So, we’re going to explore eight types of content pillars and assess how they should be used. But first, let’s have a definition and see how content buckets can further streamline your content creation process.

What are content pillars?

OK, so there are a lot of social media platforms and a lot of users out there.

The social media sphere is bulging with a huge diversity of voices. It can be tricky to cut through and seek out your audience. One way is to create and maintain a specific voice, like using a particular distinctive instrument in a band or using a certain channel on the radio. By sticking to this voice, you can hope to attract like minded followers and keep them close.

Content pillars are the foundation of a successful social media content strategy, enabling businesses to create relevant and engaging content that resonates with their target audience. By establishing key themes and topics, companies can develop a consistent brand voice and tone across all social media channels, ultimately driving engagement and conversions. Effective content pillars are crucial for creating a solid social media presence, and their importance cannot be overstated.

To create effective content pillars, businesses must conduct thorough audience research, identifying their target audience’s interests, needs, and pain points. This information will serve as the basis for developing core themes that align with the brand’s values and mission. By understanding what your audience cares about, you can tailor your content to meet their expectations, ensuring that your social media posts are both relevant and engaging.

Creating content pillars is essential in structuring social media content effectively. By planning content pillars in alignment with your brand’s values, you can maintain authenticity while allowing for creative experimentation within those established boundaries. Additionally, sharing your brand story helps in building trust and loyalty by emphasizing leadership and personal connections.

Content pillars are a way of maintaining that voice. They’re simple terms that define what you do with your social media output. You can think of them as topics that you concentrate on.

You can also think of them as buckets of ideas unified by a single term. For instance, you might have content pillars called quite general things like “entertain.” Or more specific names like “privileged access.”

You can use them in all of your output, from Facebook posts to helping you with landing page best practices. For this reason, they’re a vital tool in your marketing. By conducting a social media audit, you can evaluate the effectiveness of different types of content and refine your brand’s content pillars based on what resonates with your audience.

Understanding business goals

Understanding business goals is crucial for creating effective social media content pillars. Business goals can range from increasing brand awareness and driving website traffic to generating leads and boosting sales. To create content pillars that align with these goals and the brand’s mission, social media marketers must first identify the key objectives of the company. This involves conducting thorough market research, analyzing industry trends, and understanding the target audience’s needs and preferences.

Aligning content with the brand’s values is equally important. By doing so, social media marketers can foster transparency, deepen audience connections, and ensure authenticity in their social media presence, ultimately enhancing trust and loyalty among customers.

By aligning content pillars with business goals, social media marketers can create a focused and consistent content strategy that drives engagement and conversions. For instance, a company aiming to increase brand awareness might develop content pillars around educational content, industry insights, and customer success stories. This approach not only keeps the content relevant and engaging but also ensures that it supports the overarching business objectives.

Creating a content pillar strategy

Developing a content pillar strategy involves several key steps, including defining the brand’s mission and values, identifying the target audience, and conducting keyword research to determine relevant topics and themes. Start by clearly articulating your brand’s mission and core values, as these will serve as the guiding principles for your content.

Next, identify your target audience by conducting audience research. Understand their demographics, interests, and pain points. This will help you create content that resonates with them. Conduct keyword research to find relevant topics that your audience is searching for, ensuring that your content is discoverable.

Create a clear structure for your content pillar plan, including a list of pillar ideas and a brief description of each. Develop a content calendar to plan and schedule content in advance, ensuring consistency and efficiency. By creating a comprehensive content pillar strategy, businesses can establish a strong brand identity, drive engagement, and ultimately achieve their business goals. A well-planned content pillar strategy will also enable companies to measure their results and adjust their approach as needed, ensuring continuous improvement and optimization.

How content pillars ensure consistent social media branding

Whichever content pillars you stick with, the important thing is just that — stick with them. Think of them like the bumpers at a bowling alley. Without them, a kid or a beginner will quickly hit the gutters, and their game will be over. With them, what was an impossible game becomes manageable — even winnable.

You can think of them as reminders of what you set out to do in the first place. With the best will in the world, it’s possible sometimes to forget this. Oftentimes, you can go a little off course as you stretch for originality. The trouble, then, is that what you were known for and why people tuned into you suddenly takes a backseat.

Think of a brand with an Instagram marketing strategy comprising health and wellness posts. It covers subjects like good diet and exercise ideas. People go there for tips on staying in good shape.

