The Building Blocks of Your Marketing Strategy Step 7: Gather Your Resources

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.

Gather Your Resources

You can have the best marketing plan in the world, but it’s not worth much if you don’t have the ability to execute it. As you prepare to launch or ramp up your content, here are some resources you need to consider:

Time: The biggest resource you’ll need is time to create, post, and distribute your content. The good news is that with a well-thought-through content strategy, you’ll cut down on the time needed because you’ll know exactly what you need to create and post. Once you spend the initial time creating your strategy and plan, you’ll either need to budget a bit of time each day to create content or spend a chunk of time each week creating content all the content for that week.

People: Who will be creating this content and executing your strategy? If you’re an author, it’s likely you. If you’re a business or non-profit, you’ll likely designate someone to do it or hire someone to do it. There are plenty of freelance social media or content marketing managers or creators out there that you can get to help you. My advice? Since your content strategy is so tightly connected to your business strategy and requires more thought than just “making TikTok videos,” don’t give your content to an intern or the youngest person on staff.

Budget: While this guide mostly focuses on free or organic methods of building an audience, there are still some expenses that come into play, like website fees or subscription fees for tools. If you’re a business, you’ll need to consider the budget for either hiring a marketing manager or if current members of your team will spend time working on marketing.

Tools: Finally, you’ll need tools to help you create content and execute your strategy — not many, but some, like the aforementioned website-building platforms, your social media platforms, and your newsletter platform. Other tools may include Canva or another similar tool to create graphics, Excel or Word for planning and writing, or even project management software to keep everything organized. Equipment can minimally be a computer and smartphone, but you may decide to invest in a better camera or microphone, especially if you go the podcast route.

We’ve come so far already in creating your content strategy, yet we haven’t even created any content yet! In the next section, we’ll put all of this preparation to work in executing this strategy and creating content.

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!