A Mini Guide to Content Pillars for Small Businesses

 I'm sure you've heard the term 'content pillars' floating around whenever you work on your marketing - but what does it really mean? Here's my mini quick-start guide to content pillars and how you can use them in your small business marketing plan!

What is a Content Pillar?

Content Pillars are different categories or types of content that you’ll be posting. It helps to keep your strategy focused on things that resonate with your brand, which means you have guidelines to help you create content and your audience sees a consistent brand.

What should my pillars be?

Your pillars depend totally on your brand, your values, and your products or services. But they’re not fixed forever – having content pillars is a great way to see what works and what doesn’t. You can check in with your analytics and see which pillars are doing well with your audience, and which aren’t, so you can always change them to suit what works best.

So, how do you create your pillars? You’re looking for 3 or 4 broad categories (though not too broad – ‘fashion’ isn’t specific enough, but ‘vintage fashion’ is perfect), and each of these categories will have a few sub-types.

Example Case Study

Let’s look at an example: The Fakery (my pretend bakery) is a letterbox-friendly bakery that makes highly-decorated bakes, with a strong brand that’s all about fun and colour. Their content pillars could be...

1. Product Spotlights

2. Behind the Scenes

3. Fun & Engaging

and the sub-types might look like…

1. Product Spotlights: Bake of the week, introducing a new product, showing off a new decorating technique, highlighting a new flavour combo, showing a review of a product

2. Behind the Scenes: Day in the life vlog, tour of the bakery, packaging up a bunch of orders, showing how you make a component

3. Fun & Engaging: Putting your own spin on trends and popular audios, showcasing the personalities of your staff, a blind taste test, funny relatable moments or stories

Content pillars are a helpful way to streamline your content creation and help to create a strong brand. Any questions? Leave a comment and I’ll help you out!