Marketers tasked with building brand awareness, improving SEO efforts, and driving traffic to a website or e-commerce store know that content is key. But it’s not just about creating copy for your site or crafting emails that convert. The bulk of your marketing strategy should be structured around content pillars.
Keep reading to see how these themed topics can guide you to create everything—from blogs, e-books, infographics, and social media content—and support and engage your target audience along their customer journey.
What are content pillars?
In the most literal sense, pillars are designed to support your structure, and the same is true in marketing. Your content pillars will provide overarching themes around which your content—both long form and short—will be focused.
These pillars should align with your brand’s products or services, values, and goals while touching on your audience’s pain points and interests. Done well, these topics will help your brand or company establish itself as an authority in your industry and provide consumers with a consistent sense of your brand identity across all forms of content.
For example, a brand that sells organic protein bars for women will likely choose broad content pillars that include nutrition, fitness, and mental health. A hotel brand may choose pillars such as travel tips, local attractions, on-site photography, and hosted events. All content—whether aspirational, educational, or entertaining—will fall under these three themes.
Identifying content pillars
Most brands identify three to five broad themes under which all of their subtopics fall. Marketers can use several techniques to help them determine their brand’s content pillars.
Determine what your audience wants
Consider using surveys, comments from reviews and social listening, and feedback from focus groups to better understand what type of content your customers and prospects want.
Do keyword research
Keyword research will not only help you identify the words and phrases that your target audience members are searching for but also potential content pillars.
Audit existing content
Consider using an AI tool to review and summarize your website and social media content to determine which broad themes arise. Are the results accurate and represent your desired goals and messaging that you want consumers to take away?
Review your competition’s content
Check out what type of content your competition posts and look at the engagement on pieces to determine what’s resonating most.
The benefits of content pillars
The time marketers spend identifying content pillars will more than pay itself. Here are some of the advantages of using well-thought-out themes and assets.
Increased trust and authority
Content perceived as relevant and helpful to users increases trust and value. Consumers who search for and find your comprehensive content are more likely to return or share it with others.
Diversified content
Offering consumers a variety of topics helps ensure that you’ll provide the right content to the right person at the right point in their customer journey.
Ease of planning
With broad themes that can be broken down into subtopics, your marketing team can create a content calendar to plan and generate ideas organically.
Higher rankings in SERPs
Long-form content with relevant keywords will help search engines understand your website and the comprehensive information will signal that your content is relevant to the user’s experience.
Improved performance analysis
Using tools to help you analyze how your pieces of content are performing, marketers can quickly identify which posts resonate with consumers, informing strategies for future content.
Creating cluster content
Your website should house foundational evergreen pieces related to your content pillars. These should be broad topics—with optimized keywords—that educate readers and demonstrate your authority. Be sure to avoid trends and timely references (such as events) to prevent the need for frequent updates.
These foundational assets will be supported by cluster content pages, which provide more in-depth information and link back to the pillar content. These interlinked cluster pieces might include detailed tutorials, explanations of a particular feature, or tips on choosing a particular product or service.
Check out this example to inspire you:
Nike’s “Well Collective,” geared toward women interested in holistic fitness, identified five content pillars: movement, mindfulness, nutrition, rest, and connection. Evergreen content—such as this piece on how your mind affects your immune system and this piece about making progress toward goals— provides foundational timeless information to which smaller cluster content can provide backlinks.
Remember, waiting for people to stumble upon your website on their own or through search engines is not enough. You’ll need to push out your cluster content assets through your company’s social media channels and email marketing. Additionally, you can repurpose your pieces for distribution—as infographics for print media, podcast content, and even tips on in-store signage and displays.
By investing in content pillars and cluster content, you’ll better manage your content marketing while educating and engaging your audience.
