Excerpt from Gartner.com The original included several graphics to articulate the concept.
When content marketing isn’t aligned with both organizational goals and audience needs, it fails to affect business outcomes. Digital marketing leaders should use content pillars to help refine and focus content strategy into themes and create messages and assets that resonate with audiences.
Content is the fuel that powers channels. While channel spending has increased, investments in content and messaging have not kept pace, according to the 2023 Gartner CMO Spend and Strategy Survey. This strategy requires digital marketing leaders to be smarter with their spend by reusing high-performing assets and developing new content on known gaps and pivotal moments in the customer journey.
A strategic approach to content pillars guides content creators in aligning their work with business objectives. It eliminates the creation of a broad range of content on unrelated topics.
This framework offers marketers a roadmap to link long-term strategy to day-to-day planning, content development and execution. It will give you a step-by-step approach to developing your own content pillars, which your team can use to create messages and assets that resonate with audiences.
To develop content pillars, align your desired business outcomes with your customer needs and determine the connection point. Your content strategy will stay clear when you align customer needs with desired business outcomes.
Your content’s goal is to influence audience behavior in ways that help your business. Too often, when an organization doesn’t have a documented content strategy, random content replaces purposeful, focused communications.
Step 1: Define Content Marketing Objectives That Align With Business Values and Audience Needs
Effective content helps fulfill a company’s goals. A strong content strategy covers the topics your audience cares about and that your company addresses uniquely.
First, understand why you’re creating content. Many key motivators for creating content will be based on increasing profit and revenue. Content can help you achieve these goals by attracting and engaging customers.
Demonstrate how your content supports the business by starting with your business goals. Then, connect your desired business outcomes to your marketing objectives and to your content pillars. Focus your content pillars at the intersection of business and customer needs.
For example, Company A is a credit union. It wants to increase its revenue with current customers by increasing their awareness of more products. The customers seek information and advice on related financial topics. The credit union is uniquely positioned to create helpful, customer-centric content.
The credit union’s leadership first focuses on using the right language. Strategic digital marketers, instead of using single-word topics to describe their content (e.g., “innovative,” “sustainable”), use descriptive phrases to explain the brand’s value
The descriptive phrasing explains the brand value to customers. Company A selected three clear values it brings to its customers: simplifying financial decisions, helping members understand solutions and being a part of the same community. The last one is the most differentiating because it shows the organization has a vested interest in community success compared to large corporate banks.
Step 2: Use Content Pillars to Bridge Strategy and Execution
Once you’ve determined how your brand values can help fulfill customer needs, focus content creation on fulfilling pillar benefits and themes.
Pillar benefits are how you bring your value to life for the customer. You’ll need to articulate how you help the customer. In the example shown in Figure 2, Company A’s pillar benefits empower confidence and enable members to manage their finances properly. Those great customer benefits will also establish the credit union as an invaluable resource. The pillar benefits differentiate your organization in the market and will be the reason you’ll earn customers who stay loyal.
How to Choose the Appropriate Pillars
Craft a statement that addresses your audience directly, explaining how each pillar corresponds to a personal benefit, followed by themes describing how content will support that benefit. This format puts your audience’s needs first and keeps the focus there throughout the content development process.
A customer-centric approach to a brand definition, focusing on the personal benefits a customer receives, is three times more likely to drive a strong brand connection than an approach focusing on authentic values alone. This emphasis leads to better commercial results (see Position Your Brand to Drive Preference and Purchase).
Further, Company A’s knowledge of, and attention to, its customers informs the observation that its customers lack confidence in financial decision making; customers aren’t using all the products that might benefit them. The credit union thus aims to educate and empower its customers to feel confident using more products. Effectively addressing this personal need benefits both the credit union and the customer.
In this example, the pillar benefits help explain the credit union’s three prioritized themes:
Empowering confidence in financial choices: Content that educates members on financial products in general and on what differentiates the credit union’s approach in particular.
Enabling members to manage their finances properly: Content that explains how financial products work together to address member needs at different life stages.
Working together to build a stronger community: Content highlighting local charities, events and opportunities to invest in community growth.
The credit union’s pillar benefits and themes help its marketing team create compelling content by taking the focus off of general topics (the “what”) and putting it on the effect that its content should have on its audience (the strategic “why”). This approach helps the team identify relevant topics on an ongoing basis and guides messaging by focusing on customer needs.
In addition to carrying the strategic “why” of audience value into content creation and development, organizing your content around a central pillar is also an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. In SEO circles, “pillar content” is a strategy that focuses on topics rather than keywords (see Create Customer-Centric Content for SEO).
You may also hear pillars called content buckets, 10x content, cornerstone content or flagship content. The concept is to identify the broad topic(s) for which your customers have a need and create clusters of content based on that topic.
Pillar benefits and themes focus on the effect that content should have on customers, rather than on general topics.
Step 3: Identify Topics and Content
Your pillar topic is a broad description and a high-level category. Pillar topics can be core, evergreen content, while related discussions address very specific aspects of that topic. Content creation teams add related content continuously, often to engage timely topics or to answer specific questions.
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