can, in theory, tell the difference between genuine profiles and fakes.

The key components to mastery of social are:

• Timing your posts to match the pace of the network
• Cultivating influential relationships
• Sharing amusing, helpful, surprising, interesting content (not always your own)
• Asking and answering questions
• Making it about your audience, not yourself

Do this consistently and you will start to grow your returning customer base so that you can survive any search engine update. Leverage your influential relationships to attract links, trust, and attention as your business continues to grow.

Conclusion

Are you prepared for Penguin 2.0? I’d love to hear your thoughts about what I shared above and any comments you may have about what Google might come out with as part of Penguin 2.0.

You can upvote this post on Inbound.org

So, let’s get started. Who should be on your team?

Content Strategist

The content strategist is thinking big picture. They are the one who decides where resources should be shifted, which parts of the content development process could use more or less attention, whether to place more emphasis on the content itself or its promotion, and so on. A content strategist should have the mind of a CEO: they should be a content generalist with strong management skills and good business sense.

A content strategist should understand how to delegate. The last thing any content marketing team needs is somebody to micromanage all the minutia of the process. A content marketing team that needs every idea to be approved by the content strategist is a content marketing team that won’t get anything done.

The strategist needs access to data on the performance of various strategies, and should check in on each team periodically (but not constantly). Strategists should be data-driven, but should understand the benefits of techniques and skills that can’t be easily measured.

Strategists should borrow from modern, free-form management techniques like Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and Lean. These management techniques are best suited to the innovative nature of content marketing, as opposed to more traditional methods best suited to assembly line work.

The Niche Expert

If there’s one piece of the puzzle that’s missing too often, this is it. Content marketers are experts in social media, writing, and relationship building, but rarely are they also experts in the subject at hand. When you’re working with clients, you need somebody on your team who knows everything there is to know about the topic and its target audience.

The purpose of the niche expert can shift depending on your approach. The niche expert may just be there to review your content and ensure its accuracy. They may be a source of ideas, and they may also be a content creator themselves. Their level of involvement is going to depend on whether they work for you or the client, their other duties, and their content skills.

The niche expert can be one of your client’s employees, but they don’t necessarily have to be. Certainly, your client should be a part of the process, but asking for them to be the niche expert for your team could be too demanding.

One of the most neglected strategies here is the hiring of outside talent. Why not hire a blogger who is already operating in the niche? Blogging for blogging’s sake is rarely an exceptionally profitable venture, and you can hire a relatively “famous” blogger in your niche without spending a huge amount of money. If that’s outside your budget, consider hiring “famous” bloggers for one-off posts. It’s worth the attention you get in return.

Remember, content marketing is about establishing the brand as an authority. If you don’t have a niche expert, the odds of this happening aren’t too great.

Research Team

Your research team does two things: research the topic and research the marketplace.

The amount and type of research necessary is going to depend on your niche expert’s involvement. Clearly, the more involved your niche expert, the less time your research team will need to spend on the topic. (In fact, if the niche expert has the time, they should probably be a part of the research team.)

In a broader sense, the purpose of the research team is to identify gaps in the marketplace, brainstorm ideas to fill those gaps, and collect the information that will help content producers fill that gap most effectively.

This is clearly a complex job, and it should rarely be the job of a single person.

Why put topic research and market research together in the same team? When it comes to content production, the two tasks are so closely related that they shouldn’t be kept separate. Topic research can spur content ideas that can be checked against market research. Market research leads to ideas that topic researchers can identify as feasible or not. It’s difficult to identify holes in the marketplace without knowing a great deal about the subject, and its hard to research the topic effectively without understanding the target audience.

The end product of the research team is a content idea complete with a list of supplemental materials for the content producers to look at. Researchers should focus too much on the structure of the final product, but they should have a decent enough understanding of it to provide the developers with only the research materials and standout facts that they need.

Content Producers

The content producers are the writers, graphic designers, photographers, filmographers, podcasters, and more, that actually take the ideas and transform them into reality. It’s inevitable that content producers will need to do some research of their own while working on the project, but most of the research should be provided to them beforehand for maximal efficiency.

Content producers should have a proven track record of high quality content. Ideally, they should have accumulated an online audience of their own even before hiring. Content developers need not have any formal training to meet the needs of the job, but it can help. Journalism students are often the best candidates because they have been trained in fact checking and storytelling.

