Imagine building without blueprints; creating content without a solid plan can lead to confusion among both you and your audience. Content pillars are those essential blueprints—key topics or themes that guide all your content creation across platforms like social media, blogs, and emails.
These pillars typically number between three to five core ideas that encapsulate what you stand for as a brand. They help maintain consistency in messaging while catering to the interests of those who matter most: your clients.
I’m going to share with you my approach to content pillars, and an idea for your blog that worked well for Rhodes Architecture + Light (RA+), one of my long-time clients. It’s something you can implement whether you do a Brand Discovery or not.
I had the benefit of performing a Brand Discovery for the firm before I joined as their contract marketing director. Being a little farther removed from the company allowed people to share openly. Once I became the marketing director, I used that report as the basis for my content pillars. Here’s how.
After about 5 interviews, patterns start to form in interviewee’s responses. By the time I’ve interviewed 15 or 20 clients, there’s a consensus on a single brand idea, and a handful of additional distinct, repeated attributes.
Once I’ve identified the patterns, I organize the quotes into content pillars. The content pillars are dictated by the core concepts that come out of the report, which I detail in the recommendations section.
These are going to be the content categories you talk the most about. In fact, you want to make sure any proposed copy falls into one of these categories, using them as guardrails to ensure you stay on brand.
The best part, your clients literally told you what to say. The brand idea, all the attributes people think of when they consider your firm–these are the key messages you want to amplify in your content.
I put RA+L’s content pillars right out there for the public to see. I incorporated them into the blog navigation as searchable topic areas, and I love the organization of it! There were over 70 posts just floating around in there before. Once I organized the topics by content pillar, I could see how well we were doing in terms of writing about what our clients said they care about during the discovery.
When I look at my content strategy worksheet, I can see immediately how many blog and social posts I have going on within each content pillar/subject area. This helps me stay balanced overall with content development and serves as a visual reminder to put emphasis on the single brand idea that differentiates the firm from the competition.
I hope this gave you some practical ideas you can use today with or without a Candid Brand Discovery™. I’d love to hear how you put your content pillars to work!
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