Do you feel like you always get lost when creating your social content?

It can be really hard to know what to post and when.

Of course, you want to ensure your posts are interesting, but you also want your social content to help your business gain visibility and leads while working towards your overall goals.

The answer to the dilemma is… content pillars.

What are they and how can they keep your whole marketing plan on track?

Read on to find out all about why content pillars are going to be your secret to making social media a whole lot easier and more effective for your business.

Social Media Content Pillars: Your Secret To Marketing Success

What Are Content Pillars?

Creating content pillars gives your marketing a solid foundation, enabling you to publish the kind of content that is both interesting to your readers and helpful for your business. Also known as content buckets, each pillar focuses on a specific theme or subject that can be discussed and amplified.

Setting your content pillars is like choosing categories for what you are going to post about. These pillars then serve as the fundamental and strategic drivers for your social strategy. They are evergreen pieces of content that address a core topic or theme related to your brand and industry.

Most businesses will have a handful of content pillars that are chosen for their overarching importance to your business. Having these pillars in place means you will never be lost for what to post about and your content will always stay relevant and engaging.

Why Use Content Pillars?

Content pillars can really help your marketing to be more effective. This is how:

Concentrated Marketing 

We have all been guilty of just throwing something up on our social media pages as we know we haven’t posted in a while. Usually, it’s a meme, a joke, or a quickly dashed out post that does nothing to meet your marketing goals. 

However, if you had a designated content pillar to form your content around, you could be sure that your posts would always be targeted and in line with your overall content strategy.

Consistency

Consistency is key when it comes to marketing. That’s to ensure your audience doesn’t forget about you and to ensure you continue to make nice with the various social media algorithms. Having content pillars helps you to take a clear and structured approach to your content strategy. 

By drawing from a handful of key subject areas, you can be consistent in your brand messaging, and ensure that your content aligns with your business’s core values and objectives.

Establishing Authority

Authoritative and informative pillar content helps you position yourself as an expert in your field. Proving you are knowledgeable builds trust and credibility with your audience. This convinces them that they should choose your business over others in your industry. 

Creating Efficiency

Creating effective marketing content can be a time consuming job. Having set content pillars can make this process more efficient. The pillars become a foundation to plan and organise your content around, making it easier to develop a content calendar.

Once you have established your pillar content, you can then repurpose it by changing the graphics, dividing it up into smaller pieces of content, and adapting it into different mediums like video or infographics. This maximises the value of your initial creative effort and allows you to share the same core message across different social media platforms in various ways.

Remain Engaging

Pillar content is chosen so that the topics are relevant and valuable to your audience. Posting on these topics can lead to increased engagement, as your audience is more likely to interact with and share content that addresses their interests and needs.

Also, because pillar content is typically evergreen, it remains relevant over an extended period of time. That means you can repost it again and again to maintain a strong online presence and continue to engage your audience with the same ideas long after the content was initially created.

Better Content

Having content pillars in place makes it easier to generate ideas for new content. You can create supporting content that dives deeper into specific aspects of the pillar topic, allowing for a streamlined content creation process. Great, creative content that aligns with your marketing goals is better content than something you’ve whipped up in a hurry.

How To Set Your Content Pillars

So, how do you establish these content pillars? Let’s take a quick look at the process:

1. Know Your Audience: It is important to know who your target audience is so that you can create content that aligns with their interests, needs and pain points. 
2. Connect Your Goals: Determine what you want to achieve with your marketing - is it visibility, brand awareness, generating leads, driving website traffic, or boosting sales?
3. Research: Check which of your content pieces have previously performed well, what other businesses in your industry are posting, which relevant keywords are ranking well, and what areas of your business are performing well or that you’d like to amplify.
4. Set Your Pillars: Based on all this information, you’ll be able to pull out 4-5 key topics that will form your content pillars. Choose overarching themes that you can explore in more intricate detail to engage your audience and meet your marketing goals.
5. Form Your Content Calendar: Once you have your pillars set, it’s time to place them into a content calendar so that you ensure you cover each idea equally and that your content is varied throughout the month.

Need Some Help?

Choosing the topics that you will set your whole content calendar to can feel a little daunting! But sometimes all you need is an expert external opinion.

Here at Face Up Now, we specialise in identifying the key areas of your business that will make great pillar content. Together, we’ll look at your business goals and how we can align your marketing with them via great pillar content.

If you’d like to know more about how we can help make your marketing easy, efficient and effective, then book a time to chat with us now.