As a business, you are more than likely working toward utilizing more than one social media platform to reach as many current and potential clients as you can. However, creating more than one piece of content to post on each platform is time-consuming.
Big and small businesses can relate to trying to take the perfect photo for the Instagram feed, blogging, and even perfecting their social media captions. Separately coming up with each post can be a lot to handle.
Doing so can also cause businesses to get off track as to who they are targeting and why they are creating content.
This is where content pillars come in.
What is a Content Pillar?
A content pillar is a large group of topics or themes that create the foundation for a business’s overall content strategy.
To put it simply, a content pillar is a piece of content with a specific theme or topic that can be broken into different sections and then posted on multiple social media platforms.
Each pillar oftentimes represents a specific and relevant topic for your target market. The pillars can be made up of blog posts, images, videos, or even tweets for your business.
This makes it easier to plan out content and reach out to as many potential clients as possible through the different social media channels.
For instance, content pillars are typically videos, blogs, or content pages.
Brands and businesses can benefit from using content pillars to improve their:
- Organization: to cover necessary topics for their business instead of on-the-spot content
- Targeting: to create specific content for your target audience(s)
- Ideation: to target relevant topics
That large piece of content can be turned into smaller pieces of content that can be used for various social media channels.
In order to maximize reach, businesses are encouraged to post on social media on a regular basis. Each piece of content that is posted should be interesting, engaging, and relevant to the businesses.
With pillaring, businesses can plan out their posts easier and long-term.
This eliminates the need to create multiple pieces of content for each marketing platform and dramatically ramps the level of content under your business brand.
When you focus on creating a single piece of content, or your content pillar, you will easily be able to break up the final product into infographics, blog posts, social media updates, emails, videos, and more to attract clients through each channel.
Planning Out Your Content Pillar
To create content pillars, you must establish their customer profiles and personas so they know who they are targeting.
The first step to creating a content pillar so you can share it on multiple platforms is to come up with a strategy on how you will get the most out of each section.
Each content pillar should appeal to the personas you have established. Think about it this way, content that is appealing to a millennial, might not be appealing to a baby boomer.
The content from each pillar can be repurposed and tweaked to appeal to the different audiences you may be targeting with your business.
Let’s take demonstrating expertise in a topic, like Xeriscape lawncare as an example.
The video footage can be used to demonstrate a Xeriscape technique or action that is easily posted on Youtube.
Now you can post small chunks of the video (snippets) on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
Sequential Posting
Following is the sequence of the posting. Without getting into excruciating detail on each topic, you can see a summary on how to pillar below.
Note: If you need to learn how to post on a social media platform, for example, Youtube, just Google “How to post on Youtube” and you can use several sources to figure out best practices for your company.
Sequential Pillar Posting:
- Youtube video, 3-8 minutes long on a technique.
- Post the video on your business Facebook account as well, uploaded directly to Facebook (don’t link to the Youtube video).
- Then post sixty-second cuts of the video on Instagram, and use a social media scheduler like Sprout or Hootsuite to schedule the sixty-second posts throughout the week
- Then post the same sixty-second videos on TikTok under your business name, using lots of #tags for Xeriscape and the procedure you are doing, make sure you emphasize your hometown with hashtags for your town, example #austin #xeriscape #waterusage #naturallawn, etc.
- Next convert the four-minute video into an audio file, using software like onlineconverter.com or VLC
- Next, post the video’s audio on to your podcast using software like Buzzsprout.
- Finally, convert the audio file into a text file using software like freefileconverterpro.com or 360converter.com. You’ll need to cut and paste the text into a Word document and then take about 15 minutes to edit it to make it logical from a written document standpoint.
- Now, post to your website blog;
- And then use the social media scheduler to schedule and send out five tweets over five days with information tidbits on Twitter.
- As well as Instagram posts.
- You can also take the text and post it on Facebook (make sure to have a disclosure on the bottom that says “Published previously on yourwebsite.com”
- Then create an email of the video and send it to your customer list and your prospect list, make sure to include the text version or blog link in the email.
Creating Content Pillars During a Crisis
A crisis can come about at any point so it’s important for your business to be prepared and proactive during this time.
You’re going to want to be careful on social media posting during a crisis.
Some customers or prospects will be adversely affected by the crisis and very sensitive to anything that they deem too cavalier.
So, make sure that your posting takes into account the current restrictions and controls at the time in the case of a virus epidemic. You don’t want to be showing a video of a crowd of your employees standing around and working on something, as an example.
Also, you don’t want to do any hard selling right now. It rings hollow. Focus on educating your customers about things they can do on their own. For example, if you are a plumber, do a video on fixing a leak. You’re not going to lose business in the future and people will think of you as someone that’s here to help.
Finally, consider doing a video on what the best practices are, during the epidemic, for performing your service to minimize contact or contamination.
Using the plumber example again, if it’s to show up at a house, have the occupants vacate, wear a mask and gloves, perform the repair, spray sanitary cleaner on the area, vacate the house and then have the occupants go back in. Shoot a video of that and post it.
People will appreciate the information and it will show you know what you are doing.
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