Kaitlin Simpson

Content Marketing is important because it educates and informs your audience. Educated buyers reduce sales cycle times and increase average order values. If you’re serious about growing organic traffic to your site and becoming a thought leader and authority in your space, content marketing is a must. Put yourself into the buyer’s frame of mind because you, yourself, are a buyer too. When you want to make a decision, you look to the Internet to search for answers to your questions, to become educated on options and the variety of choices. But, have you ever struggled to come up with a new social media post idea for your brand? I completely understand, but building Content Pillars can help ease that process.

What is a Content Pillar?

Content pillars are the core themes or topics that form the foundation of a brand’s social media strategy. They represent the main areas of focus that align with a brand’s values, expertise, and target audience’s interests. These pillars act as a guide, ensuring that all content created is relevant, valuable, and consistent.

Varying Theories Around Content Pillars:

• The Hub and Spoke Model: This theory suggests creating a central hub of content that represents the brand’s core value proposition. The hub content is supported by various spokes of related content, which branch out from the central theme. This approach encourages businesses to create a mix of cornerstone content and supporting content, creating a comprehensive and well-rounded social media presence.
  • Example: Your hub would be a book you wrote, and your spokes would be infographics, interview snippets, and excerpts you could pull from your book in order to create generate content across different social media platforms. This may also be approached from an SEO standpoint, finding your hub keywords and then spoke keywords in order generate content.
• The 4-1-1 Rule: According to this theory, for every six posts on a platform, businesses should share four pieces of relevant educational or entertaining content, one post should be a soft-sell, and one post should be a hard-sell. This strategy ensures a balanced mix of promotional and valuable content, positioning the brand as a curator of industry knowledge and enhancing audience trust.
  • Example: Your brand creates 6 blog posts about marketing, 4 are a blend of infographics and educational content within the industry, 1 is also educational but also reminds you if you want to learn more, there is an e-course they host every Sunday, and 1 is a sales-pitch the entire way through, focusing on the benefits of purchasing your product.
• The Hero, Help, and Hub Approach: This theory divides content pillars into three categories. “Hero” content aims to make a significant impact and is usually less frequent, such as a major product launch or campaign. Help content focuses on solving problems, answering questions, and providing value to the audience. Hub content represents the core topics that the brand consistently covers. This approach ensures a balance between engaging, educational, and impactful content.
  • Example: Hero content, in this context, would be your big-budget production like a TV commercial or corporate film that makes a lasting first impression on your audience, your Hub content would be your podcast or branded educational content, and your help content is your how-to videos or tutorials.

While these varying theories within the Content Pillar methodology may be overwhelming, when you combine the similarities between all these theories, what you get is a focused curation of topics that helps you easily navigate the content ideation process.

How to Implement Content Pillars for your Brand

1. Identify Core Themes: Start by identifying the core themes or topics that align with your brand’s values, expertise, and target audience’s interests. These themes should be broad enough to encompass a range of subtopics and content ideas.
2. Identify Your Content Pillar’s Topic and List Your Cluster Topics: Your Pillar Content should have two things—a topic that’s interesting, relevant, and essential for their target audience and keywords that have a healthy search volume and ranking potential. Cluster topics are all the related ideas and keywords around your Pillar topics.
3. Look at the Competition: Do a competitive analysis to identify the gaps, opportunities, and advantages of your pillar content.
4. Audit the Existing Brand Content: Do you already have content that could be spruced up or integrated into your pillar? Use it! You don’t want to cannibalize content that already exists and expend more effort to do so. Especially if your already have a large content portfolio, you can rework parts and pieces of it to generate fresh pillar content.
5. Content Calendar Planning: Create a content calendar that outlines when and where you’ll publish content for your content pillar. This calendar can cover weekly, monthly, or quarterly periods and ensures a consistent flow of content across your social media channels.
6. Interlink Your Pillar and Cluster Content: Link your pillar content back to your cluster content and vise-versa.
7. Distribute and Promote Your Pillar Content: Your pillar content should be what drives customers back to your cluster content and to your product.
8. Monitor Engagement and Analyze Results: Regularly monitor the performance of your content across social media platforms. Pay attention to metrics like engagement rates, reach, comments, and shares. Analyze the data to identify which content pillars are resonating the most with your audience, allowing you to fine-tune your strategy over time.
9. Stay Agile and Evolve: As your brand evolves and your audience’s preferences shift, don’t be afraid to adapt your content pillars. Regularly review and refine your pillars to ensure they remain relevant and aligned with your brand’s goals and your audience’s interests.

Benefits of Content Pillars:

• Consistency: Content pillars enable businesses to maintain consistency across their social media platforms. By organizing content around specific themes, brands can establish a recognizable identity and reinforce their messaging consistently. This consistency helps build trust and strengthens the brand’s image.
• Audience Relevance: Content pillars ensure that the content produced resonates with the target audience. By identifying the key interests, pain points, and preferences of their audience, businesses can align their content with these needs, increasing engagement and fostering a sense of community.
• Efficient Content Creation: Content pillars provide a framework for creating content ideas. Marketers can brainstorm and plan content in advance, saving time and effort in the long run. With a clear understanding of the pillars, businesses can develop a content calendar that covers each topic, ensuring a diverse range of content that addresses various aspects of their brand.
• Brand Authority: Content pillars allow brands to establish themselves as industry leaders. By consistently producing valuable and insightful content in their areas of expertise, businesses can position themselves as authorities in their field. This reputation attracts a loyal following and sets them apart from competitors.

Remember, the key to success is maintaining consistency while offering valuable and engaging content within each pillar. By following this process and continually refining your approach, you can leverage content pillars to create a strong and effective social media presence that attracts and retains your target audience. The implementation of the Content Pillar method allows you to be more strategic with content topic coverage and engage with consumers on what they really want to know about. Have fun creating!