What Are Content Pillars And How Will They Help My Marketing?

One of the greatest challenges of marketing is the continuous need to think up new, creative, and relevant content for your social media or website. To make this process a little easier, your business can start creating content that is guided by content pillars.

Content pillars are three to five umbrella topics that your business can regularly create content about. Your business will have multiple content pillars to ensure that you are writing content for each of your identified target audiences. Business Foundations has created a guide on how to create content pillars and how they will help your marketing efforts.

How To Create Your Content Pillars

1. Create A Customer Persona For Each Of Your Different Audiences.

You will have likely already created customer personas in your marketing plan, which can help you pinpoint the challenges, desires, and interests of your different audiences. However, if you have yet to create any customer personas, you will need to create an avatar of who you think your audiences are by filling out the template below.

2. Identify The Content Your Personas Enjoy

Next, you will need to look through your existing content and determine what is working well amongst your audiences and what isn’t getting engagement. This can help you refine what types of content you should be creating for different audiences. For example, if you are a hardware store, perhaps your tradespeople customers prefer videos of tools in action, whereas your DIY-focused customers prefer informative, how-to blog posts.

3. Use This Information To Create A List Of Content Pillars

Now that you know what your customers are interested in and what your customers enjoy, create a list of content pillars that you can centre your content around. This list should be three to five topics that can encompass many different sub-topics that will be interesting to your audience. A simple example is that if you were running a beauty salon, your content pillars may be:

• Nails
  • Subtopics: Nail art, nail care, nail polish.
• Hair
  • Subtopics: Hair styling, hair care, haircuts, hair colours, hair trends.
• Skincare
  • Subtopics: skin treatments, skin care, acne, hair removal, anti-aging.
• Makeup
  • Subtopics: makeup trends, simple makeup, dramatic makeup.

These are different and wide-ranging topics that are relevant to the business, but each audience member is likely to be more interested in some and not others. By focusing on all four rather than just one or two, the beauty salon can ensure they are providing relevant and useful content to their whole audience.

4. Create A Content Calendar

Now that you know what your content pillars are, create a content calendar that can help you keep on top of your content pillars. A content calendar is a term for a calendar that helps you schedule content for weeks ahead and outlines what you are posting, what platforms you will use, and what audience or objective you are trying to reach. You should space your content pillars out equally in your calendar to ensure that no audience is left behind and you are giving them equal attention in your content marketing.

How Content Pillars Can Help Your Marketing

1. They Will Save You Time

Creating content pillars can transform your content strategy into one that is methodical, efficient, and process driven. Rather than making up content as you go along, this can help you create a content calendar that ensures you are covering all your bases.

2. Provide The Right Content For Your Target Audiences

Content pillars can help guide your content so that you are regularly posting about topics that interest each of your target audiences. Following the beauty salon example from earlier, some of their audience may be only interested in nails, and some will only be interested in haircare, therefore it is important for them to post about both equally. By knowing your content pillars and following them well, you will ensure that every piece of content you create is focused directly on a particular target audience.

3. They Will Help You Post Fresh And Creative Content

Content pillars will guide you in the ideas process of content creation and help ensure that there is variety and creativity in your content. By posting about fresh new ideas regularly, you will prevent your business from coming across as trying to sell all the time.

4. They Will Position You As An Expert

By consistently publishing quality content on just a few topics, your business will be informing your customers on what you specialize in and show that you are highly knowledgeable in your field. Being consistent in your content and proving to be an expert in your niche will be instrumental in growing your audience faster.

Content pillars can be an excellent way to ensure that your business is regularly posting new and relevant content to your target audiences. This will help prevent focusing too much on one particular topic and ensure that no target audience is left behind in your content strategy.