What Is A Content Pillar?

What is a Content Pillar?

Content marketing has become an essential aspect of a successful business strategy. The abundance of content on the internet makes it challenging to capture and retain the attention of your target audience. To overcome this challenge, businesses must create compelling and valuable content that provides solutions to the problems their target audience faces. One way to achieve this is by using content pillars.

A content pillar is a comprehensive topic that serves as the foundation for your content marketing strategy. It provides a structure for your content creation and helps you to consistently deliver relevant and valuable information to your target audience.

By creating a pillar, you ensure that your content is aligned with your business objectives, target audience, and the solutions you offer.

Benefits of using a Content Pillar

There are a number of advantages to approaching your content marketing strategy with this strategy.

Focuses your content efforts

A content pillar helps you focus your content efforts on the most crucial topics that align with your business goals. By having a clear understanding of the topics you want to cover, you can create content that appeals to your target audience and supports your business objectives.

The pillar becomes your roadmap for content creation, providing direction and helping you stay on track.

Increases relevance and value to your target audience

A content pillar ensures that your content is relevant and valuable to your target audience. It provides a comprehensive understanding of the problems and challenges your target audience faces, allowing you to create content that provides solutions.

The pillar helps you to tailor your output to your target audience’s needs, ensuring that they find it valuable and relevant.

Improves search engine optimisation

Having a content pillar can improve your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts.

By consistently creating content around a specific topic, you can establish your brand as an authority in that area. This, in turn, can increase your visibility in search engines and drive more organic traffic to your website.

Supports your business objectives

It can support your business objectives by providing a framework for your content creation. It helps you to create content that is aligned with your business goals and supports your efforts to achieve them.

For example, if your business objective is to increase sales, your content pillar can be centred around the products or services you offer and how they provide solutions to your target audience’s problems.

How to create a content pillar

Identify your target audience

To create an effective content pillar, it’s crucial to understand your target audience. Ask:

• Who are they?
• What are their needs, challenges, and pain points?
• What kind of content do they find valuable and engaging?

By understanding your target audience, you can create a content pillar that appeals to them and provides value.

Define your business objectives

Your business objectives should also inform your content pillar. What are your business goals, and how can your content support them?

Understanding your objectives will help you create a pillar that aligns with your business strategy and supports your efforts to achieve your goals.

Identify your unique value proposition

Your unique value proposition (UVP) is what sets your business apart from the competition. What do you offer that your target audience can’t find elsewhere?

Understanding your UVP will help you create a content pillar that highlights your strengths and differentiates you from the competition.

Research relevant topics

Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience, business objectives, and UVP, you can start researching relevant topics.

Use tools such as keyword research and Google Trends to identify the topics your target audience is searching for. Also, look at your competitors’ content and see what topics they cover and how they present them.

Create your content pillar

With your research complete, it’s time to create your content pillar. Start by defining the main topic or theme that you want to cover.

This topic should align with your target audience’s needs, business objectives, and UVP.

Next, break down the main topic into subtopics that provide a comprehensive understanding of the subject. These subtopics should serve as the foundation for your content creation and help you to consistently deliver valuable information to your target audience.

Format of content pillar

It’s also important to consider the format of your content. Will you create blog posts, videos, podcasts, or a combination of formats?

The format should be optimised towards your target audience’s preferences and how they consume information.

Finally, create a content calendar that outlines the frequency and schedule of your content creation. This will help you stay on track and ensure that you consistently deliver valuable content to your target audience.

Avoiding keyword cannibalisation with content pillars

When using this strategy, it’s crucial to avoid keyword cannibalisation by properly targeting your keywords.

Each subtopic within your pillar should target a different keyword or phrase, ensuring that each page of your website is optimised for a specific keyword.

To avoid keyword cannibalisation, make sure that each subtopic within your pillar is unique and provides valuable information to your target audience.

This will not only help you avoid keyword cannibalisation, but it will also ensure that your content is relevant and valuable to your target audience.

Additionally, use proper title tags and meta descriptions to help search engines understand the relevance and context of each page.

This will help search engines determine which page is the most relevant for a specific keyword, increasing your chances of ranking higher in search engine results.

In conclusion, a content pillar is a crucial aspect of a successful content marketing strategy. By following these steps, you can create an effective content pillar that sets the foundation for your content marketing success.