The Building Blocks of Your Marketing Strategy Step 6: Pick Your Formats

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.

Pick Your Formats

We’re getting closer to actually creating content, but we’re not there yet! Now is the time to evaluate what content format you’re most comfortable working with: text, graphics, video, or a combination. There are a lot of people (like me!) who enjoy the creativity of having graphics or images in their content. There are plenty of people who do not want to be on camera. Here are a few things to know about each:

Text: If you’re really comfortable with writing (hello writers!) you may decide to prioritize more text-based content, like a newsletter or more text-based social media like Threads. You can certainly do that. Just be aware that writing newsletters and writing online require some different skills from writing a novel. For these, you’ll be doing more content or copywriting — and we’ll go over that in the next section.

Images and Graphics: Most social media platforms like Instagram prioritize images and graphics, and posts that include an image get more engagement than those that don’t. Posting a photo from your camera is pretty easy, yet one of the trends on social media today is posting graphics. Fortunately, you don’t have to be an experienced graphic designer to create these posts, as there are various tools out there that make creating graphics easy — like Canva.

Video: Some people are comfortable creating video and some people are not — and if you’re not comfortable being on camera, you don’t have to! Fortunately, today’s video trends don’t require speakers or videos to be polished with a high production value. Video creation tools are easier than ever today as well. Simply shoot a video and many social media apps or third-party apps will help you easily cut it together, add music and effects, and make sure it’s engaging in just a few steps.

In the next step, we’ll look at how to gather your resources.

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!