Content Pillars: Your Ultimate Guide
How effective is your content creation process? If you find it overwhelming, stressful, and confusing to consistently create content, content pillars are exactly what you need.
Content pillars are the main themes you want your social media content to be known for. They are the central content ideas your online platforms will focus on and consistently talk about.
Who needs Content Pillars?
If you’re intentional about your online presence and want to reach a specific target audience, then you need to have content pillars. You also need content pillars if you’re interested in ranking high on social media platforms. Talking about the same key subjects repeatedly tells search engines exactly what you’re about and who you’re for. It is a useful strategy for optimizing your account and maximizing your online results.
Why Content Pillars are Needed
With content pillars, you can create a social media framework suited to your brand vision, value, and goals.
Content pillars ensure that your content is aligned, focused, and consistent.
They are crucial for many social media marketing purposes such as brand awareness, engagement, SEO, reach, and conversions. By deciding on and sticking with your content pillars, you can increase your followers, impressions, influence, and drive traffic and sales.
Examples of Content Pillars
Content Pillars are used by most major brands you know and love, and their specificity is probably what got you hooked in the first place. These are some examples:
- Buzzfeed
Viral quizzes, listicles, and pop culture entertainment are part of Buzzfeed’s content pillars.
With these content pillars, they ensure that their content appeals to large audiences and is highly shareable.
- Nike
Nike’s content pillars are motivational content, lifestyle, and culture.
Starting with their “Just Do It” motto, they carry a motivational theme throughout their online presence by sharing the inspirational journeys of popular athletes and their road to sports stardom.
They connect with their customers by passing a message of determination, perseverance and strength.
- HubSpot
Inbound marketing, SEO(Search Engine Optimization) and CRM(Customer Relationship Management) are HubSpot’s major content pillars. This can be seen throughout their blog posts as these are the major topics that are covered.
They implement their content pillars by using informative and sharable content such as e-books, webinars and courses.
How to Create Content Pillars
It can be hard to choose content pillars as there’s just soo much to talk about. Worry not, I’ve created a step by step process to make it easy for you.
1. Look back at your goals and objectives
At the start of your social media journey, you most likely had a driving force that motivated you to have an online presence. That driving force is the backbone of your social media goals and objectives.
Being clear on your goals is a crucial part of succeeding on social media. It is important to ensure that both your business and social media goals align. This way, you have clarity going forward.
To choose your content pillars, you have to look back at why you’re doing what you’re doing and who you’re doing it for. When your messaging is clear and concise, you can figure out the best ways to pass across what you have to offer.
2. Decide on your target audience
Your target audience is a specific group of people that you want to reach and sell to. Trying to sell to everyone may most likely lead to selling to no one.
Your target audience is based on demographics and psychographics.
Demographics include characteristics such as age, location, gender, career, and marital status.
On the other hand, psychographics has to the with the mental and emotional driving force behind your target audience. This focuses on their values, belief systems, interests, challenges, etc.
You can take this a bit further by creating a target audience persona.
A target audience persona (also known as a buyer persona) is a profile of a person that highlights the characteristics of your key target audience, this persona represents your ideal target audience.
With it, you are speaking to one specific person rather than talking to a vague general audience.
3. Decide on your main social media platforms
The platforms you choose to focus on influence your content a great deal as different types of content work best on different social media apps.
Educational long form content perform well on Twitter and LinkedIn in the form of threads and newsletters while entertaining short-form video content do well on Instagram and TikTok.
At this stage, you have your messaging clear and now is the time to decide which online platforms will help you pass that message across best.
If you are an educational brand, it may be best to focus on platforms that thrive with long form content such as YouTube, email newsletters, blog posts, etc.
If entertaining videos, quick and fun tutorials and catchy sharable posts seem more like the vibe you’re going for, then Instagram and TikTok may be the best place for you to be.
Now, it is possible for a brand to be present on all the major social media platforms, HubSpot and Hootsuite are great examples. In my experience though, it can be overwhelming and tedious for brands who haven’t yet established themselves as leaders and experts in their industry to achieve this feat. Most times, it ends up leading to brands crashing and burning when they try to take on too much at once.
I suggest that if you’re a beginner with less than 1–2 years of experience, you focus on two to three main platforms. After testing the grounds and establishing a solid head start, you can spread your wings and increase the number.
4. Check your current insights
You don’t have to start from scratch. If you have even the littlest semblance of an audience, offline or online, you can use that to guide your decision.
How did your audience react when you published that inspirational quote? Did they like the fun and quirky thank you note you included in that delivery order? Were they excited to see you move from posting only photos of your clothing items to creating video styling tutorials? Use the reaction of your audience to guide your decision.
Check your analytics to see what performed well and resonated with your audience. Look at top-performing posts and record their captions and keywords that were used.
If you see a positive pattern in your analytics for a particular type of content, that could be the beginnings of a content pillar.
Additionally, you could create a Q&A session to get customer feedback. This is a great way to truly know what your audience wants to see. Ask them questions such as:
- What was your favorite post from us in the last month?
- If you had to choose between our educational and entertaining content, what would you choose?
- What type of content would you like to see from us?
5. Perform a competitor analysis
Competitor analysis is a research process that allows you identify the marketing strategies, products, sales and of your competitors.
With a competitive analysis, the goal isn’t to copy or replicate your competitor’s strategies but to look at their strengths and weaknesses to know the the areas where you can improve and the opportunities you may have to differentiate yourself from the general market.
With a proper look at your competitors, you can identify content ideas and strategies that will help set your social media apart from the rest of the crowd
6. Brainstorm for topics and keywords
You’ve done the necessary research and analysis, it’s now time to make use of all the information gathered and build up the framework of your content pillars.
While your content must be true to your brand vision, it also has to rank high in the SEO engines of your chosen social media platforms and this is where keywords come in!
With the right keywords you’re guaranteed to reach your target audience and this is why they are important when choosing content pillars.
For example, for a fitness brand, possible keywords to consider include gym, wellness, health, workout routines, personal trainer, and fitness classes.
7. Pick your content pillars!
You’ve reached your final destination, picking out your content pillars. You should have between 3–5 content pillars that are the core of all your content ideas across various platforms.
Any more than five content pillars can lead to confusion among your target audience as what you’re about can become muddled and unclear.
You want your content pillars to have these two crucial features:
a. They should embody a key aspect of your goals
You don’t want your content pillars to lack the personality and uniqueness your brand has to offer. Make sure that your content pillars completely align with what you want your message to be.
b. They should easily produce multiple content ideas
To be effective, a content pillar should be implemented in many different ways, it should be able to produce a long list of ideas that cuts across the four main types of content:
- Educational content
- Entertaining content
- Inspirational content
- Promotional content
Piggybacking off the earlier example of content pillars for a fitness brand, this is how I would use “workout routines” for the four different types of content:
- Educational: 5 tips for an effective workout.
- Entertaining: Join us for a fun dance workout routine to your favorite trending song.
- Promotional: Become an exclusive member of our fitness community by downloading our fitness app.
- Inspirational: A client’s weight loss/gain transformation.
The overall purpose of content pillars is to ensure that you never run out of ideas, your content is always aligned, and you show up consistently on social media!
Conclusion
And there you have it, an ultimate guide to creating your very own content pillars!
To make sure you maximize your use of content pillars, test and analyze how your content performs after publishing high-quality content from your content pillars. Stick to what’s working and make improvements and changes when necessary.
Additionally, as new social media updates and trends come up, don’t get left behind and intertwine those trends into your content strategy.
