5 Steps for Creating Effective Pillar Content

Content marketing is the major key to your digital marketing plan. It helps in attracting leads that you are unable to reach with other marketing techniques. Publishing blog posts or articles on your website is a great way to enhance your site’s SEO strategy and to create connections with your audience on a more personal level. Here are five steps for creating effective pillar content.

Pillar content can be defined as a series of posts that represent your site’s best work.

These are the posts your visitors will be attracted to, as well as the ones that will continue to be useful to readers.

I have used articles by ERIC SIU to illustrate the five steps. SIU once said that The Content Marketing Institute reports that 73% of B2B marketers think that blog posts and articles are the most effective content types for demand generation in the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, or the top of the sales funnel. And yet, only 27% rated their company’s content marketing efforts as extremely successful or very successful.

Content pillars are compulsory for marketers who want their companies to stand out from the crowd. When you want to develop your pillar content there are many things to think about which are research, planning, content creation, sharing, and engaging with your audience.

Creating a lot of high-quality content is not easy. There’s a big difference between a business blog that is uninformative posts and one that’s with the type of high-value content that naturally draws in readers.

Here are the 5 steps to developing successful pillar content

1.Understand Your Audience

Understanding who your audiences are is really important. Building pillar content for your blog or business blog is an opportunity to pour out your deepest thoughts and meaningful piece of advice to your readers.

Make sure your articles represent your business in the best way possible so that they can be of the greatest possible use to your readers.

Try to take a look at your social media analytics tools. Check out Google Analytics, and any customer databases you maintain in order to answer the following questions:

. Is my audience primarily male or female?

. What is the average age of my audience members?

.Which ethnic groups do my audience members belong to?

. Where are my audience members located geographically?

. What do I know about my audience’s average education level?

These questions will help you get some ideas about how to address your audience with your pillar content posts.

2. Identifying Your Reader’s Needs and Wants

Identifying your readers’ pressing needs is really important. it’s time to discover the issues that are on their minds, as understanding their pressing needs will help you to develop topics for each of your pillar posts.

Try to figure out what your readers are talking about on social media, read through their posts, and take a look at the topics they mentioned. This information should give you a starting point for producing your pillar articles.

If you are struggling to come up with topic ideas, try to take a look at the content pieces that are popular on other websites for directions. Make sure you don’t plagiarize.

3. Create Good Content

Creating good quality content helps to drive traffic towards your site and boosts overall awareness of your brand. Customers are interested in your content.

Headings are just as important as the content underneath them. Make sure your headings are catchy so as to attract customers to your blog.

ERIC SIU also said that it’s been said a zillion times before — but remember that 80% of people will read a headline while only 20% will click to read the rest of the blog post. Make your titles catching, intriguing, and informative — but forget the clickbait stuff.

The most important element of creating good content is making sure your content is original as possible. The reason for creating good content is to entice readers, engage them, and also to promote your blog and services.

4. Promote Your Content Regularly

Make sure you promote your content daily using different social platforms. Don’t forget the first place to distribute your content on is your website and have the content live there since it the place you want people to come and find out about your company and services you offer.

You can also promote your content on social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedln. These platforms help to attract more readers to your website.

Promoting your content helps in increasing traffic to your pages, don’t forget to share it with your followers and make sure you encourage them to share with their friends and families too.

5. Measure and Analyse

Don’t Just publish and forget about the content, you need to check if the content performed, or did it perform as you expected? You need to measure how well your content performs and make sure you try and analyze its process.

For you to measure the content marketing metrics, you should ask yourself these questions:

. How many page views does the content receive?

. What type of content is shared the most?

. What type of content is read the most?

. What keywords do people search for to find my content?

Then try to check for the answers so that you will have more data to analyze and use next time you create content.

Conclusion

Make sure you use these five pillars as a guide to help you create valuable content for your audience and continue to analyze and measure performance.

Building solid content pillars and then distributing portions of them through social media, businesses can begin to see real, indicate results from their content marketing efforts.