The Five Ws of a Content Marketing Strategy
Your content marketing actually doesn’t begin with creating content. Instead, it starts with planning out a strategy so that you have a roadmap to show you where to go before you start on your journey.
A content strategy is your plan for how you’ll effectively achieve your marketing goals. The key elements of a content strategy map to the five Ws, as seen below:
What content you’re creating
Your strategy will guide you in what content you’re creating, from the type to the topic to the format.
Are you creating a behind-the-scenes video at your bookstore?
Are you posting a photo announcing the cover release of your upcoming book?
Are you writing a newsletter with craft advice for memoirists?
Are you creating a graphic with your mission statement for your literary non-profit?
By determining what you’re posting in advance, you cut down on the stress and franticness of trying to figure out what to post each day. You can also be sure that what you’re creating helps to forward your goals.
Why you’re creating that content
It may be easy to decide what to create and post, but do you know why you’re creating and posting that particular piece of content? The “why” connects back to your goals and objectives:
You create a behind-the-scenes video at your bookstore to increase audience awareness and engagement.
You post a photo announcing the cover release of your upcoming book to encourage pre-orders, as well as increase awareness about your new book.
You write a newsletter with craft advice for memoirists because it will help you more easily sell your memoir writing class.
You create a graphic with your mission statement for your literary non-profit because you want to increase donations.
Asking the “why” can also help keep you from posting content that doesn’t align with your goals or key topics. If your “why” is “because I want to” or “because it’s fun,” then maybe rethink posting it!
Who you’re creating that content for
A content strategy also helps you understand who you’re creating content for, which is your target audience or ideal reader. Not thinking about your target audience when you create content is the difference between a personal account where you post what you want to post for yourself and a professional account where your posts target the interests and needs of your target audience. Once you know what you’re posting, your ideal audience will essentially self-identify and start following you — like the aforementioned lighthouse when it comes to inbound marketing.
For example, if you’re a horror writer who offers classes on horror writing, you wouldn’t send a weekly newsletter that talks about what restaurants you ate at that week, what new productivity software you’re using, your thoughts on the current political landscape, or what coffee you like. This is an example of not thinking about the target audience: horror writers and readers. Likewise, horror writers and readers won’t follow you because they don’t know who you really are, nor are they getting any value in what you write.
Instead, a newsletter for your target audience could feature tips and advice for how to write horror, horror book recommendations, interviews with horror authors, and other horror-related content. Not only will your target audience follow you and gain value from you, but it will also make selling horror writing courses a breeze when the right audience is paying attention.
Where you’re posting that content
Part of a content strategy is determining where you’ll post your content, or which channels you’ll use to deliver that content to your target audience or ideal reader. This could be your website, social media platforms, a blog, an email newsletter, or other channels. It’s always good to start with two or three channels (two social media sites and a newsletter, for instance) that you can really master — not immediately jump into all platforms where you can share content. By creating a content calendar (which we’ll go over in detail later), you’ll know exactly what content you’re sharing where.
When you're posting that content
Similarly, a content strategy will help you determine when you’re distributing your content to your audience, including what day and what time. The biggest killer of audience engagement is inconsistency, and it’s hard to maintain consistency without a schedule or calendar of when you’re posting.
Notice I left off “how” above — that’s because your entire content strategy is the “how.”
Whether you’re doing book marketing, book festival marketing, or bookstore marketing, how do you come up with the elements of your 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 marketing 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.
In the next post, I’ll start showing you the “how” of building and executing your marketing strategy.
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!
