Promote with Purpose: A Guide to Creating Effective Content Pillars
Uncertain about how to start crafting content for your brand? Search no more— content pillars serve as an excellent resource to assist any brand in creating content that resonates with its audience. A content pillar is a substantive and informative piece of content on a specific topic or theme that can be broken into many derivative sections, pieces, and materials. These can be broken down into several categories, including: brand offerings, educational or value posts, product offerings, company culture, and customer feedback.These pillars can help you create and channel different types of content for your businesses and target your audience through their specific preferred medium.
Benefits of Content Pillars
Content pillars serve as main structures for core content. These pillars serve as the main support structures, providing a framework for creating a variety of related content. Content Pillars can fall under the following Categories:
Promotional: Refers to pieces of content that communicate what your brand and service can offer. This type of marketing campaign can generate brand awareness, leads, and conversions.
Content Ideas: Service Offerings, Product Announcements, Referral Promotions and Giveaways, Email Blast
Educational: Any type of content that aims to bring value to an audience by teaching them something new.
Content Ideas: Tips, How To Tutorials, Informational Blogs, Newsletters
Inspirational: Inspirational media can be defined as that which orients users toward matters beyond themselves that are more important than typical concerns and which prompts in users a need to express related positive thoughts and to display related prosocial behaviors.
Content Ideas: Quotes, Testimonials, Fun Facts, Customer/Staff Features
Entertaining: Any content that aims to amuse or collaborate with an audience.
Content Ideas: Brand relevant memes, Collaborative Video Content , Brand relevant viral content
Content pillars are key themes that a brand wants to focus on and communicate to its audience through its media channels. Using content pillars are great road maps to help establish what content is meaningful and in alignment with your company’s brand and goals. This approach focuses on creating interconnected themes that form the foundation of a comprehensive content strategy.
Click here to start planning your content using our Content Pillar Proposal Guide.
Benefits to Using Content Pillars to Create Content
There are four key benefits to using content pillars as a framework to developing your content.
Strategic Focus: Content Pillars enable a strategic approach to content creation by aligning your messaging with your overall business goals. This focus helps build a more cohesive and purposeful narrative.
Consistency Across Platforms: centering your content around specific pillars, make it easier to maintain consistency across different channels. It ensures that your audience receives a unified message, regardless of where they encounter your brand.
Search Engine Optimization: Search engines favor websites that provide valuable and interconnected content. Content Pillars help improve SEO by creating a cluster of related content, signaling to search engines that your site is an authoritative source on a particular topic.
Audience Connectivity: allow you to dive deep into topics that resonate with your audience. This in-depth exploration not only establishes your expertise but also fosters stronger connections with your audience, as they see you as a valuable source of information.
Implementing Content Pillars:
To implement these pillars, the following steps will help any brand build up their content inventory, and can be integrated in any strategic marketing plan your company may need.
Pillar Identification: consists of identifying the main themes or topics that align with your brand and business objectives. You can establish these by looking at your company's mission statement, services and even surveying key stakeholders to get their thoughts. These pillars should be broad enough to allow for a variety of subtopics but specific enough to maintain relevance.
Create Pillar Folios: Developing a place that can act as a hub or comprehensive guide for each pillar on your brand’s website and social media pages can help link related content and serve as a seamless web of interconnected information for your brand.
Strategic Content Planning: Plan, Plan, Plan! Outline your content calendar and make sure it aligns with your pillars. This ensures a consistent flow of content, and it allows you to explore different aspects of each pillar over time. In the midst of your planning content, don't be afraid to diversify your content options. Research the trends. Use different mediums to create your content such as infographics, interviews, photos etc. This keeps your content fresh and relevant.
Analyze and Adjust: Regularly assess the performance of your content pillars. Using tools that track engagement, traffic and impressions allows you to see the effectiveness of your content and where and when you can improve.
Content Pillars provide a strategic and holistic approach to content marketing, offering a way to organize and amplify your brand messaging. By anchoring your content strategy around these central themes, you can build a robust online presence, establish authority in your industry, and foster meaningful connections with your audience.
Need a starting place? Check out our content pillar proposal & social media check list under our guides page
