You are short on three valuable resources: time, people, and money.
And yet, you’re expected to (nay, required to!) compete for visibility in search results with competitors who have an established online presence, and who have far more resources.
Your competitors (large or small, local or global) are investing in content marketing and creating optimized content (from blogs and Infographics to videos) for their audience. They are creating content regularly, and promoting them across every nook and cranny their target audience may be residing.
How do you compete with them and grow your business?
By remaining focused, and investing your resources in creating epic pillar content.
Content that is so useful that it blows people away — Every, Single, Time.
What is Pillar Content?
A content piece that empowers your audience and solves real problems by shamelessly sharing the deepest, (withheld) industry secrets, and expert tips and tricks that consultants would charge for — and which you are sharing for free.
But why?
Because when you share expertise and help people solve their problems on their own:
- It increases your brand awareness, positioning it as a business that has experts working for it.
- It increases your visibility as people always share valuable content with others through social media, and
- As a result, your target audience comes to trust your brand. And as a result, it will accept your word as authority when you introduce your services and products to them.
You need to create pillar content.
Because it offers you competitive advantage over your competition that is simply creating more feathers and less bricks:
- Feather Content — simpler text content (short blogs and content pieces) used as a means of maintaining visibility in front of the target audience. Gain more insights on how to reach your customers by downloading our guide:"5 secrets to reaching your customers online"
- Brick Content — large content pieces (pillar content) such as extensive blog posts, whitepapers, research reports, webinars, etc. These pieces require more effort, are more authoritative, generate more qualified leads, and grow your business.
Pillar content is your bricks.
They establish your brand as a resource for extremely helpful content and can establish your thought leadership in the industry.
Creating Pillar Content — Primary Considerations
Pillar content are a sure way to boost your content marketing efforts and establish your online presence with a fraction of the resources relative to your competitors. However, there are certain considerations to be made:
- Resource Requirements — Creating pillar content is resource intensive. It will require fixing several of your resources, preventing them from actively pursuing other marketing ventures. However, it opens up the “content box” of ideas for generating feather content. The reverse is often difficult.
- The Content Lifespan — The more valuable a content piece, the more chances are that it becomes evergreen and hence become a source of generating back-links from other authoritative sites. However, you have to maintain consistency in creating more valuable content and create feathers to promote it and avoid losing visibility for that resource.
- Opportunity Cost — Avoid putting all your eggs in the pillar content basket. How well a content piece resonates with the audience is mostly only realized after it has been published. The best way is to analyze competition and your current content to know which pieces have generated the most engagement and traffic before getting started with your content.
Creating pillar content has the power to significantly boost your marketing momentum and meeting marketing goals. Have you been using pillar content? Share your insights in the comments!
To learn how to create your own pillar content, complete the form below for access to our 6 week course on "How to Promote Your Business Online."