The practice of management has a moment.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, their popularity has grown significantly and has garnered peak interest over the past five years Google Trends. According to Moz, people search for the term around 4,500 times a month. And hundreds of articles have been written on the same topic since October 2020, including articles in the Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Forbes and more.
As your popularity grows, are you managing the day-to-day career practice that aspiring content marketers have to do more of? Not necessarily.
What is the management?
Push the pictures from aside The office‘s Dwight Schrute or mad Men‘s Bob Benson. The‘s not manage that‘s suck – and They are not the same. The management is much more strategic and ideally less nakedly selfish.
In general, the term refers to the purposeful way you develop a relationship and communicate with your manager to make your business easier to perform‘ Goals, your manager‘s goals, the goals of your own role, and your career goals.
There are many approaches here, but best practices are based on some basic principles:
- Learn what success really looks like for you and your boss and work on it together.
- Develop a personalized communication strategy with your manager.
- Clarify your work style and career goals regularly and regularly.
Few content marketers can build sustainable, successful careers without Applying these principles to practice. Management is of crucial importance in every environment – from a start-up with 25 employees to a highly matrixed company with branches in 25 countries.
But too much time to manage may not translate into better projects, better positions, or better pay for content marketers in the long run. in fact, it can mean the opposite.
Why content marketers are risking an administrative trap
When their executives need comprehensive management, content marketers face a trap in both their daily projects and careers. The extra time and energy devoted to practice can limit agility, experimentation, and optimization – three elements that allow content marketers to thrive and reflect the content appetites of online buyers.
Corralling buy-in for buy-in‘Sake blocks the start of a campaign as well as the rest of the work in your queue. It could have taken two hours to propose a new LinkedIn post format to create, publish, and analyze real-time data early on. A slog in the production and distribution of content and a minimal tolerance for risk (when content can be described as risky) essentially nullifies the potential for optimizing your content strategy. Within the digital content role, such administrative traps can impact business goals and disrupt workflows.
And when business results are at risk, so are careers. Imagine a marketing director at a high-growth SMB hiring an experienced content marketer. The new role‘Goals primarily focus on growing organic traffic and supporting lead generation efforts – typical content marketing tasks.
Two candidates from the same industry make up the final round: one has a diverse portfolio of work across a range of channels, experience customizing strategy on the fly to maximize ROI, and strong intuition for what works. The other is familiar with some types of content, has a very good understanding of team dynamics and relationship building, and usually goes with established content marketing practices.
Which candidate would the director trust with these goals?
Both candidates offer advantages, but given the goals, the first seems to have the upper hand, even in a company’s “peacetime”. Digital content is dynamic. Careers that match these attributes have the advantage.
5 signs of an administrative trap
The signs of an administrative trap can be more difficult to spot, especially because of the personal and unique relationships between managers and direct employees.
However, five of these are a clear sign of an administrative trap for content marketers:
- Their collective goals are consistently unclear. With the team Goals are not SMART, vague strategy and fragmented projects are becoming the norm. Together, these can frustrate attempts to develop a program (rather than just a single project), invest in new technology or new channels, and assume new responsibilities.
- Your manager misunderstands content marketing. If executives view content marketing solely as content development (e.g. writing an e-book) or copywriting (e.g. writing a landing page), or overlook the effects of algorithms on distribution, you can contribute more to the team and Expanding your team career will be limited.
- Your ideas routinely require formal pitches. A calculated content risk that fails won’t harm the internet and likely won’t harm your brand. Executives struggling to understand this and who need formal clearance from reasonable experimentation to mitigate this risk will likely need a lot of education (and time) to get around.
- Their unique expertise is regularly ignored. If you consistently and objectively demonstrate your expertise (e.g., share data-driven best practices) but are left out of key decisions on the matter, then there is likely some relationship dynamic or an obstacle that standard administration cannot overcome.
- Data does not play a role in decision making. When leaders reject data or show little interest in understanding its context, personality and politics can be the primary influencing forces, neither of which offers long-term benefits.
Some of these signals might sound harsh, but their impact on your career is tougher.
Choosing trapped content marketers face
The most important question is the hardest to answer: How do you get there? out an administrative trap? Unlike when you started out in your role – when the tactics were seemingly endless and the benefits were easy to imagine – over-management ultimately seems to leave few options.
- Expand your management tactics. As the least risky but time consuming option, the final extension of your administrative effort is to try to verify that you tried and create the change you want. If this doesn’t move the needle then a more explicit request may be in order.
- Ask about your own SMART goals. Making a request for specific goals to make your manager’s job easier and improve your performance can result in the open conversation you’ve been waiting for. And these concrete goals form the touchstone for your project proposals and growth opportunities. However, if showing your cards isn’t doing much, it may be time for a change.
- Find a new team. If managing and explicitly requesting goals and directions doesn’t lead to the projects and growth you need, your company or team may not be right for you in your career.
In the end, the decision likely depends on: Do you want to use your time, talent, and energy in your current role to attract the attention and consideration of new buyers or the attention and consideration of your team leaders? The right role is unlikely to force you to choose.