What are content pillars in marketing strategy?
Content pillars are a set of 3-5 topics or themes that set up the basis of your marketing strategy. They can be used across your social media, website content, blogs, newsletters, video content and any other content you can think of. So, it’s fair to say that they are pretty important, and defining them early on is a really useful practice to ensure your content strategy is relevant, engaging and consistent.
When defining your pillars, you need to ensure that they’re relevant to your target audiences. However, not every pillar needs to appeal to everyone – it may be that some pillars are for persona X, whereas the other pillars are relevant for persona Y. In fact, it’s a great way of ensuring that you’re posting content that’s useful for all of your ideal customers.
As with all content and marketing, the pillars also must be aligned to your brand plan. This means they must be working towards helping you achieve your vision, goals and mission, whilst supporting your brand values. Different pillars may use different tones of voice, but they should all be consistent with your overall brand voice and messaging.
Why use content pillars?
Pillars help ensure that you are strategically creating content for your social media and blog, covering all of the topics your audiences want to hear from you. It also means that you can create a plan that spreads the topics strategically across the calendar to consistently provide relevant content for each persona.
Each piece of content that you post or promote, must be tied to one of the content pillars. If it doesn’t fit with any of them then you need to ask yourself why you are posting it. Is it relevant? Is it promoting your value proposition? Does it align with your brand? If not, then you should most likely think again about using it.
For example – my content pillars
To give you a clear picture of content pillars – here are mine:
Content strategy and creation – targeting those who want to learn more about content marketing. I'm hoping to help people looking for education around the topic, as there is a lot of overwhelming information out there, so I'm making it simple, implementable and measurable.
Brand voice, messaging & strategy – Brand can be confusing. A lot of people get it wrong. Miss bits out. Make a pretty logo and hope for the best. Brand is about what you want PEOPLE to FEEL when they encounter you. It’s about the values, storytelling, words, and voice alongside the visuals. There’s a heck of lot to go in there and it needs to be done right for it to work well. This pillar is again me posting about the theory and strategy behind what makes a brand work, showing I know my stuff but also helping educate people.
Hi, I’m Emily and here’s who I am - Now that I’m self-employed, I can be myself through my marketing. I want to be transparent with new and potential clients about my life – I have a family and I work around them. I love cats. I do my serious work at a desk with a focus music playlist on, but I do my creative stuff curled up on my cuddle sofa with a lamp and a bit of Portishead quietly playing. It’s about being authentic, transparent and myself.
Mental Health in business – sharing tips, supporting others, and promoting mental wellbeing whilst working. It’s a crazy world out there – and it seems to be getting more bonkers. I think we all need to support each other in the working world. That’s to all new(ish) parents trying to work alongside the struggle of childcare, freelancers who are fighting imposter syndrome and need to know they aren’t alone in that battle, and small business owners who’ve had a hell of a few years and need a space to feel positive. This content will share some tips on how I balance all the stresses. I’m not a mental health expert, but I struggle with anxiety and have a good few nuggets of advice that have worked for me and may help others.
How to make content pillars work
So, now we’ve identified the topics we want to cover in our content and have thought about what’s useful to our audiences – it opens up ideas for content generation.
Think about questions within these topics. Have a good session bashing out all your questions and thoughts around each of those topics and voila – a list of potential blogs, reels, and social media posts.
Make sure you have a good mix of them, don’t only focus on one topic. Although maybe you prioritise one topic within a specific platform. A brand voice specific newsletter perhaps, or reels specifically around mental health. It helps people interested in that topic know what to sign up for or look out for.
