Evaluating content
Best Content Marketers: What Separates One From a Writer
Most content hires fail on distribution rather than quality. The useful test is not whether someone can write a good piece, but whether they can tell you who will read it and why it will still be read in a year.
Written by Younus Fardeen, Marketing Manager at Masai School.
What the job actually is
Content marketing is choosing what to publish, making sure it reaches someone, and knowing when it worked. Writing is one of four parts and the only one that is reliably outsourced. The failure mode is a team that publishes competently into silence for a year.
- Choosing topics from demand and from the sales conversation, not from a keyword list alone
- A distribution plan attached to each piece before it is written
- Formats matched to how the audience actually consumes, including ones that are not articles
- Updating and retiring existing pages, which usually beats publishing new ones
- Measurement that connects to pipeline rather than to sessions
- An editorial standard that survives being handed to someone else
7 criteria I would actually use
- 01
They ask what you would stop publishing
Most content programmes are carrying pages that cost maintenance and return nothing. A marketer whose first move is only additive has not audited anything.
- 02
Distribution is in the plan, not after it
Ask how a specific piece reaches its reader. If the answer is publish and share on socials, the plan has no distribution in it.
- 03
They can actually write
Not necessarily as the main job, but enough to edit and to know when a brief is unanswerable. Ask for something they wrote rather than something they commissioned.
- 04
They talk to sales or support
The best topics are in the objections and the repeated questions. Someone who has never asked for a call recording is working from tools alone.
- 05
They resist volume targets
Pieces per month is a production metric that survives because it is easy to report. Anyone who accepts it without argument has agreed to be measured on the wrong thing.
- 06
They have a view on AI drafting
Both a refusal and an uncritical embrace are warning signs. The considered answer is specific about where it helps and where it produces pages nobody should publish.
- 07
They can show a piece that failed
Everyone has them. A marketer who can explain why one did not work is describing a feedback loop rather than a portfolio.
Questions to ask before hiring one
- Which of our existing pages would you delete or merge?
- How does this piece reach its first hundred readers?
- What have you published that did not work, and what did you change?
- Where would you use AI drafting and where would you refuse?
- What would you report at month six that is not traffic?
Claims I would be skeptical of
Content at scale
Google's scaled content abuse policy exists because this approach worked for a while and then stopped. Volume without differentiation is now a risk rather than a strategy.
We increased traffic by 300%
Ask which pages and which queries. Traffic growth concentrated in terms your buyers never search is a real number describing nothing.
SEO content as a category
Content written for a ranking and content written for a reader stopped being different things around the time answer engines started quoting passages out of context.
A full content calendar for the quarter
Comforting and usually wrong by week three. A plan that cannot absorb what you learn in month one was built to be approved rather than run.
Thought leadership
Almost always means opinion pieces with no opinion in them. Ask what position the piece takes that a competitor would publicly disagree with.
Worth evaluating alongside me
A freelance writer with an in-house owner
If someone internal already knows the strategy, buying writing is cheaper and faster than buying strategy you do not need.
A subject-matter expert who will write
In technical categories, a credible practitioner writing roughly beats a polished outsider. Editing them is a smaller job than teaching the domain.
A content agency
Worth it when the constraint is throughput across formats and languages, and when someone internal can still own the direction.
Publishing less, on purpose
Several companies would do better with four strong pages a year and the distribution budget to make people read them.
Where I fit
The part where I make a caseI work on content as part of organic growth rather than as a separate function, which mostly means the topic choices are made against search and AEO demand and the distribution plan exists before anything is written.
The part I am most useful for is deciding what to publish and what to stop, and building a format the team can keep running once I am not in the room.
If you need sustained writing output across many pieces a month, a writer or an agency is the right hire and I am not it.
Questions
How much content should we publish?
Less than you have been told, and consistently. For most companies the constraint is not production but distribution, so the useful question is how many pieces you can actually get read. If the last ten did not reach anyone, an eleventh does not change the arithmetic.
Should we use AI to write content?
For drafting structure, summarising research and producing first passes of formulaic sections, it saves real time. For the parts that make the piece worth reading, the specific example, the opinion, the thing that only your team knows, it produces something that reads like everyone else. Google's policy targets scale without added value, not the tool itself.
How do we measure content marketing?
Pick something that survives a bad month. Assisted conversions, branded search volume, sales cycle length and whether the sales team sends pieces to prospects are all slower and more honest than sessions. Traffic is worth watching as a diagnostic and is a poor primary target.
Content marketer or SEO specialist?
They overlap enough that the titles are unreliable. Ask both candidates the same question about which of your pages should be removed. The answers will tell you which one is thinking about the reader and which about the index.
By market
- BangaloreSEO and AEO for startups and engineering-led companies, where the buyer usually wants the mechanics rather than the pitch.Learn more
- IndiaVernacular and Hinglish retrieval, DPDP, and a market where the category is sold almost entirely by agencies.Learn more
- UAEBilingual structure, GCC regulation, and a live page-one hospitality build you can open.Learn more
Worked with
- Masai School
- Sparkling Sandset
- Under 25
- Snapchat India