A pillar content strategy is a way to plan out content with the intention of covering every related topic your audience needs. You can use this strategy for blogs or other marketing materials, such as white papers and ebooks.
It’s an efficient way to provide value to your readers while also making it easy to find what they need on your website.
What is a Pillar Content Marketing Strategy?
A pillar content strategy is a collection of content that you create and publish on a regular basis. This strategy aims to help you establish yourself as an authority in your industry, generate traffic, and convert leads into paying customers.
The benefits of pillar content are:
- You build trust with your readers by establishing yourself as an expert in the field.
- Your visitors will be more likely to buy from you if they’ve already been impressed by the quality of the information provided by your product or service (eBook, infographic, etc.) It helps you drive better traffic to your website or blog.
1. Identify Your Best Performing Content
To create a content marketing strategy, you must first identify the best-performing content you’ve produced in the last 3-6 months. This can be done by examining your social media, email list, customer support, and sales data.
Once you have identified what has been successful for you, keep an eye out for trends when developing new pieces of content that will help inform future posts.
2. Create Your New Pillar Topic and Subtopics
The next step is to create your list of topics and subtopics. Start by writing a few ideas for what you could write about. You may want to look at the blog section on your website or the last blog posts you’ve published, then think about which topics get the most engagement or shares.
Next, think about how relevant each topic is for your audience—not just in terms of whether they will care about it, but also in terms of what marketing benefits they might gain from reading it (i.e., do they buy products from you that would be related? Do they work in industries that would benefit from something like this?).
Then look at how relevant each topic is for your business—is there some aspect that can help you improve? Would having more information about this area improve your product?
Finally, consider how relevant each topic is for other companies within your industry/market segment.
3. Create Your Main Pillar Piece
Each pillar of your content marketing strategy is going to be a piece that can stand on its own. These are the big pieces you want to promote, and you’re going to use one of these pillars as the main piece for each month.
The pillar should address a specific pain point or problem that your target audience experiences with your product or industry. It should also include an offer for them to take advantage of if they want to learn more about it.
4. Create Supporting Pieces for Each Subtopic
Once you’ve created your pillars, you can jump into creating supporting pieces for each subtopic. You can do this by going through the lists of topics related to the main pillar topic, then jumping into those lists for each subtopic.
For example, if your Pillar 1 is “Business Growth” and has 3 subtopics: sales, marketing, and customer service; you would create these supporting pieces:
- A list of topics related to “sales” in Pillar 1. This might include “how I sold $100k in my first year” or “5 sales hacks I use daily.”
- A list of topics related to “marketing” in Pillar 1. This might include “how I got 250k followers on social media” or “4 tips for content marketing success.”
5. Include Internal Links in Each Post
Internal links are clickable passageways leading from one page of your website to another. They’re essential because they help visitors find what they’re looking for and make your website easier to navigate. By making it simpler for search engines to browse and index your pages, internal links can enhance SEO.
Do not forget to check out blogging for content marketing for more advanced tips!
Let’s say you have an article called “How To Build a Pillar Content Marketing Strategy” promoted across multiple channels, including social media, paid ads, and email campaigns. Here, it would be helpful to include internal links throughout the content.
It will help people find related pieces of content on your website if they might want more information or want to learn more about pillar content marketing strategies in general.
6. Create an Editorial Calendar with Upcoming Topics and Related Posts
- At the start of the year, create an editorial calendar.
- Include topics, dates, and titles of posts. A sample calendar could look like this:
January 12th: How to create a pillar content marketing strategy
February 8th: 8 tips for making sure your content marketer was engaged in 2019
March 5th: The importance of creating content that’s shareable on social media
7. Plan out content with Keyword research
Plan out your content with the intention of covering every related topic your audience needs by utilizing keywords.
Keywords focus on what your audience is currently searching for and what they may require. So map out necessary keywords relevant to your business to help people to find you. It helps with SEO to rank on google on the first page for being relevant to that specific niche.
Conclusion
In summary, a pillar content strategy is a way to plan out content intending to cover every related topic your audience needs. Identifying those topics and creating an editorial calendar supporting them is key.
You can then use these pillars as the foundation for your business’s other content marketing strategies, including social media posts, email newsletters, and more.