Creating and identifying your content pillars helps you simplify your content creation process, provides you with clarity in your messaging, helps you identify your target audience and niche, and supports your unique marketing goals.
Content pillars represent topics that are of interest to your target audience.
In this article, you’re going to learn what content pillars are, how to define your content pillars and see why content pillars are so important in helping you execute a successful content strategy for your personal brand or business.
If you need help identifying your pillars and want to know how to maximize your content pillars for your marketing plan and content creation process, then keep reading so you can start being more intentional and strategic with your content.
WHAT ARE CONTENT PILLARS?
Content pillars are 3-5 topics that your brand or business discusses in-depth. Content pillars are sometimes referred to as “content buckets” or “content categories.”
There are many benefits to identifying your content pillars:
They help you stay focused on creating content that is relevant for your audience and their needs. These topics help to answer questions, educate or solve a problem for your audience.
Developing a strong brand voice and staying consistent with your brand’s messaging is important. Content pillars enable consistency in your messaging and helps you build trust and establish authority on the topic.
Your content pillars give you clarity around your niche, your messaging and target audience. Your pillars also serve to complement topics around your products or services and also support your overall goals (i.e. audience growth or revenue goals).
When you intentionally create and curate content around your content pillars, it helps to maximize your content strategy and marketing plan.
Pillar content helps to bring topics or themes together, which we’ll discuss more in-depth in this article with examples.
HOW TO DETERMINE YOUR CONTENT PILLARS
Determining your content pillars is a thoughtful exercise and some of the topics may feel intuitive to you and may just need a little bit of refinement.
To help you determine your content pillars, start by identifying the following:
➜ WHO IS YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE? WHAT ARE SOME OF THEIR KEY DEMOGRAPHIC DETAILS THAT YOU CAN IDENTIFY?
Here are some examples: age, gender, geographic location, income, education level, life stage, interests and behaviors. Think about the type of client you’d like to attract and work with.
Your pillars help to support your content strategy that you will implement to attract your target audience. The topics you will discuss will be relevant for your audience and their needs.
➜ WHAT IS YOUR EXPERTISE OR WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE KNOWN FOR? WHAT’S YOUR FOCUS WITH YOUR BUSINESS OR PERSONAL BRAND?
Think about what you offer (i.e. products, services) or the solutions that you provide for your audience. Identify topics that connect back to your offers and that support your revenue or other growth goals (i.e. audience growth, brand awareness or website traffic).
Your content pillars help you build a know, like, trust factor with your audience. They will help you stay focused and will allow you to anchor all of your relevant keywords, brand messaging, values, content ideas and expertise into your content strategy.
➜ WHAT IS YOUR NICHE? WHAT DO YOU SPECIALIZE IN THAT HELPS YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE?
Your content pillars will help you gain clarity on who you serve, what you offer and how people can work with you.
CONTENT PILLAR EXAMPLES
As you start to define your content pillars, you should ensure that your content pillars cover topics that define your personal brand or business, that resonate with your audience and that help to signal to your audience what you expert niche is.
For example, you might be a nutritionist, but perhaps your focus is on anti-inflammatory diet and fitness for women in their 20s to 30s.
Here are some examples of what those content pillars might be:
Content Pillar 1: Nutrition
Content Pillar 2: Mental Wellness
Content Pillar 3: Exercise
Content Pillar 4: Mindful Habits
CONTENT PILLARS AND SUBTOPICS OR THEMES
After you identify your main content pillars, identify subtopics you can discuss that relate to and complement your pillars. List out potential subtopics to help you with your content creation process.
Here’s how you can take it a step further and expand on those topics.
Content Pillar: Nutrition
Subtopic Ideas:
Anti-Inflammatory Foods
Nutrition Labels & Ingredients
Resources About Nutrition (i.e. books, apps, etc.)
Meal Planning Tips
Intuitive Eating
Content Pillar: Mental Wellness
Subtopic Ideas:
Mental Wellness for Busy Lifestyle
Avoiding Burnout
Ways to Practice Mental Wellness
Mental Wellness Goals
Mental Wellness Research
FAQ’S ABOUT CONTENT PILLARS
➜ HOW CAN I DETERMINE SUBTOPICS FOR MY CONTENT PILLARS?
