If you are trying to establish a brand, either to sell a service, a product, or yourself as a content creator, you will soon come to find there is a lot more to it than your chosen field of interest. If you, for example, went to film school and love film editing, you will find that there is more to do what you love than even just putting a film together.
You will need to be a salesman, an editor, a data analyst, and more. Any business needs marketing, and there are various elements to marketing that can be done yourself and others that should be outsourced.
Look into the various roles we have listed to see where your line is drawn. Can you handle these yourself or would you rather defer to an expert?
Website/social media manager
A website is a must-have for any business as a first-impression glance at who, or what, you are.
Today there are plenty of easy ways to create amazing websites and you can find them all in one place, starting from creative themes, fonts, and a friendly website editor that will help you to make your stunning website easily.
However, a lot can go into it. Maintaining a website and making sure it is free of bugs or glitches, creating pages where needed, and the general running of things takes a lot of coding that most of us aren’t experts in.
You can always invest in a developer to make a website for you or sign up for a free website editor to create a professional-looking website easily, usually for free.
In the same vein, if you have a lot of content ready to post on your social media channels, you can either do it yourself, either by waiting until the optimal moment, or use tools on the internet to schedule your posts.
However, if you find the general running of social media, replying to comments and inquiries, creating content, and posting when you need to, tedious or overwhelming, which often people do, you can hire a social media manager to handle all your social media needs.
Data analyst
Marketing doesn’t begin and end with content creation. Unfortunately, it isn’t the case that “if you build it, then they will come”. Even content needs marketing, even though it is a form of marketing.
The other side of digital marketing is the data. Every move your viewers make will be recorded for your analysis. What brought them to you, what kept them on your site, and what actions they took will all be available for you to take action with.
But what action? What are you supposed to do with this data? Well, if trying to understand the data didn’t convince you to outsource to a tool on the internet, this problem will.
You can look at this data and know what channels to your site aren’t getting much traffic, implement changes and tweak any marketing campaign accordingly. Or you can find someone who can put it all simply.
If you don’t like that idea, there are a lot of courses and guides online to give you the basics and details of search engine optimization, keyword research, affiliate marketing, and lots more.
Content editor
The term “content editor” is covering a wide range of roles that you can either take on board or not. It all depends on your skillset and chosen platform. Say you’ve chosen to hit every platform in an attempt to gain as wide an audience as possible, then you will be creating long-form and short-form video content, photos, written content, social media posts, and audio content. There are a lot of roles within each of these categories.
The simplest would be written content, but even that can benefit from a dedicated proofreader to make sure there are no typos or mistakes. Podcasting is in the same sort of category, wherein there is fewer roles, but you should look into audio editing or someone you can trust or pay to edit the material into a cohesive piece of content.
Photography can also be done yourself if you are willing to learn some photography skills and some photoshop skills. Both of these can be outsourced if they need to be, or if you want your content to pop with a certain style. It can be beneficial to stand out from the sea of other influencers posting all the lyrics to Bo Burnham’s White Woman’s Instagram.
Video content, however, depending on how much effort you are willing to put in, and how much you can afford, can take a lot of roles. A lot of YouTubers outsource their editing to freelancers, for example, and it’s said short-form content like TikTok creators can spend just as much time editing due to the number of videos needed to succeed. Depending on the content you are making you can either learn or outsource roles in audio creation, filming, and even directing and writing.
And it goes without saying that all of these means of creating content should come from a passion. If you aren’t passionate about it, find a tool or a person who is. Otherwise, you’re just putting out unprofessional-looking content that will not keep a viewer’s attention.