In architecture, pillars provide reliable, essential support to a structure. Content pillars can play a similar role in your content marketing efforts, providing a strategic framework for years to come.
A content pillar strategy can also ensure consistency in your messaging, make content creation more efficient, and better engage your target audience. Here’s more about content pillars and how to apply them to your content strategy across multiple channels.
What is a content pillar?
A content pillar is a key theme or topic that guides the content you create for your brand’s social media channels, blogs, and emails. Often called “content buckets,” they outline the categories that each piece of content falls into so you can keep your content fresh and focused on relevant topics. Content pillars are rooted in your business’s expertise, mission, and values—plus what your audience wants to engage with. When you establish content pillars, you don’t have to guess what you’ll create every month; filling your content calendar with new ideas becomes easy because you have pre-defined pillars to support.
Some content pillar examples for a company that sells sustainably made t-shirts would be sustainable fashion guides, t-shirt trends and history explainers, styling how-tos, and t-shirt testimonials.
What is the hub and spoke content pillar model?
“Hub and spoke” is an approach to building out your content pillars from broader topics or themes to detailed content clusters that expand upon the ideas in each pillar. It’s an accessible way to put content pillars into practice and get content in your pipeline.
In the hub and spoke model, your pillars are the hubs (the center of a wheel) and your subtopics are the spokes (radiating out from the hub). A piece of hub content and its surrounding spokes create what’s called cluster content.
Here’s the hub and spoke model applied to the sustainable t-shirt content theme, with the hubs bolded:
- Sustainable fashion guides. The spokes are natural dying practices, low-waste patterns, and recycled fabrics.
- T-shirt trends and history explainers. The spokes are the first white t-shirt, the history of t-shirt collars, and a t-shirt trends review.
- T-shirt styling how-tos. The spokes are how-to guides for casual and dressy occasions.
Content clusters
Content clusters help you build topical authority—your business’s reputation as a trusted source on subjects related to your industry. By focusing on well-defined content pillars—the main themes you consistently address—search engines can recognize your authority on these topics, potentially improving your search rankings. As you complete clusters, they grow into an ecosystem of content that shows your brand’s depth and breadth of knowledge to Google, and therefore, to audiences.
Clusters also give you the opportunity to interlink your articles, which gives your site visitors an interconnected web of helpful content. For example, in an article about natural dyeing processes, you could link to another article about t-shirt color trends, helping the reader dig deeper into a topic that interests them and discover more useful content on your site. The more tightly woven and extensive your content web, the more time visitors will spend on your online store.
Types of content pillars
Here are the common types of pillars to give your content topics structure:
Guide
Guides provide an overview of a pillar topic, serving as a one-stop shop for the audience. While guides can link to additional subtopic content for further learning, they should answer all of the audience’s top-level questions, providing a 101-course-style education. Ideally, use the guide as a hub with “spoke” content that builds on this foundational knowledge. Well-written guides are often evergreen, meaning they offer timeless information that remains true and doesn’t require frequent updates.
In the sustainable t-shirt example, a guide might be “The A to Z Guide to Sustainable Fashion: Avocado Pit Dyes to Zero Waste Patterns.”
What is
Whereas guides offer an overview on a topic, articles in the “What is” or “explainer” pillar type define or explain a pillar topic in depth, usually in a long-form article. Picture someone typing a question into a search engine that starts with “what is” and imagine how your content could offer a thorough definition and leave them confident about their understanding of the topic.
For complex topics, spoke articles linked from the “What is” section allow readers to delve deeper on important details. If you find a section of your “What is” article getting long, it may signal that the explanation deserves its own article.
For the sustainable t-shirt company, a “What is” article could be, “What Is the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) in Sustainable Fashion and Why Does it Matter?” The article could branch into spokes exploring GOTS certification across different textile industries or examining how GOTS influences pricing in fashion.
How to
The “How to” pillar type follows a tutorial-style format that walks the audience through solving a problem or completing a task. It’s especially well-suited to video content but also works well as a long-form article with detailed examples.
