If you are new to the world of content creation and social media marketing, you might find yourself struggling with the question of how to keep your online communication effective and engaging. When I entered this field in 2018, I felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content that brands needed to produce, and I felt lost in a sea of social media updates, blog posts, videos, and more. However, as I learned more about the importance of content pillars, my perspective began to shift.
The Importance of Content Pillars: A Realization
The realization hit me hard. It wasn’t just about churning out random updates; I needed strong pillars to support my content buckets and ensure they aligned with the brand and its owners. If you want your content strategy to be effective, you need to think in terms of themes or pillars that align with your brand’s messaging, values, and goals. By using content pillars, you can create a coherent story that resonates with your audience and builds a sense of community around your brand.
Learning the Hard Way: The Significance of Content Pillars
I learned the significance of content pillars the hard way, by making mistakes along the way. Without a clear sense of the themes or pillars that underpin our content, we were in danger of getting lost, diluting our messaging, and ultimately confusing our followers. Developing a set of content pillars is essential to creating a focused, coherent, and effective content strategy.
Aligning with the Brand: Strong Pillars to Support Content Buckets
Strong content pillars are like the roots of a tree; they provide stability and hold your content buckets in place. As you create content, you should think of it in terms of buckets such as blog posts, social media updates, videos, etc. These buckets need to support your content pillars and be a part of the larger story that you are telling about your brand. Your content pillars should reflect the values of your brand, the heart of the business, the mission, and the vision for the future.
Dealing with Content Creation Struggles
Content creation can be a difficult and time-consuming task. It can be even more challenging if you don’t have a clear sense of the pillars that guide your content strategy. Creating a set of content pillars can provide a framework to guide your content creation process, making it easier and more straightforward. This is especially important when handling clients or trying to create organic traction for your brand.
Connecting with the Audience: Different Segments of Conversation
Your content pillars should reflect and resonate with your brand’s audience. When developing your content pillars, you should think in terms of the different topics and themes that your brand can connect with. For example, if you are a clothing brand, your content pillars might include high-quality materials, affordable prices, and sustainable practices. These themes should then be incorporated into your content strategy, and the language and tone should reflect what sparks conversations within your target audience.
The Uniqueness of Every Industry and Brand
While content pillars are vital to any content strategy, it’s important to remember that every industry and brand is unique, and so the pillars may vary. A content strategy that works for a food brand may not work for a technology brand, and vice versa. It is essential to take the time to understand your brand, your audience, and your industry, to create a set of content pillars that achieve your goals and resonate with your followers.
Checklist: Ensuring Sturdy Content Pillars
If you’re creating content for a brand, here’s a checklist to go through to ensure your content pillars are sturdy:
1. Understand your brand’s mission, vision, and values.
2. Understand your target audience and the conversations that are relevant to them.
3. Identify the themes or pillars that align with your brand, mission, and values.
4. Ensure that your content categories support your content pillars.
5. Ensure that the language and tone of your content align with your content pillars.
6. Regularly evaluate your content to ensure that it aligns with your content pillars.
More factors to consider
While this article may have given you a good starting point for creating content pillars, there are always more factors to consider. For example, you might want to think about the competition or the latest trends in your industry. You might also want to consider how to optimize your content for search engines or how to use paid advertising to drive traffic to your website.
In conclusion, content pillars are the foundation of any successful content strategy. They provide the coherence, focus, and stability that you need to create content that resonates with your audience and builds a sense of community around your brand. By spending time developing your content pillars, you can ensure that your content is always on message and that your users are engaged and interested in what you have to say. So next time anybody asks you what content pillars are, just tell them they are the skeleton of your online communication.
