One of the foundations of developing your business and creating a marketing plan is deciding how you want to portray your business and its brand identity. A key concept to developing your brand identity is figuring out what your content pillars are. Once content pillars are established, creating new and evergreen content will be much easier.
Content pillars give your business a clear framework for the topics you regularly share online. Instead of constantly wondering what to post, you can use your content pillars to create consistent, relevant, and engaging content that connects with your target audience.
What Are Content Pillars?
Content pillars are exactly what they sound like! Imagine a building, that building is your social media presence. The success and stability of your social media presence is based on the pillars that hold the building up. The pillars are key topics that your social media content will revolve around. Instead of randomly picking what to create and post, this will help streamline your digital identity and produce content that connects with your audience.
Why Are They Important?
Your audience has a set expectation of what your business’s branding will look like. This transfers across all digital platforms, whether that be social media, television, and even advertisements. Following your content pillars will help establish your brand identity and help customers recognize you as they go about their daily lives.
How To Create Content Pillars
Content pillars can be a variety of different topics. Some of the key content pillars that many brands choose to follow fall under four core themes: educational, promotional, community, and inspirational.
Continuing from these core themes, small more specific content pillars can be established. Generally, brands try to stick to 3 to 5 core pillars.
For example, an ice cream shop may be interested in the educational, community, and promotional themes. Under education, the specific pillar can be ice cream creation processes. Here they explain the process of creating real ice cream and how they decide what ingredients to source and what flavours to choose. Under community, they may want to focus on how ice cream brings families together, diving into the feel-good aspect of community. And finally, under the promotional section, they will want to promote their products, this is where ads and posts highlighting flavours can appear.
The content pillars you choose to follow will greatly depend on the type of business you have. The examples above may not work well for a company that instead focuses on lawn care. Selecting pillars that resonate with you and your business will help capture your audience.
Establishing Your Audience
Your active and target audience will fall under certain demographics that can help you look more openly at what they may like. Thinking broadly, a woman in her 60s will like things very differently from a man in his 20s. Your audience can help you determine what content pillars you should follow.
A man in his 20s may be more interested in comedic content whereas a woman in her 60s may be more interested in content that portrays real-results.
All social media platforms give you access to your audience demographics as long as you have a business account set up.
I Don’t Have Content Pillars But I Have An Established Business
If you already have an established business, chances are you already have content pillars active but just don’t know it! There are a few things you can do in this case to better understand what type of content you are already making and how it aligns with your brand goals.
The first option is conducting a content audit. This is where you go back through each and every post that has been uploaded and categorize the content into basic sections. Start very generic. If it is an infographic, that can fall under educational. If it is a new product launch, that can fall under promotional. From there you can begin to look deeper into the subcategories that each piece falls under, exactly like how we broke things down in the ice cream shop example above.
Conclusion
Creating and establishing content pillars is an excellent way to help generate content that can be posted long-term, while also helping you create content that can resonate with your current and future audiences. Once you’re ready to start creating content, we have some tips and tricks on how to optimize your time to create content for multiple months in one go.
Interested in developing a stronger content strategy or creating engaging content for your business? Book a consultation with us to learn how Jennifer Baker Consulting can help.
