What are content pillars?

One of the greatest challenges for social media or community managers is creating relevant, share-able content for social feeds. It isn’t easy to come up with engaging, on-brand content day after day, week after week, month after month. Strategy must be applied to ensure your audience is educated, entertained, inspired and informed – which ultimately leads to business conversions. This kind of content can’t just be off the top of your head.

But how do you save your sanity and cover all this ground strategically with the content you share via social networks? The answer is by applying content pillars. Once you establish what your business themes and key objectives are, apply them to your content pillars and they will form one of the most effective tools in your content marketing arsenal.

So, what are content pillars?

Content pillars do not replace campaign ‘themes’ or content initiatives, but help to draw out all the different angles of a piece of content as they relate directly to these objectives and audiences.

Five content pillars are:

  • People and expertise
  • Knowledge share
  • Numbers
  • History
  • Sustainability and Community

How to apply content pillars.

1. Define your businesses key themes and objectives.

2. Create a table containing content pillars on one axis and business themes and key objectives along the other axis. Something like this:

 

3. Fill the table with content that aligns with both content pillars and business objectives and key themes.

3. Fill the table with content that aligns with both content pillars and business objectives and key themes.

And voilà! Content created. A set of content pillars closely linked to the broader business objectives and other marketing activity makes it easier to develop a tacit knowledge of the angle and direction stories should be taking without constantly consulting business strategies. Content creation becomes a breeze as you’re never stuck for on-brand things to write about that are interesting to your audience. You save yourself time and a few grey hairs.

Talk to us about online content marketing.

Image credit: George Rex via Flickr Creative Commons