Determining your content pillars is a thoughtful exercise and some of the topics may feel intuitive to you and may just need a little bit of refinement.
Your content pillars sit at the intersection of your expertise, your business/ services & what relates well with your audience. To help you determine your content pillars, start by identifying the following:
WHAT’S YOUR FOCUS WITH YOUR BUSINESS OR PERSONAL BRAND?
Think about what you offer (i.e. products, services) or the solutions that you provide for your audience. Identify topics that connect back to your offers and that support your revenue or other growth goals (i.e. audience growth, brand awareness or website traffic).
Your content pillars help you build a know, like, trust factor with your audience. They will help you stay focused and will allow you to anchor all of your relevant keywords, brand messaging, values, content ideas and expertise into your content strategy.
WHAT TOPICS YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE IS INTERESTED IN?
Refer back to the detailed audience personas to understand your target audience's preferences & interests, goals & aspirations, needs & wants and pain-points & challenges. Understand what resonates with them. Now, write down each of these points under each pillar in the Content Pillar database.
Once you have your 3-5 content pillars identified, add sub-topics to it.
<aside> <img src="/icons/asterisk_gray.svg" alt="/icons/asterisk_gray.svg" width="40px" /> WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CONTENT PILLARS AND SUBTOPICS?
Content pillars are the foundation of your messaging. Visually, consider your content pillars as a tree with different branches and your subtopics an extension from the tree.
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<aside> <img src="/icons/circle_gray.svg" alt="/icons/circle_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Go to Content pillars serve as the foundation of your content strategy, encompassing 3-5 main topic themes that resonate with your audience and align with your brand's message. Come up with your content pillars and sub topics within those main topics to build relevant content around. page and note down content pillars and sub-topics from points 1 & 2 above.
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RESEARCH CONTENT PILLARS & VALIDATE THE DEMAND
You want to ensure that the the topics you discuss are educational and valuable and address the needs and values of your target audience.
Once you have your 3-5 content pillars identified, you can do some research online and offline. Head to Answer the Public and enter a 1-2 words around a content pillar and you’ll get a bunch of inspiration of things people are searching for online.
Head to Pinterest or YouTube and do some research around topics related to your audience and niche that you can expand on. Enter some keywords and see which kind of searches and keywords autocomplete on the platforms. A little bit of research can help you hone in on content ideas for your content pillars and make content creation easier for you.
Head to Google and maximise Google’s autocomplete feature to help you identify some subtopics.
Be sure to list out your products and services and identify content that helps complement what you offer. You can create content that helps to answer frequently asked questions, solve a problem or help your audience overcome a challenge they are facing.
Create an opportunity for some in-person interactions with your audience. Ask your audience questions and get real-time feedback through networking events or through a call.
Another approach you can try is to survey your audience through email or by maximizing polls and stickers on social media to see how your audience responds to your questions.
You can also visit Facebook Groups or Quora to see which types of questions people are leaving in threads that are related to your content pillars.
<aside> <img src="/icons/circle_gray.svg" alt="/icons/circle_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Go to Follow your audience, look at what other creators are posting, what problems are being discussed in your niche, what are the trending keywords, news etc. and further filter out and add from findings from point 3 above.
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