Unlocking the power of content pillars by exploring varieties, strategies, and best practices for effective content marketing.
IE 370: A Deep Dive into the Different Types of Content Pillars
What are content pillars and why are they important?
We talked about what are content pillars and why they are part important because they help you be able to create these silos of information that allow your people to see you as the resource for your content solving the problem that your audience has.
Types of Content Pillars for Blog Content
How to
The how to is going to walk them from step A all the way to step Z until they have a completed project.
A DIY are how to’s and we think of one single blog post as a how to because you’re going to teach me how to go through and build a desk.
That’s not necessarily exactly what we’re talking about here.
A how to is going to be every piece of that desk.
So if you walk me through picking the wood for the desk and being able to put the pieces together.
And then, my next article may go through and talk to me about sanding a desk and what you are going to be looking for in putting on different hardware you’re going to pick out for the desk.
And then your next blog post is going to talk to me about the different types of stains, or how to go about painting it, or what you should be using.
All of the pieces of information that could spider off of a how to that’s going to teach me how to create my own desk.
Those are the content pillars, the how to of what we’re going to do.
And that’s an example just for DIY, but it could also be a food blogger.
For example, how to completely understand how to cook chicken multiple ways so that you can use it in a soup, whether you’re roasting it, whether you are going to put it in a crock pot, whether you’re going to boil it, whether you’re going to air fry it, all of the different ways.
A how to is being able to get from step A to step Z so they have the complete process
What is
The what is is going to go about explaining something thoroughly.
So if I didn’t understand homesteading gardening, that could be a content pillar where I’m going to give a complete explanation of how to to start a homesteading garden.
Now, of course, it’s not that basic, which is why it’s a content pillar, because you’re going to build upon that information, but you can see it’s not a how to.
It’s not a step A all the way to step Z.
There’s not a complete process. It’s an explanation of what is homestead gardening.
Guide
The guide is going to give me all the resources that I could potentially need in order to complete or do something or create a recipe.
An example of this could be Thanksgiving dinner.
The guide explains how to be able to plan to make sure that you have the complete Thanksgiving dinner.
And it’s going to give me all the different recipes and all the planning tips.
It will also give me all the things that I could potentially need in order to create the perfect Thanksgiving dinner.
That’s going to be that guide, and then again, it’s going to be a content pillar.
Resource
The resource could provide all of the different aspects that you’ve already created.
For example, I have a client actually that this works for, that has created a resource where she is a supervisor for psychologists in Texas and she has gone through and has created a resource with all of the psychologists that are play therapist for the Texas area.
And then she’s going to have a resource that talks about all of the psychologists in the Texas area that do marriage counseling.
It’s a resource that provides everything into one place.
A resource could also be if you were a travel blogger and you’re trying to give all of the information that you could potentially need in order to travel to Ireland.
What are all of the links that you would need to provide them with?
Types of Content Pillars for Email & Social Media Marketing
The types of content pillars for email and social media are going to be very similar.
Inspirational
You’re trying to inspire your people to want to clean their home or to want to spend more time with their significant other by doing date nights.
And you’re going to inspire them with that content.
It is going to give glimpses and stories.
It’s going to give you an opportunity to inspire them with the stories that you share in order to then send them to the blog content that you’ve created within those content pillars.
Educational
You’re going to teach them something within the content that you create as part of the educational content pillar.
And again, anytime that you are doing social media or email marketing, you want to have a call to action.
So when we’re looking at the educational piece, you hit on some pain points, you talk about how you can help them and show them that this is what the next step is and you have the call to action that’s going to send them to the blog post or that’s going to give them more information about it so that they can truly have their problem answered.
Entertaining
The third content pillar for email and social media is going to be entertainment.
So when we’re looking at this, how are you entertaining them?
What kind of stories are you telling them?
And again, always a call to action that’s going to have somewhere to send them.
You’re not completely entertaining them and telling them a story even if you’re doing a reel, you still want to have a call to action.
There still needs to be something that you are trying to get them to do so that you can actually measure the ROI of your efforts in what you are doing.
Advocacy
The fourth content pillar is going to be advocacy.
Some of you may talk about loss, or some of you may talk about body image.
This is where you’re going to come from that standpoint of advocating, but again, always a call to action within that.
You want to make sure that you are doing it from a point of what your tugs at your heart, what you value when you are advocating for something, and make sure that it ties into what you do.
You do not randomly want to start advocating for something that your people don’t understand where this is coming from.
You have to tie it back to what it is that you naturally talk about in your business.
So if you’re a DIYer and you want to be able to talk about helping foster families that are looking to bring new kids in, you can do that.
But you have to tie it in, you got to be able to tell those stories that show the reason why you’re advocating for that and how it’s still important to you and ties into your content and what you create.
Promotional
The last type of content pillar for email and social media marketing is promotional.
The purpose is to sell something.
It is a promotional email, it is a promotional social media post.
But again, it isn’t just simply buy this, do this now. We are not used car salesmen.
This is where you are hitting on the pain points, showing them that you solve it, and then offering a solution for them.
And again, for those that have ever heard me talk about sales, if you do not put it out there, you are being selfish because you are not fully helping the people that you could help.
So don’t think of it as I’m selling, I’m being promotional.
What you’re doing is taking them on a journey to see that you can solve the problem for them.
And in order to fully be able to do that, there’s only so much you can do through a blog post.
You need to be able to help them one on one through a product, an ebook, a course.
Whatever it looks like for you and the type of content that you create.
If you are someone who has listened to this episode and said, I really want to dig deeper into understanding my content and how I can better serve my audience, then I would highly recommend that you join the insiders group.
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