Coming up with content for your marketing initiatives can feel like an insurmountable task. When you consider all the marketing outlets—paid, earned and owned—that need to be included there are a myriad of different types of content to be developed. Don’t stress! There’s some secret sauce that we want to share: One solid piece of content can fuel an entire marketing campaign.
Here’s how it works:
Develop versatile pillar content
There are many benefits to creating a well-done piece of pillar content. Pillar content is based around one main topic of interest, the pillar, with several topic clusters supporting it. For example, a main pillar may be baking, and then our topic clusters could be cookies, cakes, brownies and pies. We could go even further and have two pillars, sweet baking and savory baking. Then, we would create sub-pillars for each of these clusters through content such as webpages and blogs. Pillar content is a great way to find a focus for your marketing initiatives. Once you spend time developing your one, fantastic and comprehensive piece of pillar content, you can start to use it in many different ways to reach your marketing goals.
SEO – Pillar content is a strategic way to boost the search engine optimization (SEO) of your website. Instead of trying to weave keywords into your website copy that might not read well or even make sense, host pillar content on your website to help boost your SEO. Search engines will be looking for relevant resources to deliver in their top results, so pillar content that is highly specialized with pertinent information will rise to the top.
Owned media and social – It’s time to slice and dice that pillar content into bite sized pieces of interesting content for your owned and social media channels. Create images with useful information for social, send thoughtful content via your email blasts, craft short videos for TikTok and longer format videos for YouTube. You can use the pillar content as a jumping off point for an interesting post series or even to modify into a script for your video channels. One point of caution here, you typically want to modify the content to be unique for each channel. Each outlet targets a different audience and has a different format. Think carefully before posting the exact same content to every channel.
Earned media – It’s time to pitch that pillar content and get some earned media placements. This could be a guest article that takes the pillar content and modifies it to fit the specific publication, or as a way to entice journalists to use your content as a reference or interview your leadership. Strong pillar content that has a thought leadership foundation could potentially attract several earned media posts and interviews.
Paid media – Drive views to your pillar content by serving ads that catch the attention of your target audience and leave them wanting more. The idea here is to push traffic to your website/blog with a link and grow your following. Paid media can help you earn social media followers, capture new emails for your email blasts and possibly even get engagement in the form of likes or shares.
Pillars support your goals
There you have it! Now you can see how one solid piece of content can fuel an entire marketing campaign. Good pillar content is vital to creating results in all areas including SEO, owned media/social, earned media and paid placements.
Give us a call to connect if you’d like to learn more about how the experts at Beyond Fifteen can help drive your content marketing objectives.