What are Content Pillars?
When you think of pillars, do large vertical structures come to mind? If so, you’re not too far off base. Content pillars are essentially the supporting structures of specific overarching topics or themes that represent your business. You can think of them as symbolic structures that hold the foundation of your brand together. These pillars may include objectives, purposes, and motives behind your business, as well as hot topics and trends that are most relevant to your target audience. Content pillars can help you create videos, blogs, infographics, and social media posts while staying on track with your brand strategy. You can also create social media content pillars to expand your reach and online following by focusing on essential topics and content types. Content pillars can help with fleshing out your content strategy and your marketing strategy when it comes to advertisements, sponsorships, and even social media marketing.
How Do Content Pillars Benefit Your Business?
Content pillars are highly beneficial for building a business plan or expanding your company’s presence online. In addition, using content pillars can help boost efficiency when developing marketing strategies and creative elements intended to reach your audience. Some of the most notable advantages of using content pillars for business today include:
- Consistency: Sticking to the same line of thinking and topics can help attract followers and garner trust from prospective customers and clients.
- Efficiency: Using content pillars helps streamline the process of launching a successful content marketing strategy. Create relevant content that appeals to your audience in less time.
- Extensive content coverage: Content pillars help flesh out ideas while inspiring extensive deep-dives and in-depth articles.
- Stick to your brand: Using only a few themes to manage your content management strategy can also help you stick to your brand’s messaging and overall vision.
- Increase traffic: The proper use of content pillars can significantly increase web traffic with highly concentrated content that is useful, informative, and unique.
Tips on Creating Content Pillars
Learning how to create content pillars is hugely beneficial, whether you are launching a startup or searching for new ways to engage your current customers, clients, and online followers. One example of using a content pillar to increase efficiency while planning your next marketing campaign is creating a YouTube video to promote your brand. If an important goal of your business is to create a video, you do not need to stop there. If your YouTube video is a content pillar for your business, you can build from it by adding additional derivative items that make sense and help maximize your reach. Some offshoots that may be useful once you have created your YouTube video might include:
- Snippets: Using snippets from your YouTube video to create compilations, mash-ups, and alternative versions to share using social media platforms and guest blogs.
- Infographics: You can use the information provided in your video to create a visually-pleasing infographic. Infographics can be shared via your website, newsletter, or even using social media.
- Blog posts: Depending on the topics you cover in your YouTube video, you can then develop a host of blog posts that are useful, informative, and relevant to your viewers, helping to drive traffic to your company’s official website.
- Unique landing pages: You can use numerous video uploads on YouTube to redirect users to unique landing pages.
Other main content pillars may include eBooks, websites, forums, online communities, or even specific topics featured in your company blog. First, create a list of overarching themes and topics most relevant to your business. This can help you create standard and social media content pillars. When you want to create online content pillars or social media content pillars, keep the following tips in mind:
- Determine your target audience and the demographics (age, gender, location, interests, etc.) you intend to reach with your business, even if you launch B2B campaigns.
- Consider the theme(s) or topic(s) you intend to cover and/or represent.
- Choose the media type(s) that are ideal for reaching your intended audience (eBooks, YouTube videos, TikTok videos, email newsletters, social media, banner advertisements, etc.)
- Create a list of derivative items you can generate using your preferred media type or content pillar.
Companies understand the benefits of using traditional and social media content pillars to grow and maximize their reach and online visibility. Creating content pillars can help tighten up your brand messaging and ensure you focus on the topics that mean the most to your audience. Does your brand or content strategy need more direction? Reach out to the marketing experts at HIG today to schedule an assessment.
Related articles:
Six Reasons Your Company Should Be Using Content Marketing
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