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

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 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.

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 a solopreneur, 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 creating content.

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