Content pillars can drive traffic to your business and improve all aspects of your digital marketing efforts. Learn more about content pillars from the POP team.
Heyyyy POP Pioneers and welcome to our new blog series where we divulge all things digital marketing.
Kicking off our first blog is the topic of content pillars. What are content pillars? How do content pillars inform our decision-making process? And – why do content pillars help shape brand messaging within your content strategy?
Confused?
No?
Good 🙂
What is a Content Pillar?
Now, the first time I heard a content pillar I envisioned the pillars of an ancient Roman or Greek landscape holding up a strong historic, heroic, building. In a similar vein, when building a website, analysing your SEO or optimising your social media strategy, referring back to your content pillars is crucial to the foundational elements of your digital landscape. They are indeed the pillars that hold up your digital empire.
In short, content pillars are a group of 3-5 staple themes that your content consistently focuses on.
Your content should be simple, clear and precise while simultaneously being meaningful and in-line with your main business goals. After all, content and content pillars function as a FIRST IMPRESSION when someone visits your website, checks out your socials or romes the internet. Your content pillars help convey who you are as a brand, what your brand stands for and what your audience should care about.
Ultimately, the goal of your content pillars are to create attention, make something memorable and make people FEEL something.
Never just randomly post things, you need to stop and think about your audience yourself the person or brand they can depend on for inspiration or entertainment.
Struggling to achieve this? Ask yourself:
- Are your posts scroll-stopping?
- Is the topic relatable and dividing of opinion?
- Have you made it easy to comment or be worth sharing?
Once you’ve pondered over these thoughts, you can frame your content with these 5 key content pillars:
- Educational: Share valuable knowledge that positions you as an expert.
- Promotional: Raise awareness of your product or services.
- Inspirational: Inspire your audience through transformative content.
- Community: Exclusivity, building a sense of belonging to your turf through your posts.
- Engagement: Build relationships and nurture your community through intentional community whether that’s through an email, post, comment or message.
Whether you are a newbie to the digital game or a seasoned pro always refer back to your content pillars for your industry and niche, after all you are the expert, you just need to showcase it.
How do content pillars inform our decision making process?
By implementing content pillars into your marketing strategy is crucial to your decision making process and gets the cogs turning as it allows you to be more strategic and consider what your audience truly wants and helps form an impactful relationship. Each content pillar should serve a purpose to your audience while simultaneously elevating your brand or business’s subject matter.
To further control your decision process and help you curate each individual pillar can be explored by analysing and observing your content through an audit. Go through each section with a fine toothcomb so that you can help prevent any duplications or cannibalise any published work.
Lastly, always take a look at your competition. Who are you battling for space in the digital realm? Utilising your competitors can help identify gaps, create opportunities and elevate your content pillars to promote the thing they are missing.
TIP: Always remember to summarise the key findings and develop actionable insights to your competitors’ analysis.
By following all of these stages, will help you make informed decisions when drafting and consolidating your own content pillars.
Why do content pillars help shape brand messaging within your content strategy?
To create winning content that overrides the noise from the competition and helps form your brand messaging within your content strategy is to have pillars that exude success. It should always serve a purpose.
For example, our team at POP specialise in the renewable energy sector and we often tailor bespoke content pillars for each individual client. Within the renewables sector, we often ask our client to explain in their own words “What does your business mean to you”, “What is your USP?”, “What are you looking for? Brand Awareness, Leads, etc”. These questions alone help shape the brand message.
Not to mention, asking the client what specific services they deal with as they impact the content pillars and showcasing the brand message.
See you next week, sneak peek, we’re going to talk about Email Marketing 📩
Catch you then 👋
Amy, your social media manager.