Don’t bother hiring “marketers.” Content developers need not have any experience with formal marketing, they just need to be skilled at attracting attention online. The market research and data analysis are being done by other experts. I’d go as far as saying that marketing experience can be counterproductive for the actual content developers. Designers, artists, and writers should be focusing on their craft, not on selling.

Again, priority number one is finding somebody who has already attracted attention online with their craft. “Experience” comes second.

There is a reason that you surround these people by marketing experts.

While content ideas are in large part the responsibility of the research team, content creators shouldn’t be kept out of this process. Creatives tend to work best when they are working on subjects that they chose for themselves, so they should have influence on the research process, and their ideas should be considered fairly by the research team.

Editorial Team

The editorial team can be thought of as quality control for content marketers.

Editors don’t just fact check or evaluate style, they also pick and choose topics and have some influence on the direction of strategy. Quality should always come before quantity, and its the editor’s job to choose what deserves to stay and what ought to be tossed out.

Don’t fall into the trap of believing that more is always better. Just because work went into researching an idea or turning it into content, this doesn’t mean it needs to be published. This may feel like wasted resources, but defunct ideas are a part of the creative process. Trying to execute on every idea that sounds okay only results in a dilution of quality.

Many psychological studies have verified that our impressions are based on averages. Show us a single high quality article and we’ll assume the associated brand is high quality. Show us that same high quality article as well as a few low quality ones, and we’ll assume the associated brand is lower in quality.

Editors themselves can also be a source of great ideas, so don’t keep them out of the creative process either.

It doesn’t always make sense to have a separate editorial team. Sometimes it makes more sense to incorporate editorial with content production. Most great editors are also great content creators.

It’s more important to have an editorial process in place than it is to have an actual editorial team. Content should be reviewed by somebody other than it’s original creator before it gets published. This helps creatives improve their skills and improves the quality of the end product.

Outreach Specialists and Promoters

Great content isn’t just well researched and built by artists who know their craft: it’s also built on a foundation of solid relationships Some of the best pieces of content are the result of collaboration. Furthermore, influential relationships are a key part of your promotional strategy. Great content that doesn’t get seen never has an opportunity to expand your reach.

Like content creators, formal training isn’t necessarily a big part of what makes an outreach specialist successful. A good outreach specialist simply loves talking to people online. They probably have a large number of friends on Facebook, and they are likely quite active on internet forums and other online communication hubs.

Some experience with cold calling, customer service, and sales can also be helpful, but only to a point. Outreach doesn’t have to be about the skill of convincing somebody to take an action right away. Outreach experts can be expected to give and give before they receive, and this is okay, because influential relationships are far more beneficial than the content equivalent of a “one night stand.”

Outreach specialists can be a great source of content ideas, since they spend most of their time interacting with influencers. Over time, they develop an intuitive sense for what influencers respond most positively to, and they develop a feel for what content they can “sell” to their contacts.

Outreach experts play an important part in:

• Social media growth and activity
• Guest posting
• Email marketing and relationship building
• Search engine optimization
• Q&A site activity

Rather than dividing outreach professionals up by their medium, they should be divided up by their tasks or goals. The last thing we want is for an outreach professional to pass a contact off to another representative just because of a change in medium. Here are a few tasks or goals that outreach professionals might specialize in:

• Building solid relationships with influencers
• Casual conversations with everyday consumers
• Answering questions on Q&A sites and forums
• Sharing bite size pieces of content (not necessarily from your own brand) on social networks
• Orchestrating social media events like contests, polls, etc.
• Responding to comments
• Seeking guest posting opportunities
• Asking for links or social shares

As you can see, the skill sets for each of these tasks can be quite different, even though there is certainly some overlap here. You’ll need to consider exactly what your goal is with every new outreach expert that you hire, and look for the most fitting skill set.

For example, somebody with a large following on Twitter is probably best suited for sharing bite size pieces of information, while somebody with a large number of Facebook friends is probably better for casual conversations, and somebody who spends a lot of time on forums is probably best at answering questions.

Conclusion

While we’ve gone into detail about all the different kinds of professionals you’ll want to work with as you build a content marketing team, it’s important to recognize that content marketing is a very fluid process. Job titles should flow into each other, and rarely should any professional be limited to something very specific. Virtually all of the professionals here can bring something helpful to the table as far as idea generation. The more interaction, the better.