Imagine their surprise and confusion if they find there adverts about the best donuts available right now. People will either think the site’s gotten hacked or it’s done a complete 180. Either way, they may not return.

You can use social media content pillars with other tools to ensure success. A great example is Sotrender, which gives you all the KPI information you need to assess the effectiveness of your social media output. In this way, you can tweak content pillars and get instant insights into the results.

Creating relevant content that aligns with your content pillars ensures that your audience receives valuable and informative material, fostering engagement and loyalty.

Role of social media marketers

Social media marketing professionals play a vital role in creating and implementing social media content pillars. Their primary responsibility is to develop a content strategy that aligns with the company’s business goals and resonates with the target audience. This involves conducting keyword research, analyzing industry trends, and creating content that is both relevant and engaging.

Social media campaigns are essential for maintaining brand consistency, engaging audiences, and driving conversions. Well-planned content aligned with these campaigns can significantly enhance online presence and lead generation.

Staying up-to-date with the latest social media trends and algorithm changes is also crucial for social media marketers. This ensures that their content remains visible and engaging across different social media platforms. Additionally, social media marketers must be adept at measuring the performance of their content and adjusting their strategy accordingly. By creating effective content pillars, social media marketers can help businesses build a strong brand identity, increase engagement, and drive conversions.

8 strategic content pillars for consistent social media branding

Let’s look at some content pillars you can use to make your social media branding keep singing with the same voice. 

Brand values and mission

Go back to the start. What is the brand, at heart, intended to deliver? It could be anything. It could be selling pet products or catering to the needs of salespeople.

Whether it’s lead prospecting for choosy dog owners or lead prospecting for ambitious sales professionals, you need to build on what you’re known for. This then is a central social media content pillar: stay true to the brand’s mission, values, and core identity.

Industry insights and trends

OK, so you need to stay true to your brand values and mission. But you should also stay in touch with changes, developments, and trends. This is how brands like HubSpot stay in business. They look at what needs arise and make themselves a useful resource to meet those needs.

Sharing industry news is crucial for keeping your audience informed about significant developments, trends, and innovations within your sector. This helps establish your brand as a leader and keeps your followers engaged.

Use a tool like Google Trends to keep up-to-date. Combine this with generative AI, and you’re onto a winner. What is generative AI, and how does it work? It’s an automated tool that gives you content in an instant.

User-generated content

Here’s one of the best social media content pillars you can employ. UGC is popular, exciting, and — super-important — cheap. Incorporate UGC into your content pillar set-up, and you’ll never be short of new ideas and fresh material.

Sharing customer stories is crucial for enhancing trust and credibility, as real-life experiences from satisfied customers can strengthen brand-audience connections and foster community through user-generated content.

Obviously, you need to use it in conjunction with your other content pillars. Only use UGC if it furthers your brand voice, provides valuable insights, and enables your brand to stay consistent.

Product or service highlights

One of the best things about social media is that it can package up product information in an entertaining and easy-to-digest format, creating engaging content that captures the audience’s attention. Emphasize the fun, and you’ll get the best out of what social media can offer your brand. This is true whatever you’re selling, from automated lead generation to automated drinks dispensing.

Behind-the-scenes content

People love to feel privileged. That’s often why they follow somebody. They opt in to enjoy certain benefits. It might just be a cache kind of deal. Or they might involve more concrete benefits, like behind-the-scenes content. This is a potent content pillar for two reasons. Firstly, it’s interesting to see what goes on behind the curtain. And secondly, there’s lots of material available for you to use, including ad out-takes, which helps in creating relevant and engaging content.

Additionally, incorporating community stories into your content strategy can significantly enhance audience engagement by sharing narratives that resonate with local or national communities, thereby appealing to a wider array of followers.

Educational content

Numerous organizations maintain an educational content pillar, from the BBC to a small business tips site like Buffer.

It’s a very useful content pillar. This is because when you concentrate on education, you automatically add value to whatever content you’re putting out there. Think to yourself, “What facts is this material designed to impart?.” By concentrating on this, your brand’s educational profile will remain consistent. Highlighting sustainability initiatives in your educational content can attract environmentally-conscious travelers and position your brand as responsible and environmentally-aware. Providing educational tips can further enhance this value by offering practical insights and resources that engage your audience and establish your credibility.

