Content Pillars for Social Media: What, Why, and How

Content Pillars for Social Media: What, Why, and How

‘Content is the king’ has been doing the rounds for the past twenty years since Bill Gates famously coined the phrase in 1996. Though the business magnet wrote it as a part of an essay, the phrase has found an increased relevance in modern times with the rise in the importance of content marketing and SEO strategies. 

Today, we shall focus on why Content is king with particular respect to your social media strategies. Let’s begin-

Content Pillars: What are they

Content pillars can be understood as a broad set of themes or topics that are used to create the foundation of your content marketing. 

These are sometimes called ‘buckets’ and need to be specific to your brand, reflecting the content that is most popular and relevant to your online audience. 

What does it include?

Varied content types include blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, etc,  ie. anything your particular audience finds of interest and appeal.

This differs from brand to brand and is acutely influenced by the industry they are in, as well as their end goal(s). For example, inspirational and hopeful quotes might be suited for an NGO that’s working for the needy. 

Whereas, a risk management company might rely more heavily on overt customer testimonials to attract prospects on social media.

Why are they needed

Because despite defining your social media goals, it can be very easy to meander and lose your way when creating content once the ball gets rolling. 

So to avoid brainstorming content ideas on the fly, and spreading yourself too thin, 

having a focused and aligned social media strategy, is a must. You achieve this by drawing a well-thought-out content calendar, that consists of pre-defined—you guessed it— content pillars. 

Content Pillars enable you to connect with consumers at each stage of their buying cycle — because you’re creating specific content for each portion of the sales funnel. 

With content pillars, you can work with the confidence that your efforts are spread evenly across all objectives, right from the awareness stage to lead generation and conversion. 

And without it? Your content becomes directionless, leading to lower reach, engagement, and brand recognition. Not to mention the guesswork that comes your way leading to incoherent and purposeless posts. A very bad look indeed.

To simplify, just remember that the keyword with content pillars is consistency:  your content pillars need to encompass and be consistent with your brand’s purpose, values, tone of voice, and positioning, as well as the general aesthetic look and feel on social media. In short, the whole shebang!

Think of it as a two-pronged approach that allows you to designate and create the most relevant topics for your audience while playing on your specialties. 

And in digital marketing, you always want to provide valuable content. Because-

What’s more, useful content can also help streamline marketing efforts and improve associated authority that comes from search engines. 

How to come up with content pillars

As stated earlier, coming up with a content pillar is highly dependent on the clients in your niche and your niche. But there are some benchmarks that can help you get started: 

1. Understand your brand’s marketing persona: Audience research and analytics can help create customer persona(s) that best describes your target audience, which will then act as your north star for generating conversions. 
2. Understand your audience’s needs: This includes pain points and aspirations that can be addressed through your product or service
3. Conduct keyword research:  Identify specific keyword phrases that consumers care about and monitor highly-searched key terms often to determine core content pillars
4. Conduct Competitor research: List out the top five competitors in your league and start making notes of the posts that have performed particularly well and the topics they’re posting about.
5. Audit your social media channels: Get an overview of what’s working and what’s not, along with taking the pulse of your followers’ content habits.

Lastly, content pillars are an investment for the long haul. They help your brand realign itself, and while helping it get into the right ‘battle mode’ to charge at the market 🙂

For expert content marketing and social media marketing services, contact Matrix Bricks today. 

Source: 

https://www.textbroker.com/content-king

https://www.sendible.com/insights/content-pillars

https://bullseyestrategy.com/how-to-develop-content-pillars-for-your-social-media-strategy/