What are content strategy pillars?
One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a content marketer is only focusing on what you care about. After all, what you think is important likely isn’t the same as your target audience. However, only focusing on your audience might mean you completely neglect your brand in your content efforts. And we’re not in marketing to forget about our brand!
Today, we want to help you build your content strategy pillars. These pillars are content topics that best represent your business. These should be big, important (and broad) topics. You’ll use these pillars in all of your content from blogs to eBooks to social media messaging.
But how do you identify these content strategy pillars? It’s all about marrying what you care about with what your audience cares about.
What your audience cares about
If you’ve done the work to create buyer personas, you should have a pretty good idea of what your target audience cares about. You know what websites they’re using and what their problems are.
You’ve also likely spoken to current customers and asked them a few of these questions:
- Why did you choose us over our competitors?
- What do you love most about our product or service?
- If we could improve in one way, what would it be?
- When it comes to our offerings, what would you love to learn more about?
While buyer personas and talking to customers is good practice, you should also be looking at your own metrics! Who are your LinkedIn followers? Who’s visiting your website? What content are they consuming?
These are all of the clues you need to understand what your audience cares about. You’ll need this and more to build those pillars.
What you care about
Remember: You are not your target audience! If you answered those same questions you asked your current customers, you’d get very different answers. But that’s not a bad thing! That different perspective is so important, and vital to your content strategy.
In fact, you know what you do best compared to others in your industry. As someone who lives and breathes their industry, you know things your customers couldn’t. You have a better understanding of who your competitors are, their weaknesses, and what kind of content they’re focusing on.
You also know what’s on your company road map, while your customers likely don’t have that information.
Creating your content strategy pillars
Now here’s the fun part: defining your pillars. Find where your audience’s interests and your strongest qualities as a brand overlap. The industry term for this is “sweet spot.” At Nicklaus Marketing & PR, our audience is struggling to create content optimized for SEO. Creating optimized content happens to be something we’re particularly good at.
If you need help creating your content strategy pillars, or any other content needs, reach out.