For the sustainable t-shirt business, a “How to” content piece could be, “How to Remove Ketchup Stains from T-Shirts” or “How to Style a T-Shirt from Day to Night.” This type of content is often a step-by-step guide rather than an overview.
How to develop a content pillar strategy for your blog
Here’s how to get started on your content pillar strategy or refine your current approach:
1. Do research
Understand your target audience and their needs. If you know what questions they want answered, you can develop content pillars around these topics. If you don’t have the tools to learn what your target audiences want—or don’t have an audience yet—create a persona of your ideal customer and envision what they need to know to appreciate the value of your product.
Some other options to jumpstart your research:
- Invest in keyword research. Use SEO tools that look at search volume for target keywords and phrases to learn what your customer base is searching for. Ranking at the top of search engine results pages for these keywords can help you reach a wider audience.
- Conduct competitor research. Grasp industry trends and see what strategies could enhance your brand’s content pillars. If you notice a missing topic cluster after conducting a competitive analysis, create high-quality content that fills the void.
- Audit your existing content. If you have any standout topics or notice patterns in audience engagement with web pages or specific themes, consider these as potential pillar content pages.
2. Define pillars
Once you’ve done your research, create content pillars and define what they cover. Align them with important topics in your business, industry trends, your company mission, brand values, or important information you think your audience needs to understand your product. You can even create pillar pages—pages dedicated to a single pillar topic that links to articles that support that pillar. For example, the Shopify blog features a “Starting Up” pillar page dedicated to content for small business owners starting their entrepreneurial journey.
Keep an eye out for pillar topics that become too niche, which may indicate the idea is better served by a dedicated “spoke” or subtopic article linking back to a broader pillar page.
3. Create content
Creating content takes time, but if you chose content pillars authentically connected to your brand, it’ll feel natural to explain, break down, and share your takes. Start by creating content for the hubs and then working your way through the spoke content, or have multiple people work on spoke content and then create a hub to package it.
As you build out your content calendar—keeping in mind how much your team can reasonably create given personnel, budget, and timelines—consider how you can repurpose blog posts for email newsletters and social media posts. Write a blog post outline that considers how it will support other digital content types to maximize the time spent on each piece.
4. Share your content
The easiest way to share your content is to post your article links to the social media platforms where you have accounts.Repurpose your long-form content into social media campaigns by excerpting content into a series of posts and including links to your blog posts in your link in bio. Send heftier content pieces, like hub articles, out to your email list and include spoke articles in email content roundups to remind people of the useful library of content at their disposal.
5. Track engagement
Track how your audience engages with your content to inform how you will continue to build each content pillar or cluster. Use tools like Google Analytics to track how many views each post gets, how long the average reader spends on the page, and how often they click on another web page on your site or exit it altogether. Note that you’ll be able to analyze social media and email performance right away, but for organic traffic (the clicks that come from organic search results), it can take up to six months to see a post gain traction.
If a content pillar isn’t attracting visitors, focus your marketing efforts on what earns the most engagement.
Content pillars FAQ
What’s an example of a content pillar?
A content pillar is one of the core themes or topics that defines and guides the content you create for your blog, social media accounts, email, and other platforms. If you have a running shoe company, your content pillars might be profiles of inspiring athletes, workout how-tos, and explainers on the history of running culture.
How do you identify your content pillars?
To identify your content pillars, use your business as inspiration—whether you tie your pillars to your mission, brand values, or industry expertise. Then align your pillar content topics and types—such as guides, explainers, and tutorials—with the needs of your audience.
Are content pillars still relevant?
Content pillars are still a relevant, useful, and accessible way to start creatingmeaningful content. A cluster approach with pillar topics as your core building blocks and subtopics that add depth and detail can help your business build authority around a topic, supporting your SEO and social media strategies.
Why are social media content pillars important?
Maintaining a presence across different social media platforms requires a constant supply of things to talk about and share. Content pillars can help your content creation stay consistent, which in turn supplies you with content to mine to distribute on social media. Creating content pillars that incorporate social media trends also helps give your feed a clear identity and sense of cohesiveness while staying relevant.
