The Building Blocks of Your Marketing Strategy Step 2: Pinpoint Your Key Content Topics
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.
Pinpoint Your Three Key Content Topics
Now that you have determined your SMART goals for what you want to accomplish, it’s time to narrow down what type of content you should focus on.
It’s one of the biggest questions those starting a newsletter or blog, or ramping up their social media content ask: “What do I post about?” This is why part of building your content strategy includes narrowing down three key topics that you’ll center your content around.
Why You Need to Keep Your Content Focused
Think about the brands, businesses, and organizations you follow. Bookshop.org posts all book-related content. The American Library Association posts content on how to support libraries. The Pulitzer Prize posts author-related content, like interviews or book stacks. The Brooklyn Book Festival posts event information and behind-the-scene content. Out of Print features their literary gifts and products.
In other words, each brand, business, or organization posts about what they do, what they know, and what they sell. You wouldn’t — or shouldn’t — see a bookstore’s social media content be half focused on bookstore content and half on what the store manager had for breakfast, a hike they went on, or sharing an article unrelated to books, or (I saw this once) a rant about another business.
Not only should they, as a brand, focus their content on their core competency — their key topics — but you, as a follower, would expect book-related content from a bookstore. Remember our definition of inbound marketing above? If you saw an account on social media consistently posting great book-related content that you were interested in, you’d follow them — and you’d know exactly what you’re getting. This is why certain Bookstagrammers or people posting book recommendations get a large following: all they do is talk about specific books they love, and the audience that loves those books, too, follows them. But if that bookstore, literary organization, book festival, or library posted a variety of different types of book and non-book content, you wouldn’t know who they are or what they stand for, and you likely wouldn’t follow them.
This idea of focusing your content is especially true for authors. Because they’re not a “business,” many authors don’t tend to think about topics that center around their brand or their product. But authors do sell a product: their book. The biggest mistake I see authors making with their content is treating their platforms — newsletter, social media — like their personal accounts. They post about books or their writing, sure. But then they post pictures of their pets, what coffee or tea they drink, pictures from a trip, rants about non-book-related topics, or other things that aren’t related to them as a writer. Personal content is fine every so often, and actually makes you human! But doing it too much will confuse your followers.
If you’re trying to draw an audience around your identity and work as a writer, you need to post about your identity and work as a writer, much in the same way as any business or brand would. Essentially, there’s an element to personal branding here: being consistent in what you post will help people more easily know who you are and what you do or write — and can more easily follow you based on that.
Identifying Your Three Key Content Topics: A Bookstore
If you’re a business, the three key topics that you’ll focus your content around may be easy to pinpoint, starting with your products. For example, your bookstore marketing should focus on showcasing your products first because you want people to come in and buy your books! That’s topic #1. You may also be a big champion of local children’s authors, for example, and not only want to attract more authors to your store for signings, but want to attract more families to your store to purchase those books. That’s topic #2. Maybe you’re also passionate about pushing back against book bans and want to increase awareness around the problem. That can be topic #3.
As you plan your content, you’ll focus on these three topics:
Your bookstore and its products
Showcasing local children’s authors and children’s writing
Raising awareness around book bans
Topic #1 can help raise awareness and drive sales for a general audience. Topic #2 will help you be known for your children’s book selection, increasing your audience of families who will purchase with you. Topic #3 may not directly impact sales, but those who are passionate about pushing back against book bans will see you as a trusted resource for information — and may be more inclined to purchase from you.
Having these topics in place that align with your business goals and mission will not only help you know what content to create, but it will also help your audience more easily identify you as someone to engage with. For example, a parent may engage with your content and be more willing to purchase from you than someone who is an adult sci-fi reader with no kids (who wouldn’t be your target customer anyhow).
It also helps your internal team align on what content to post. For example, if your bookstore focuses on children’s literature, yet your social media manager keeps posting recommendations for adult sci-fi novels, you’ll be projecting the wrong content for your store and may attract the wrong target audience.
Identifying Your Three Key Content Topics: A Literary Non-Profit
For literary non-profit marketing, your three key topics may be easy to pinpoint as well. For example, if you run writing workshops for veterans, your primary focus may be getting the word out about the workshops themselves. That’s topic #1. But simply promoting your workshops won’t increase enrollment unless you’re able to demonstrate how they help and impact veterans, and you can do that through student testimonials and stories — topic #2. Finally, your non-profit likely runs on donations, so topic #3 may be sharing your mission and a call for donations from your followers.
As you plan your non-profit marketing content, you’ll focus on these three topics:
Promoting your workshops
Student testimonials and stories
Mission and donations
Topic #1 can help raise awareness around the workshops you offer and what you organization does. Topic #2 will be what convinces students to enroll if they can see how veterans like them were positively impacted by taking a writing workshop — which will help increase enrollment and engage with donors. Finally, topic #3 will be a direct call to action for donations by sharing the mission and vision of the organization.
