Con­tent pil­lars force us to take what we learn in the con­tent map­ping/discovery process and apply it to the cus­tomer jour­ney and sales fun­nel. In the con­tent map­ping process we iden­ti­fy prob­lems and cus­tomer issues. In the con­tent pil­lar process we define a thor­ough, inten­sive con­tent asset (such as an ebook, video, or pod­cast) that can effec­tive­ly answer and solve the prob­lem, then cre­ate rel­e­vant, deriv­a­tive assets for mul­ti­ple plat­forms and chan­nels.

Here are sev­en ways con­tent pil­lars make brands more effec­tive.

1. Inspires The Planning Phase

The con­tent pil­lar encour­ages cross-team inte­gra­tion because every­one – strate­gists, ana­lysts, sto­ry­tellers, search mar­keters, media, PR, and social – par­tic­i­pates in the plan­ning and out­comes. It pro­vides much need­ed role clar­i­ty and tac­ti­cal own­er­ship nec­es­sary for improv­ing the cus­tomer jour­ney by hav­ing a thought­ful, cohe­sive strat­e­gy in the begin­ning.

2. Forces Marketers To Consider Audience

When we’re devel­op­ing a con­tent asset to help solve a prob­lem, we get clos­er to our audi­ence. Rather than tak­ing the “we need impres­sions” mar­ket­ing approach, we’re putting our­selves in the cus­tomer-cen­tric place of con­sid­er­ing who they are, not just demo­graph­i­cal­ly, but psy­cho­graph­i­cal­ly.

If we’re explor­ing the cus­tomer prob­lem from their point of view, we’re less like­ly to cre­ate a con­tent asset that’s just fluff. We ask our­selves hard and human ques­tions like “if I had this prob­lem, does this con­tent asset tru­ly help my cus­tomer or poten­tial cus­tomer solve it?” If the answer is no it push­es us to dig deep­er.

Though it’s expen­sive, if the con­tent asset is real­ly impor­tant to help­ing the cus­tomer, hav­ing con­tent focus-groups can help us under­stand how we are or aren’t help­ing our audi­ence.

3. Makes The Story The Hero

When we’re forced to think about how one stand­alone, well-thought out, prob­lem-solv­ing con­tent asset is the foun­da­tion of sub­se­quent con­tent assets we make the sto­ry the focus.

It’s near­ly impos­si­ble to do the thing some brands have done poor­ly in the past year, which is write con­tent for con­tent’s sake, write con­tent sole­ly for SEO, write con­tent because some­one said you need­ed more con­tent.

Cre­at­ing a sin­gle great asset helps us stay focused on the real con­tent pur­pose which is to make con­tent that is read, linked to and shared.

4. Helps Us To Choose Channel Second

The con­tent pil­lar also helps us to do that daunt­ing exer­cise of cre­at­ing brand mes­sag­ing first and choos­ing the chan­nel sec­ond.

With new social and com­mu­ni­ca­tion plat­forms con­stant­ly sur­fac­ing, it’s easy to adopt a “me too” atti­tude about chan­nels rather than strate­gi­cal­ly defin­ing if your cus­tomers are there and if the con­tent you’re shar­ing is rel­e­vant to the chan­nel.

The con­tent pil­lar also helps us think about how we take an asset and adopt it for a par­tic­u­lar chan­nel based on what assets per­form best in that chan­nel.

5. Jump-Starts The Conversation

Cre­at­ing a con­tent pil­lar pro­vides the frame­work for the next steps of cre­at­ing the edi­to­r­i­al and con­ver­sa­tion cal­en­dars. Defin­ing the sto­ries we’re going to share to prob­lem-solve and engage our audi­ence makes for mean­ing­ful and thought­ful con­ver­sa­tion.

Con­ver­sa­tion and engage­ment goes two ways. We can’t pre­pare for how our cus­tomers will engage with con­tent in their jour­ney, but cre­ation of a con­tent pil­lar means we’ve tak­en the time to real­ly know our sto­ry. This makes the con­ver­sa­tion not only more engag­ing, but more mean­ing­ful.

6. Impacts The Process And Documentation

The oper­a­tions side of con­tent is often neglect­ed because mar­keters mis­judge that cre­at­ing con­tent is the hard part. It isn’t.

Plan­ning for great con­tent is hard. Pro­mot­ing that con­tent is hard. Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and out­reach to influ­encers is hard. Mea­sur­ing the con­tent’s impact and ROI is hard. Con­sid­er­ing and defin­ing the process and resources for con­tent becomes clear­er when you’re lever­ag­ing the con­tent pil­lar.

“We’re cre­at­ing a video as one of the assets in our con­tent pil­lar, who is going to man­age grow­ing our com­mu­ni­ty and sub­scriber base on our YouTube chan­nel? Once we’ve test­ed effec­tive­ness of the con­tent asset with our cur­rent cus­tomers and we are pre­pared for paid ampli­fi­ca­tion of the sto­ry in the right chan­nels to engage poten­tial cus­tomers, who is going to man­age that cross-chan­nel spend and work with the CRM team to get these leads into our fun­nel?”

7. Encourages Measurement At Campaign-Level

Brands are cre­at­ing a lot of con­tent, but strug­gling with how that con­tent impacts the bot­tom line. Mea­sur­ing a cam­paign of all of the assets with­in the con­tent pil­lar helps us mea­sure how we’re impact­ing and engag­ing with our cus­tomers across all of the assets, sto­ries, and chan­nels rather than mea­sur­ing the iso­lat­ed impact of a sin­gle con­tent asset, which usu­al­ly tells us very lit­tle.

Mea­sur­ing against a theme and key­word set also helps us estab­lish the search val­ue of the cam­paign and even uncov­er new needs. Cre­at­ing a dash­board that shows the audi­ence jour­ney across mul­ti­ple assets and chan­nels illu­mi­nates a more nat­ur­al cus­tomer path of aware­ness, con­sid­er­a­tion, engage­ment, pur­chase, and even loy­al­ty.