Once you have your 3-5 content pillars identified, you can do some research online and offline. Head to Answer the Public and enter a 1-2 words around a content pillar and you’ll get a bunch of inspiration of things people are searching for online.
CONTENT IDEAS AND RESEARCH
➜ WHERE CAN I RESEARCH SOME CONTENT IDEAS FOR MY SUBTOPICS?
Head to Pinterest or YouTube and do some research around topics related to your audience and niche that you can expand on. Enter some keywords and see which kind of searches and keywords autocomplete on the platforms. A little bit of research can help you hone in on content ideas for your content pillars and make content creation easier for you.
Head to Google and maximize Google’s autocomplete feature to help you identify some subtopics.
Be sure to list out your products and services and identify content that helps complement what you offer. You can create content that helps to answer frequently asked questions, solve a problem or help your audience overcome a challenge they are facing.
Create an opportunity for some in-person interactions with your audience. Ask your audience questions and get real-time feedback through networking events or through a call.
Another approach you can try is to survey your audience through email or by maximizing polls and stickers on social media to see how your audience responds to your questions.
You can also visit Facebook Groups or Quora to see which types of questions people are leaving in threads that are related to your content pillars.
➜ WHERE SHOULD I STORE MY CONTENT PILLARS AND IDEAS?
Try using a tool like Asana, Trello or Airtable to help you store and organize your editorial content calendar. You could also use an excel sheet or notebook.
➜ WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CONTENT PILLARS AND SUBTOPICS?
Content pillars are the foundation of your messaging. Visually, consider your content pillars as a tree with different branches and your subtopics an extension from the tree.
You want to ensure that the the topics you discuss are educational and valuable and address the needs and values of your target audience.
Use your content pillars and subtopics to answer questions and solve problems or challenges your audience may be experiencing. Your content pillars should also support your unique goals such as your audience or revenue growth goals.
CONTENT PILLARS AND YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
➜ HOW DO I USE CONTENT PILLARS WITH MY SOCIAL MEDIA?
The long-form content you’re creating is a great foundational content to build from. You should be maximizing your long-form content for your social media posts.
➜ HOW DO CONTENT PILLARS SUPPORT MY MARKETING PLAN?
Your content pillars support your content strategy, which is a component of your marketing plan. Your marketing plan identifies target audience, objective, unique selling proposition, content strategy, among other things.
Identifying your content pillars will help support your social media plan and help you stay consistent with delivering your brand’s messaging and support your unique goals.
MAXIMIZING CONTENT PILLARS FOR CONTENT CREATION
Now that you have your content pillars and subtopics identified, here’s how you put it into action to really maximize your pillars and your content strategy.
Keep your content pillars visible while creating content so that it can make your process easier. Sticking to your content pillars gives you some creative constraints, but these will help you stay consistent with your messaging and content creation.
Using an excel document, a notebook or your favorite content planning tool, list out your content buckets and subtopics and start mapping out your content for each month or quarter.
Depending on your brainstorming session, you could end up with 52 long-form pieces of content (i.e. blog post, podcast, video) that you can publish on a weekly basis. For example, if you have five content pillars and you brainstorm 10 ideas, you could easily end up with content ideas for the entire year.
PUTTING CONTENT PILLARS TO USE
Now that you have a better understanding of content pillars and how they help to address the needs and values of your target audience as well as how they support your products and services, you can start to create content with more clarity and confidence.
Make sure that you’re always referring to your content pillars when you’re creating content and that you’re rotating the topics so that you can continue to establish yourself as a trusted and knowledgeable source on the topic.
CONTENT PILLARS AND YOUR CONTENT CALENDAR
Plug your ideas into a content calendar to create your content on a monthly or weekly basis. Make your life easier by staying consistent with your content pillars and iterating your workflow and batching process.
When plugging content into your calendar, make sure you identify the following content:
Long-Form Content:
Your long-form content could be blog posts, podcast episodes or videos. This is foundational content that supports your marketing plan and content strategy. Maximize your long-form content by intentionally repurposing it as often as you can.
Curated Content:
Your newsletter helps you nurture your audience, builds trust and establishes you as a trusted source for information.
Promotional Content:
Be sure to incorporate content related to your products and services. You can weave in your offers within your content.
Short-Form Content:
Short-form content is built from long-form content. This is content that you create for your social media posts such as graphics, quotes, carousel posts, Twitter threads, 30-60 second videos or Stories.
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