Inspirational and motivational posts

Giving someone a lift that’s what we’re looking at here to achieve the most engagement. For many, certain phases in life or challenging circumstances present real difficulties. These can be eased with the right pithy phrasing to inject some can-do into somebody’s toolkit. Your site can get an inspiring name for itself by making motivational posts one of its content pillars.

Seasonal and timely content

We mentioned the importance of staying on top of trends above. Another way of keeping your content fresh is to fill your social media with seasonal and timely content. For instance, some brands (like Coca-Cola, for instance) are especially associated with Christmas.

Consequently, to maintain brand consistency, it’s vital that they come out with something memorable for the holiday season.

Best practices when developing your content pillars

Wondering how to create social media content pillars and then deploy and perfect them? A well-defined social media content strategy is crucial for content planning and maintaining consistency in your brand messaging. Let’s find out.

Research and address audience needs and preferences

One thing’s for sure — you can’t develop your content pillars in a vacuum. You don’t create them in lab conditions where it’s just you and your theories.

To construct social media content pillars that will zing with your audience, you need to conduct audience research to see what it is they want to see. Who’s your target audience? What are their concerns? What problems can you solve for them? How can you align your content with your audience’s interests?

Use relevant keywords to improve SEO visibility

When considering how to create content pillars, you need to consider visibility. That’s right. We’re talking SEO. There are lots of ways to do this, including content value and structure.

However, a hugely significant method is to place keywords relevant to your content in your piece. This is among the most popular SEO strategies.

Use a research tool to generate relevant keywords. Then work on inserting them into your material in a natural and non-jarring manner.

Define the scope and depth of each pillar topic

Quite often, you’ll have pillars that can seem a little contradictory or unfocused when viewed in combination. By using specific themes to structure your content creation efforts, you can better align them with your brand goals.

For these times, you need to establish which content pillar is the one to take precedence. And you need to decide how deep you want to go with each one. What can be fascinating can quickly become discouragingly niche if you’re not careful.

Diversify content formats and use a content calendar

It’s good to diversify across multiple platforms. Although you want to establish brand consistency, there are limits. If your brand becomes known for text-heavy expositions alone, you’ll end up putting off many potential followers.

Instagram content pillars are crucial in diversifying content formats, ensuring that your feed remains engaging and varied.

Different people enjoy different kinds of content, so appeal to as wide an audience as possible by mixing it up a little. And stay on top of your output blend by spacing things out on a content calendar.

Ensure pillars are scalable and adaptable to changes

You may find that you want to scale pillars up or down when circumstances change, and effective social media management can play a crucial role in this process. Your demand planning operation might predict an uptick in interest in a certain product.

In this case, you might want to promote the product information pillar. More broadly, you might detect a lurch toward UGC across some influential social media sites, so you might want to do the same. Or seek a distinctive identity by scaling up another pillar, which leads us to the next point.

Analyze competitors to differentiate your content

There’s a lot to be said for providing valuable insights. This is what gives us unique value. Say there’s a preponderance of brands out there using educational content pillars. You might decide to concentrate on inspirational pillars instead.

Or, perhaps more effectively, look at your competitors, and apply a fresh combination. Think about how you can combine an educational content pillar with, say, a UGC content pillar.

Measure performance and adjust strategy

Measuring the performance of social media content pillars is crucial for adjusting the strategy and optimizing results. Social media marketers must track key metrics such as engagement, reach, and conversions to understand what’s working and what’s not, aiming for more engagement by creating entertaining content. This involves using social media analytics tools like Sotrender to monitor the performance of individual posts, stories, and campaigns.

By analyzing these metrics, social media marketers can identify areas for improvement and adjust their content pillar strategy accordingly. For example, if a particular content pillar is not performing well, social media marketers may need to adjust the keywords, hashtags, or content themes to better resonate with the target audience. By continuously measuring and adjusting the strategy, social media marketers can ensure that their content pillars remain relevant, engaging, and effective in driving business results.

Key takeaways

Content pillars are a terrific way to plot a course that’s true to your brand identity and build brand loyalty. We live in an era of confusing and inconsistent messages. Among this chaos, nothing cuts through like consistency. This is what social media content pillars will deliver for you.

Adhere to content pillars in your social media messaging, and your output will stay fresh and valuable. And you’ll give your followers no nasty or frankly baffling surprises.