By just posting about your workshops without focusing on the veterans’ issue, you may appeal to the wrong audience. By not posting student testimonials and stories, future students won’t see how a writing workshop can benefit and help them. Ultimately, non-profits need to post regular calls for donations, and can do so by regularly sharing their mission and student stories.
Does this mean that this non-profit can’t share content related to veterans’ affairs on their channels? They can, and if they can tie it into a call to action to sign up for a workshop, even better. However, too frequently posting about content not related to writing will quickly dilute what they’re trying to do, and could result in followers who are just following for news and who will never take a workshop.
Identifying Your Three Key Content Topics: A Fiction Author
Your three key topics may be easy to pinpoint if you’re a non-fiction author — they’re likely the topic of your book — but maybe a little bit harder to pinpoint if you’re a fiction author. But if you’ve been researching and writing a novel, you likely have a lot to say about the topics you’ve been working on, too. Focusing on those topics in your author marketing strategy will help your audience understand what your novel is about and be willing to buy it.
Let’s say you write a speculative fiction/cli-fi novel that takes place fifty years in the future where tides are rising, and your protagonist is a lighthouse keeper watching the land slowly disappear around her (I maybe wrote something similar once!). Topic #1 will focus on what your novel is about — the story, the characters, the premise — so that readers can learn what it’s about as well (it’s like a bookstore focusing on its products or a non-profit focusing on its services). Topic #2 could be what you learned in your research on climate change. Topic #3 can be the act of writing itself and the craft elements that went into how you actually wrote and constructed your novel.
As you plan your content, you’ll focus on these three topics:
Sharing what your novel is about
Topics in climate change related to your novel and your research
The process and craft of writing fiction
Another mistake I see with authors posting about their books is not actually sharing what their book is about. They share blurbs or reviews or who said what about it. But readers want to read a novel because the story captures and compels them in some way. When I was a bookseller, I hand-sold books by telling the customer the book’s story. So, first and foremost, share what your novel is about. If you’ve done any research for your novel, you should focus on creating content around that research. In this instance, individuals interested in climate change topics will be drawn to your content, and then may check out your novel because you speak thoughtfully about that topic. Finally, talking about how you created your novel will give a behind-the-scenes glimpse for readers and will also attract writers as potential readers as well.
Creating Your Subtopics
Once you’ve determined your three key topics, you’ll list subtopics beneath those topics that will become the guide for what content you’ll write. First, make sure that your key topics are broad enough to have lots of subtopics underneath them.
Let’s say one of your main topics was how you wrote your novel. Some subtopics could be:
How I plotted my novel (or pantsed it!)
How I chose and developed my setting
An introduction to my main characters
Whose writing influenced me the most
What craft elements were the most challenging for me
What resources I used to help me write my novel (software, a class)
The origin of the idea for the novel
How the novel has changed with drafts and revisions
Goals and hopes for publishing
How I chose the POV for my novel
What we have now are ten subtopics that were pretty easy to generate — and you could probably come up with a lot more subtopics related to your work, too. Yet these are:
10 newsletters
10 blogs
10 Instagram posts
10 Threads posts
10 Facebook posts
10 LinkedIn posts
10 YouTube videos
And you don’t have to (and shouldn’t!) just post once about a topic. Repurpose content you’ve already written, or take a different angle to the topic, for even more pieces of content. Now, once we get to planning out your content calendar, you can very easily take a subtopic, plug it into one of your content channels, and you know exactly what you’re writing about.
How Focusing Your Content Can Make You a Thought Leader
The idea of thought leadership has sprung up recently in the marketing world. As mentioned in the first section, thought leadership is presenting yourself or your business not just as an entity that sells products or services, but as a knowledgeable, trusted authority in the space. One of the “big ideas” around creating content is that you’re not just straight selling someone on a product or service. Remember the marketing funnel above: it doesn’t start with conversion. Instead, content allows you to offer your audience value through education around a problem and solutions on how to solve it. By becoming a trusted guide or advisor, it’s much easier to gain an audience and build their trust in you, and it makes purchasing much easier.
Take the examples above:
For the bookstore: What if you built your bookstore content strategy around talking about children’s authors? You interviewed children’s authors, hosted them for events, and sent out newsletters each week with children’s book recommendations. Soon you’d be known as the booksellers that really get children’s books — increasing your audience and making sales suddenly becomes easier.
For the non-profit: What if you used your platform to share content around how writing workshops help improve the quality of life for veterans? You wrote blog posts and newsletters about the impact of writing on veterans, published anthologies of veteran stories, and shared testimonials and stories on social media. Not only could you increase awareness and enrollment, but as the go-to for this topic, you could create more and more impact.
For the fiction author: What if you used your author platform to write about climate change and how it’s being portrayed in fiction today? You wrote blog posts and newsletters about your research, how you wrote about it, and how other authors are writing about it. You interviewed other cli-fi writers about the topic, and you posted book recommendations for other cli-fi authors. Not only would you attract an audience of cli-fi readers, but you’d build a network of other writers and readers who would recommend your novel to their followers.
In the next step, we’ll look at how to discover your target audience.
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!
