Learn how to leverage content pillars to enhance your social media strategy. Discover the benefits of creating content pillars and how they can help you streamline your social media content creation.
What’s one thing you can do to make your content creation easier, social strategy clearer, and brand image more powerful? Create content pillars. Content pillars (sometimes called content buckets) give social marketers a clear path to follow when it comes to building and implementing their social strategy.
Content pillars are a handful of themes or topics that you consistently create content around. They provide structure to your content strategy and ensure that your content remains relevant, engaging, and valuable to your audience. In this blog, we'll discuss how to use content pillars and the benefits of using them in your social strategy.
To start, let’s take a look at some popular content pillars marketers use:
Entertainment
Education
Inspiration
Conversion
These content pillars are a great starting point! They cover 4 bases within social media marketing: entertaining your audience, educating them, inspiring them, and leaving room to convert them into customers. Most content can be broken down into one of these 4 pillars, but if you’re looking to niche down or focus on other themes, you’ll need to create another more personalized pillar and/or subtopics within each pillar.
Creating Personalized Pillars
If you’re looking to create another pillar, the first step is to identify the core themes that define your brand. These themes should align with your brand's mission, values, and goals. To determine your core themes, ask yourself the following questions:
After answering these questions you’ll have a better idea of what your next pillar should be about. But don’t feel pressure to create another pillar to niche down your content categories because the next thing we’ll be talking about is subtopics, which does exactly that.
Subtopics
After you have your content pillars, you can go and write in categories or subtopics that you already post often or would like to start posting within each pillar. These subtopics allow you to develop a deeper understanding of what kind of content should go into each pillar. It also helps you niche down on certain topics within each pillar.
Here are some examples of content pillar subtopics for two different businesses:
A summer camp may niche down their conversion pillar into subtopics like camper enrollment and camp promotion. While their entertainment pillar may break down into subtopics like camp activities and staff jokes.
A salon may niche down their Inspiration pillar into subtopics like trend-setting and new styles. While their education pillar may break down into subtopics such as hair health and hair tutorials.
Once you have an understanding of your content pillars and the subtopics that live under each of them, it’s time to start creating content.
Content Creation
Now that you have your content pillars and subtopics figured out, you’re ready to get creative. Having content pillars allows you to streamline your content creation process because you will never have to start from scratch again. You’ll always have a clear direction for your content, making it easier to brainstorm and create content that aligns with your brand’s mission and goals.
Your brand will not only look polished, but like an industry expert in these areas. By focusing your content on a few impactful themes, your content will reflect a clear direction to your audience. It’ll also be easier to create a dedicated follower base of users who too have interest in these focused areas.
Category Tags
Category tags are incredibly helpful and flexible tags that help you categorize your content. Within the Cloud Campaign platform you are able to assign a category tag to any piece of content and see insights on how well each tag is performing. For example, a salon could tag their hair tutorial content with an education tag and a tutorial tag. They could also add other specific tags that represent the piece of content such as a curling wand tag to help them track how popular this hairstyle is alongside how popular the type of content is.
After tagging the content, the salon social media manager could navigate to the analytics tab to see the most used, most viewed, and most engaged with category tags. This data allows users to better track and understand what content is performing best and make informed decisions moving forward.
Analyze and Adjust
It's important to regularly analyze and adjust your content strategy and pillars based on the metrics that matter to your brand. Some to consider are saves, shares, likes, and the overall engagement, and interactions your posts receive.
Regularly analyzing your metrics can help you identify which content pillars are resonating with your audience and which ones need improvement. Use this information to adjust your strategy and ensure that your content remains relevant and engaging. If you’re seeing a lack of engagement in one of your content pillars, don’t be afraid to re-evaluate and adjust it.
Pro-tip: As mentioned above, use Cloud Campaign’s category tags to tag your content with each specific pillar/subtopic it fits into. Then you can easily analyze the performance of each pillar and make decisions based on the data.
In conclusion, content pillars are a valuable tool for social media marketers looking to create a consistent and effective content strategy. By identifying your core themes and analyzing your data, you can develop a successful social media strategy that resonates with your audience and helps you achieve your brand's goals.
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