How to identify your content pillars [IPF #085] - Adriana Tica

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I don’t remember a strategy session where content pillars didn’t come up. Sometimes, they are the focus point of the session, other times they pop up when I ask my clients what else they are struggling with.

Before we get to the how, a quick primer:

What the heck is a content pillar?

A content pillar is a key theme you focus on in your content (d’uh!), something you want to be known for.

Think of it as a red thread passing through every content you create.

Ideally, you will have 2-5 such content pillars, ideas that you keep repeating in various forms and formats.

The tricky part about content pillars is that they need to please two types of people: your accountant and your audience.

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I put together this very advanced graphic representation of where the best content pillars live.

Of course, in the real world, your content pillars will skew to the right or to the left depending on your goals. You can read more about what to post depending on your goals here.

Now let’s see how you identify those big themes.

It all starts with the BIG idea: why do you do what you do?

Please look beyond the obvious:

Image: Jonathan Stark, Ditcherville

The purpose of a business is to make money, we all know that. But, if you want solid pillars, the kind that supports that ultimate goal, you need to look beyond it.

In the exercises I do with my clients, the big why usually stems from something negative: they want to do things differently than their competitors do, they found a better way to do X, or they found an alternative way to do it, serving a previously underserved market.

To get to your big why, ask yourself this:

What do you hate about your industry? → This is very likely to be the reason why you started your business.
What are your core principles, something you won’t break no matter what? → These may be ethical principles. For instance, a lot of service providers I know refuse to work with clients in some industries: gambling, weapons, the sex industry, and so on.
What is your unique advantage? → This is the hardest one to nail. It can be the speed you deliver services with, the approach, the unique outcomes no one else offers, or your background. It can be almost anything, which is what makes it hard to narrow down.

Pro tip: if you have trouble identifying your unique advantage, look outwards:

Talk to your current and former clients. Ask open questions to figure out what they loved most about working with you.
Collect testimonials and reviews — ongoing and as often as possible.
Talk to your peers, (former) colleagues, friends, and so on.

Do this exercise with at least a dozen people and it will be impossible not to spot any patterns, words, or ideas that people keep repeating.

This is your unique advantage, as seen by your clients and audience, which makes it all the more valuable — you can talk about it in their words, not yours.

My big idea: no-sleaze, future-proofing marketing

My big idea came from the first question above: what do you hate about your industry?

The answer: I hate that marketers have gotten a bad rap because a few bros decided to sell empty promises, get-rich-quick schemes, and hacks that get you $10k/week by working 10 mins a day — “cross my heart and hope to die”.

That’s not marketing, that’s snake oil peddling.

I decided to build a business around better marketing, with no grandiose promises, and by setting realistic expectations.

Because marketing is fucking hard and there’s no single winning formula everyone can replicate successfully.

My big idea attracted people who:

Had been duped by a bro at some point
Tried a bunch of hacks and realized they’re meaningless without a strategy to hold them together
Are smart and see snake oil peddling for what it really is
Don’t want to build their fortune by ripping other people off. They have real businesses they actually want to stay in.

My big idea applied to content pillars

If you don’t sell snake oil and you want to be in business for years to come, it means you need:

To spot trends before they happen.
To have a solid strategy, a roadmap you can follow.
To think in years, not days or months i.e. you know where you want to be 5 years from now and you work backward to figure out what you need to do today.
To understand human psychology. Channels come and go, social media networks rise and fall, but humans respond to the same triggers.

That’s why I talk about perennial insights and ideas. Think how to create compelling content rather than how to please the social media algorithm gods.

These are my content pillars:

How to future-proof your business
How to market smarter, not harder (with psychology and sociology, NOT hacks)
Trends and analyses
Radical stances against bro culture
The occasional meme or funny post (more of a self-indulgence rather than a pillar, really)

You can also see this in my products, save for one:

A strategy session to build the fundamentals for your business
A guided marketing template to build your sustainable, future-proof business
A fractional CMO offer to future-proof your business the DWY way
The Audience Accelerator course (launching in July) that does NOT teach you how to game social media algorithms but how to position yourself as an authority in your field so you can stop chasing leads.
And the outlier, the pre-written email sequence to help you launch a product easily. While it is a shortcut (you don’t have to write the emails yourself), it’s story-based instead of FOMO-based. Frankly, this was a test product but it worked so well and people loved it so much, I kept it live for much longer than I had initially anticipated.

How to build your content pillars

If you’re constantly wondering what you should talk about in your content, one of two things is happening:

You’re unclear on your big idea
You’ve strayed from your big idea in time and it’s become fuzzy

So, the first step is going back to your core drivers (or values but I’m not a fan of that term). Figure out what makes you tick (other than financial motivation).

Write it down then add all the topics you can think of. We’ll segment and clarify them in a second.

Let’s say you’re selling healthy cupcakes. Your big idea is that healthy food does not have to be tasteless and expensive.

Your content pillars are:

Notice something about the topics in the pillars above? The big idea fuels all of them. You can almost see the red thread going through all of them.

The big, hairy goal with your pillars is to make your content easily recognizable. If your audience saw a social media post or an article of yours would they know it was you who created it without looking at the name? This is why you need a big idea, the red thread that unites everything.

Because this is how you build brand recognition and, with time, a fanocracy, a devoted community that stands by you (almost) no matter what.

Does your big idea have to be unique?

Not exactly. There will always be others with the same idea.

What makes your content pillars unique is execution. The seemingly tiny details:

Your tone of voice
Your branding
Your approach
Your face (ok, that’s not exactly a tiny detail but you get the point)
Your background and how you use it to fuel your content

So don’t worry about your big idea being taken. It’s nearly impossible to come up with something that’s 100% unique.

But it’s very possible to add your unique spices to the mix and thus make your content unique.

That’s it from me today!

See you next week in your inbox.

Here to make you think,

Adriana

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