23 Mar 5 Steps to Developing Successful Pillar Content
Content pillars are a must-have for marketers who want their companies to stand out from the crowd. There are so many things to think about when developing pillar content – research, planning, content creation, sharing and of course engaging with your audience. That’s why I’ve broken it down to 5 key areas – to help you to build a strong foundation for your content.
And if you are still in doubt as to whether it’s worth getting into social media for the business there’s no need. Social media is no longer the poor relative of marketing channels and has now matured into a fully fledged part of all effective digital marketing strategies.
In the content pillar process, we define a thorough, intensive content asset (such as a blog article, video, or podcast) that can effectively answer and solve the problem, then create relevant, assets for multiple platforms.
This project I am currently working on for HR Ignite requires me to create great content for them to be able to post it on their different social media platforms. And this approach takes some work, and requires a fair bit of content, but will spread your image across a larger audience that if you simply use one of these social media.
Here are the four content pillars for HR Ignite and their subcategories :
Advisor and consultant
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- Ensure Fairness & Consistency
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- Interpret Policies/Laws
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- Employee Advocate; Management Resource
- Monitor for Harassment, and Discrimination
HR core competencies
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- Recruiting
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- Training
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- Benefits
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- Compensation
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- Safety
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- Employee Relations
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- Employment Law
- Policies
Ensure Compliance
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- Required Internal Documentation e.g, company-specific required training, safety, policies, tracking” systems.
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- State Licensing Requirements,(Security Licenses)
- State and Federal Laws (employers required to abide by and, employment decisions must consider
Human Connection
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- Help navigate “HR” world; HR questions.
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- Serious personal issues
- Provide resources (legal, housing, training..)
1. Understand Your Audience
Before you begin to create your content, you need to understand for whom you are writing for, are your business to business or Business to a customer? below are few questions to help you answer this question
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- Who is your current customer?
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- Who is your potential customer?
- Who would find your content useful?
To answer this, You need to understand the types of pressing needs your audience has.
Once you have the personas in place, use them to create content and solve problems. The key to your content is to help your customers help themselves, and the only way to do that is to understand your audience. If you do not understand your audience, your content will fail.
2. Identify Your Readers’ Most Pressing Needs
Need to create content to meet the needs of your prospects at each stage to help them move to the next stage of the funnel.
HR Ignite target Audience
Target Audience (Start Up)
Company – new, recently created. To differentiate from the competition, startups need to be very innovative.
Growth – startups need to grow quickly, the company’s activities occur around a single product/services. In startups, economic resources, human and physical are usually extremely limited. Generally, need financial resources from investors
Startups deal with many uncertainties from a different view. Due to innovation and the various uncertainties involved, the failure rate is high. Startups often are very dynamic and able to react quickly to market changes, new technologies, and competitive products
Target Audience ( HR Director)
- Have strong time management skills, Highly organized
- Good Communicator – have strong communication skills
- Problem Solver
- Must exhibit leadership skills, be assertive and optimistic. Should also have exceptional organizational skills
Target Audience ( Small companies)
- Personal Character/ owner management
- Limited Investment
- Unorganized labor
- Labour intensives
This is the most pressing needs these audiences are facing
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- Faulty planning
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- Lack of trained personnel
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- Workforce Training and Development
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- Understanding Benefits Packages
- Compensation
3. Create Good Content
Having a quality content calendar is very useful in helping to spread your content daily and drive traffic towards your site and boost overall awareness of your brand. However, it is the content that keeps a visitor interested.
Your article/post is about and summing each section up with a catchy phrase as a caption. Website visitors are liable to scanning a text for key information before they fully commit to reading it, so in many ways, headings are just as important as the text underneath them.
One of the most important elements of creating good content is ensuring that it is as original as possible. The aim of content should always be to entice readers and engage them, whilst also being able to promote your message/service/product. You need to think about the different types of people who will be visiting your site and tailor your content based on this.
Here is an example of content created for HR Ignite to help with daily post promotion about the services they offer and more info about the company.
4. Promote Your Content Regularly
HR Ignite promotes their content daily using different social media platforms. But the first platform that they distribute content on, is their website and have the content live there since that is the place they want people to come and find out more about their company and services offered.
They always promote their content daily on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn.
is always a good platform to drive engagement with your content so people can be able to engage with you about your content and the company.
has a big number of people that interact with, you can be able to reach a piece of that market.
Feel free to promote the same series of posts over and over again. And if you’ve carried out your research and content creation processes correctly, these articles should continue to have enduring value to your audience.
Check out other social media platforms you can use to promote your content like:
Linkedin is that social media platform that focuses on professionals and what they do. It seems to be a platform that most people associate with getting jobs and engaging with their networks and building the network, but it can be more than just that since It’s a good platform to educate your prospects about your product or service.
Tumblr
Is a very easy platform that you can put whatever you want on it, blogs, stories, photos, GIFs, TV shows and links. Tumblr is one of the famous blogging platforms, but it is more than just a blogging platform since you have a profile that you can use to share content and engage with other users.
Quora
Quora is a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. Content is generally created to solve a problem thus Quora is a good platform to distribute content to people who have a question that your content is answering.
5. Measure And Analyse
It’s easy to click “publish” and forget about content, but that’s where a lot of content marketers go wrong. Did the content perform well? Did the content perform as you expected? You need to measure how well your content performs and analyze its progress.
To measure the content marketing success metrics, ask yourself these questions:
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- How many page views does the content receive?
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- What type of content is shared the most?
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- What type of content is read the most?
- What keywords do people search for to find my content?
Once you can answer those questions, you will have much more data to analyze and use for the next time you create content.
Conclusion
The tips in this post will save you the months of guesswork and continuous optimization that I had to undergo. Use these five pillars as a guide to help you create valuable content for your audience and continue to measure and analyze performance.
Successfully managing a social media platform is a matter of following the 5 Pillars on a regular basis. The good news is you are able to tackle the power of social media has to change your business. The bad news is that it will require much commitment and focus.
Like many things in life, the outcome is primarily determined by you. By your ability to take action on each of the five Pillars. By your ability to grow, post, engage, report, and repeat.
As I mentioned, most content marketing efforts fail. But when done right, they can transform your business and turn your website into a traffic and lead-generation machine. By implementing a successful content marketing strategy.
By 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.