Building Effective Content Pillars: A Guide for Nigerian Brands -

Can you build a house without a pillar? No right. That’s exactly how it is with content. Content pillars serve as an essential part of your content strategy. In most cases, this content pillar depends on the individual and their brand, because different brands have different values and structures they want to portray to their audiences. In this article, we will explore the importance of content pillars and how to effectively establish them.

What Is a Content Pillar?

Content pillars are essentially the core themes or main topics that form the foundation of your online presence. They serve as the main subjects around which you create and organise your content. They are like a set of themes that your brand can use to create posts. Some brands also call these themes “buckets,” which are mostly specific to their brand and should reflect the most popular content with your online audience. These key themes generally fall under the promotional, educational, inspirational, and entertaining categories. They give your brand a roadmap to follow, ensuring that you are always creating content that is aligned with your business goals. The content pillar helps you stay organised and gives your followers a clear idea of what to expect from your social media accounts.

Key Points

Content pillars are the core themes or main topics that form the foundation of your online presence. They help you stay organized, maintain consistency, and align your content with your business goals.

The process involves assessing your interests, researching niches, aligning content to social media platforms, brainstorming relevant topics, creating high-quality content, and building a content bank.

Content pillars enhance brand awareness, visibility, SEO, engagement, and conversions. They also provide a structured approach to content creation, helping you generate ideas and maintain a steady flow of content.

Regularly collect data on reviews and feedback to tweak your content pillars, ensuring they remain relevant and engaging. This ongoing optimization helps you adapt to changing audience interests and improve your content strategy.

Having social media goals is one thing, but when you are in the mood for creating social media, you may sometimes forget why you are actually doing it. Having a specific theme or a core topic that each post or piece of content should align with can simplify the process of creating valuable content that supports social media goals. Content pillars bring a sense of organisation to your brand’s social media content approach and also make it easier for you to create your content calendar. It can also help to maintain your brand’s consistency across different social media platforms, giving your brand a strong identity. Your customers can quickly learn what to expect and also follow along with your brand story if you actually create content that belongs to your brand.

They are also very important for building brand awareness and visibility, SEO, increasing engagement, and driving conversions. By creating high-quality, informative, and engaging content around your content pillars, you can attract more followers and ultimately drive more traffic to your sites. If you are able to define your content pillar and create contents that align with them, you can control how you appear in search engines by creating content that matches certain categories and keywords relevant to your content.

It can also serve as a source of inspiration so that you can consistently and continuously generate ideas with fewer gaps or blocks between them. So instead of posting just anything or everything you can possibly lay your hands on, a content pillar helps you create attractive and educational content for your target audience.

Creating a content pillar is very necessary for setting a strong foundation for a building. It helps you to establish a clear, organised framework from which all your content will branch out. The following are steps to create your content pillars:

#1. Assess Your Interest

The first thing to do is identify a topic you are interested in and have vast knowledge of. You can’t create content about something you don’t know about. One thing that will help with your consistency is that if you pick something you are interested in, that’s a topic you actually like. In a situation where you like this topic but don’t know much about it, don’t rush into creating half-baked content. Take your time and learn about it. Assessing your interest is where the theory of in-out and out-in comes into play.

Out-in

Start with the broader terms that stir your interest, and drill down to find a niche within that broader category. For example, if you are into electric bulbs, you can find your niche in “rare electric bulbs made in Nigeria.”

In-Out

If you have any particular idea, find the broader category they fall under to ensure you have many ideas to draw from in the future. For creators that get extremely popular on one topic, this strategy can help you find the broader category that your content belongs to.

#2. Research the Niches That You Have Picked

You have finally picked your niche; that’s great. Now, what does your audience have an interest in and how does it align with your identified topics? These are things you need to research and understand. Look at what topics others are covering in your field and identify gaps or unique angles you can explore. Before you start creating any content, it is very essential that you identify your target audience’s pain points and needs. Understanding your audience persona is crucial to creating content that connects with the target audience and drives engagement.

You also need to choose the most suitable content distribution channel that will be relevant to you. Each social media platform has its own unique strengths and limitations, and your content type should always align with the platform’s best practices and user behaviour.

For example, if your target audience is usually on TikTok, your social media content pillar might include visually appealing posts, behind-the-scenes footage, and user-generated content.

#4. Brainstorming Your Topics

When creating content, you should aim to be relevant without being irresponsible or fickle. It is very okay to create content based on the trending topic, but while doing that, ensure that the particular topic embodies your mission and withstands the changing tides of social media trends. This simply means that the content you are creating should be able to remain stable, effective, and relevant despite the often rapid and constant changes in social media trends. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs to identify high-volume, low-competition keywords that content can target.

