How to organise your content into user-friendly pillars
So, you’ve gone through the process of qualifying your content ideas and decided what you want to cover. However, to ensure maximum impact, you’ll need to figure out how you’re going to group this content together.
When we’ve generated a long list of content ideas for a new client at Inkwell, the first thing we do is organise them into groups. These groups are ‘content pillars’ – broad topics that your business cares about, but that also have resonance with your audience and provide them with added value.
Content pillars can bring many benefits, from providing focus and galvanising the marketing team’s efforts, to helping your audience self-identify with content and making it easy to explain your marketing strategy.
In this article, we’ll be looking at how you can organise your ideas into groups and cement a plan to publish the right content at the right time.
Figuring out your content topics
As you go through your ideas, natural themes should start to emerge. Note these down and allocate ideas to each one – a guideline is usually around four to six content pillars.
Accountancy firm The Wow Company is a great example of how you can utilise content pillars. They know that financial advice is important to their customers, so they produce a lot of content about this, with pillars on ‘tax advice’ and ‘growing my business’.
But, they also know it’s important to add colour to their content with real life examples and by talking about the things that matter to people as well as businesses.
Take time to go through your long list of ideas, thinking about the different ways you could organise them. You could do this with post-it notes, a whiteboard, a spreadsheet or a Trello board.
Whatever you use, try to find a way that allows you to move the contents of the column around until you’re happy with the pillars as an overarching framework. Once you’ve charted out your pillars, you’ll have a framework that all your content can hang within.
However, as time goes on, it’s quite common to come up with a new idea that doesn’t fit into your pillars. If this happens, question whether it’s relevant to your business and if so, revise the pillars again.
Bringing your content pillars to life
Once your ideas are organised into pillars, it’s time to flesh out how they will come to life. There are loads of different types of content, so it’s good to map out what would work best for each idea in advance.
Ask yourself these questions to guide the type of content that will work best for each idea:
Are we experts on this subject – or do we know someone who is?
How much do we have to say about this?
Do we have relevant real-life examples?
Do we know people who have experienced this, and would they be willing to talk about it?
Can we share lots of good resources on this subject?
For example, you may be marketing an HR outsourcing service. If you know two people who are willing to talk to you about how they changed their hiring process, then you have a ready-made case study at your fingertips.
Alternatively, if you’ve spoken at a public event on how to improve your hiring process, you’re well placed to write a long-form guide about it.
Here are a few examples of different types of content you might create if you’re a marketing manager at an HR company:
Personal stories: ‘How we helped our client develop a new onboarding strategy’
Case studies: ‘We improved our employee job descriptions and boosted staff retention’
Long-form guides: ‘How to build a watertight payroll system’
Listicles: ‘Top 10 ways to make sure you hire the right person’
Curated resources: ‘Best online apps for managing payroll’
News stories: ‘What the new Minimum Wage rates mean for your employees’
Topical stories: ‘Top five workplace stressors to tackle this Mental Health Week’
Evergreen content: Content that doesn’t date and can be promoted or published at any time
Go through your ideas and identify the most appropriate type of content for each one – this will be your primary content.
Mapping out your secondary content
Secondary content is essentially any content that you repurpose from primary content. It’s extremely valuable in helping you reach your marketing goals, without too much additional effort.
For instance, if you’ve spent time creating a guide or long-form post, it’s easy to reuse that hard work to create supporting marketing assets. Analyse the content you’ve created and then find ways to create additional secondary content from the same idea.
Perhaps your case study has given some useful advice that could be turned into a short top tips blog post? Or, you could pull out two or three quotes and turn them into branded visuals that can be posted on social media.
Finding ways to repurpose content, or the research you’ve done to create it, makes sure you’re getting the maximum value from your investment, and helps to reinforce the message you want to share with your audience.
Professional services companies will often have existing insight that they can leverage. Training materials and workshops, for example, can be easily turned into content marketing.
Hero, hub and hygiene approach
Another way to organise your content list is by taking the hero, hub and hygiene approach.
Hero content is the big, important stuff that will pull in a crowd – think videos or seasonal campaigns. It takes time to create, but the reach and awareness you generate should make it worth it.
Hub content targets a certain group and gives them something of value. It could be a useful blog post or a landing page on your website that curates lots of related content in one place, otherwise known as a learning hub.
Learning hubs are great for SEO because they tie a lot of content together around a popular topic. They’re sometimes called ‘push content’, as it’s pushed out to certain people who will find it helpful.
Hygiene content is content that goes out regularly and attracts people to your business. For this reason, it’s called ‘pull content’ and also includes social media content that’s always on.
By implementing this approach, you will be able to establish gaps in your content strategy which can help you decide what you should focus on to make it a success.
Want help to perfect your content pillars for your content marketing strategy? Inkwell’s here to help.
Visit our content strategy services page to learn more about what we do, see the impact we’ve made and to get in touch.
