The Building Blocks of Your Marketing Strategy Step 1: Determine Your Goals

How do you come up with the elements of your content strategy? To figure out your Five Ws, you’ll need to do some work that will include determining your goals, finding your key topics, thinking through your target audience or ideal reader, and more.

Note that building your content strategy does not begin by creating content. In fact, we won’t even get into actually creating content until the next section, because before you do so, you have to know what you’re creating, why you’re creating it, who you’re creating it for, and where and when you’re posting it.

Determine Your Marketing Goals and Make Them SMART

Before you start opening accounts on various social media platforms, launching a newsletter, or creating content, start with your goals. Too often I hear literary people — especially authors — being told they have to get on social media or start a newsletter. And those people are often resistant to it or don’t understand why they have to because nobody connects that action to foundational goals.

So let’s start with your marketing goals, which will guide your entire content strategy. They can be fairly simple, like:

• Building awareness around my new bookstore opening

• Connecting with my audience as I look forward to my book launch

• Increasing donations to my literary non-profit

• Increasing ticket sales for my book festival

• Connecting better to my writing center’s target audience

• Boosting traffic to my online bookstore

• Ranking my literary non-profit higher in Google search

One content strategy won’t work for all of these goals, meaning that you can’t just take a broad-stroke approach to your content and expect results.

Also, notice that each of these goals seems to align with the marketing funnel or customer journey mentioned above. “Building awareness” would be at the top of that funnel, “boosting traffic” would be at the middle, and “increasing donations” or “increasing sales” would be bottom of the funnel. Remember that each of these requires a different type of content: a post about who you are, a newsletter series educating about what you do, or a direct call to action to buy.

Having goals like the above are a great start, but they’re not yet enough to guide a content strategy. You want to build awareness around your new bookstore — how much awareness, and in what way? You want to increase ticket sales to your book festival — how many ticket sales, and how long (or short!) of a timeframe?

SMART Goals

One common acronym that can guide your goal-setting is to create SMART goals:

Specific: Your goal should be specific. Instead of the goal of building awareness around your new bookstore, set a goal of increasing your follower account on Instagram by 100 new followers by a certain date, or signing up 50 new people to your newsletter in the next month.

Measurable: Your goal should be measurable as well. Like in the aforementioned example, “building awareness” isn’t measurable, yet measuring new followers or newsletter sign-ups is. Once you determine what you’re going to measure, then you can make sure to track those measurements as well. For example, if you have a goal to achieve a certain number of followers, you can use your social media analytics tools to track your progress as you post, and use that data to iterate on your content strategy (more about that in an upcoming section!).

Achievable: You also want your goals to be achievable and realistic as well! “I want to sell a million copies of my new book” is likely not achievable. But “I want to sell ten copies of my book this week through my newsletter” likely will be.

Relevant: Having a goal that’s relevant means that it’s meaningful to you at this moment. For example, if you’re an author who just wrote a novel and doesn’t yet have an agent, you don’t want to create goals around a future book launch. Instead, create goals around building an audience with where you are on your publishing journey today.

Time-Bound: Finally, have a date by which you want to achieve your goal. Having a goal of increasing donations to your literary non-profit is one that can happen whenever and however. Instead, set a goal that states: “I want to increase donations to my literary non-profit by $500 over the next two weeks by sending out five email newsletters telling success stories of our work.”

Starting to Map Content to SMART Goals

Part of making these goals SMART can include getting specific on how you’re going to achieve those goals. For example, let’s go back to the previous goals and make them SMART goals along with options for what we can do to achieve those goals:

• Building awareness around my new bookstore opening by increasing my new followers on Instagram by 100 in the next two weeks, which we’ll do by posting behind-the-scenes posts and videos so they can get to know who we are and what we do.

• Connecting with my audience as I look forward to my book launch by adding 50 new subscribers to my newsletter in the next month, which I’ll do by pointing my followers on social media to a sign-up link in my bio.

• Increasing donations to my literary non-profit by $500 over the next two weeks by sending out five email newsletters telling success stories of our work.

• Increasing ticket sales to my book festival by 50 new tickets sold in the next two weeks by partnering with authors and organizations to boost content to new audiences on social media.

• Connecting better to my writer center’s target audience by revamping my hashtag strategy on all social media over the next two months to ensure we’re getting content in front of the right audience.

• Boosting traffic to my online bookstore, with a goal to achieve 50 new website visitors a day within four weeks, which I’ll do by increasing the number of calls to action in my content that will push people to visit the website.

• Ranking my literary non-profit higher in Google search by creating one Search Engine Optimized (SEO) blog post once a week for the next six weeks.

Now we’re getting somewhere! Even by doing this simple exercise of determining your goals and making them SMART, you likely have a much better vision of what you want to accomplish and how you’re going to get there.

In the next step, we’ll look at planning out your key content topics.

Hi! I’m Jessica, and I help literary businesses, organizations, and authors build and execute their marketing strategies. If you'd like to learn how to do this 👆, come work with me!