#4. Create, Publish and Distribute High-Quality Content

Since you have your keywords and core topic, it is finally time for you to create high-quality, educational, and engaging content. You should always make sure your content is educational, informative, engaging, entertaining, and visually appealing. You should try using storytelling techniques to hook your audience. But creating the content is just half the battle. You need to promote your content using various channels, which can be paid channels, owned channels, or earned channels. You can share them on your social media profile, in email newsletters or through influencer marketing.

#5. Craft Your Content Pillars

While on this, you can create as many as 3–5 content pillars. These pillars should have branches like the trunk of a tree in order to accommodate various questions, analyses and conversations. When creating a social media pillar, it is also very important to consider the different platforms on which you will be sharing your content. You will always need to adapt and repurpose your content for each platform. This will allow you to reach different audiences on different platforms and maximise your content’s reach and impact. Use your pillars to diversify your content across different formats and platforms. This simply means using core topics that are central to your brand and creating content based on those core topics. The different platforms can include blogs, videos, podcasts, and social media posts.

To streamline the process of crafting your content pillars, consider using a structured template. This template will guide you through each step, ensuring you don’t miss any crucial elements. Here’s a simple Content Pillar Development Template to help you get started:

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Content Pillars.PDF

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#6. Build a Content Bank

A content bank is just a place where brands or individuals store various pieces of content that can be used for marketing and social media blogging. This content bank can include any form of content material, such as videos, pictures, infographics, blog posts, etc. For each pillar, build a content bank that will ensure you have a reservoir of content to pull from.

#7. Engage the Audience and Analyze Content Performance

Try to engage your audience; this will make it easier for you to understand their responses to your content pillars and also make some adjustments if there is a need to. Monitor analytics to see which topics are resonating and optimise your strategies accordingly. It is very essential to measure and analyse your social media content pillars’ performance to refine your strategy and optimise your results. Tools like Google Analytics or Story Chief can help you track your audience growth, engagement, impressions and traffic

#8. Continue to Optimize Your Pillar

As you collect more data on reviews and feedback, revisit and tweak your content pillars to ensure they remain relevant and engaging. This regular collection of data on feedback and review will give you insights into your customer’s needs, preferences, and pain points. Always review the data to be sure it still aligns with the audience’s interests to enable you to adjust if there is a need.

Through this structured approach, you are not just pasting anything randomly; you are creating content that provides value, engages your audience, and sets your brand apart in a crowded social media space.

The following are a few examples of content pillars for popular marketing brands:. They include:

Hubspot:

Hubspot’s social media content pillars include ebooks, blog posts, customer service, courses on topics like inbound marketing and webinars. Their content is also very informative, data-driven, and visually appealing, making it shareable and engaging.

Buzzfeed:

Buzzfeed’s social media content pillar includes listicles, quizzes, video pop culture, entertainment, and news. Their content is highly shareable and appeals to a wide range of audiences, making them one of the most popular social media brands.

Sales forces

Sales Force is a cloud-based customer relationship management software company. Their social media content pillars include digital transformation, customer success stories, and thought leadership on the future of business technology.

You have done well by defining and creating your own content pillar. But what about creating the content? Do you have plans on how to do it? Creating high-quality content for your social media with a content pillar is easy, but not as easy as we think. You can’t create content if you don’t plan well. Creating content is time-consuming and requires energy. But if you plan for yourself like I do, you won’t have to experience many difficulties along the way. So how do I plan for myself? By using a content calendar. A content calendar helps you schedule and plan your posts in advance, thereby reducing the pressure on you and saving you more time.

For outlining the topics I will cover and making notes of any important dates and potential trends to join, most times I make use of Google Sheets. You can try Asana as well.

I came across a great tool that can be used to showcase any content you have created. The name of the social media management tool will be revealed later. Later, you can see all your content along with your upcoming posts on Instagram, Facebook, X, Pinterest, and TikTok. For me, it is the best tool to use to check your content before it goes live.

Scheduling your content calendar is another way to offer support to your brand’s after-development pillars. There are a lot of social media management tools that can be used for scheduling your social media content.

How Many Content Pillars Should You Have?

The 3-5 pillars should be broader enough to give some flexibility in content creation but specific enough to keep your content focused on the brand. Aim for 3–5 pillars to guide your content creation.

How Long Should a Content Pillar Be?

While traditional blog posts can be anywhere from 500 to 2000+ words, depending on your goals, pillar pages typically clock in around 5,000 to 10,000 words.

What Is 10X Content?

10x content is a term used in content marketing to describe content that needs to be 10 times as good as the content that is already ranking for a given keyword or topic.

Conclusion

If you want to level up your brand’s social media strategy, try adding a content pillar to your strategy, and you won’t regret it. Be strategic in your approach by carrying out competitor research, auditing brands’ social media channels, and, most importantly, using your brand’s marketing persona to guide every piece of content you create for social media. Content pillars not only lay the foundation for your social media posts; they will also help you feel more strategic about your content.

Building Effective Content Pillars: A Guide for Nigerian Brands

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What Is a Content Pillar?