A content pillar is a large piece of content that can be broken into smaller, bite-sized pieces of content. This allows you to focus on a single topic or theme, but at the same time, meet the needs of every department in your organization.
Examples of content pillars include eBooks, reports, and guides. You then repurpose this big content into individual blog posts, infographics, videos, emails, social media updates, and more.
The Need for Content Pillars
A content pillar approach is both an efficient and effective way to create and distribute content. It benefits your entire organization, not just your marketing department.
Imagine a potential customer browsing your website. She is very inclined to buy one of your products and called your hotline to confirm some specs. The customer representative then said something different from what she read on the website. She got turned off and decided not to buy any more.
This situation is not uncommon, even in big companies.
Most of the time, this happens because the people in-charge of the phone (sales) have a different piece of content that came from another part of the organization (product team). The content on the website is also different because it’s handled by different people as well (marketing).
The product team updates the product, they updated their technical specifications, both marketing and sales didn’t get the updated notification. Another scenario is marketing receives the specs, tried to reword it so the public can easily understand its benefits, but understood the features in a different way.
Multiple departments creating and handling their own versions leads to content chaos.
Creating a mash-up of content from experts and other teams without a unifying theme or approach results in a disjointed customer experience.
The solution to content chaos is to have every department involved in the content creation process. They should buy-in the idea that content is everyone’s shared responsibility.
Why? Because of the customer.
The customer only sees one entity — your organization.
The customer doesn’t make any distinction across the different “departments’ content” — sales brochure, fact sheets, website, calling cards, press releases, social media, flyers.
That leaves you with the only effective approach to solving content chaos — a content pillar.
Remember to involve the other departments when planning content campaigns. That way, everyone has a centralized content resource — avoiding different messages conveyed to customers.
Have you used content pillars in your digital marketing?
Let me know in the comments below!
