What is Content Pillar?: Definition, Tips, and Examples

Creating content isn’t a simple task; it needs a long journey and hard work. However, creating content is more essential than ever to generate leads, engagements, and spread brand awareness through social media or an SEO campaign. However, as a digital marketer, you often feel anxious and run out of ideas. Therefore, to make a digital marketing campaign run successfully and structured, you need content pillars. The content pillar will help you to stay focused and avoid posting random content in order to make sustainable growth in marketing channels. So, what is a content pillar for business? And why are they important for brand image? Let’s dig deeper together in this blog. 

What are content pillars actually? Why are content pillars important?  

Content pillars are the fundamental topics or themes of the content you will create. It can be broken down into specific sections or a format to ensure that the content ideas are relevant to one another. In short, a content pillar is basically a pillar for all content marketing strategies to maintain the consistency of brands and continue to create relevant content for the target audience. 

Without content pillars, the content marketing strategy will be undirected and lack focus to target the specific audience. In contrast, implementing the content pillar will help your brand stay on track and inform pertinent content. In the eyes of the algorithm of social media and search engines, your social media account and website will be seen as an expert in a specific type of topic or theme, and it will drive domain authority. 

When starting to create content, whether it is a blog or other long-form content, you will find a broad range of topics. For instance, a topic about food, then you can cluster it into a more specific niche, including restaurant, recipe, food hack, and culinary business. From a generic theme, it can be subcategorized into a more specific topic to create any type of content, including infographics, videos, and other forms, to be posted in a blog post or social media channels. 

Why do we need a content pillar for marketing? 

A content pillar is always needed by marketers before creating content. It becomes a foundation or pillar to expand the relevant ideas into clusters within the umbrella of the main topic. We can see how important and useful the content pillars are for the marketing strategy below:

• Explain brand image: The content pillar is the key for the company to confirm its brand, including explaining its products or services and how to communicate with the audience. With the consistency of publishing content about a specific theme, the audience and the marketing channel algorithm will understand that you are an expert in a certain theme.
• Easier to generate ideas for your business content: For marketers, the most significant challenge is finding the relevant topics every day. By using content pillars, you can find lots of ideas and avoid running out of ideas and doing too much brainstorming. 
• Drive the audience engagement: Using content pillars will help you to stay focused on a topic and avoid irrelevance. Consistently posting relevant content that aims to appeal and is helpful to a specific target audience will drive more engagement instead of posting irrelevant or random content. If they feel your content is helpful, they will save it, repost it, or share it with others. 
• Enhance authoritativeness for the website: In terms of SEO, authoritativeness is one of the key on Google E-E-A-T; therefore, using content pillars will help you to create content from a specific theme. If your website is posting pertinent content continuously, the search engine system will see your website as an expert in a specific theme. 
• Improve the ranking on search engines: By using content pillars, you know the cluster topics and structure relevant to the primary keyword. Thus, you can determine how deep your content is to make it useful for the readers. Not only does it generate evergreen content, but it also makes your website rank higher on search engine results pages (SERP). Additionally, it helps the search engine to understand your website and content better, combined with the internal linking.
• Attract backlinks to the website: Using a content pillar will enhance the quality of content on a website. As content gradually improves with educational or inspirational content and aligns with the specific topic continuously, the search engine will recognize your website’s authority. Therefore, your content can be a reference to other websites. 

What types of content pillars are there? 

When you comprehend the importance of content pillars for creating content, you need to understand the types of content pillars. By recognizing that the types of content pillars are an integral part of a better understanding of what a content pillar is for a business. Without further ado, let’s take a look at the types of content pillars for marketing, including for SEO or social media campaigns. 

1. Promotional Content Pillar

Promotional content is the type of content pillar to highlight the benefits of your products and services. In this content pillar, you should not directly sell your products or services or engage in hard selling. Instead, you should mention the advantages, values, and features of your products. 

The primary goal of promotional content is to drive sales and conversions for your products and services. Examples of promotional content pillars are promotional countdowns, discounts, product launches, and specific events. This content pillar is mostly used for social media campaigns. 

2. Educational Content Pillar

Different from promotional content, educational content is a type of content pillar that is specifically created to educate the audience. This content typically gives the audience information relevant to your products and services. 

An example of educational content is if your company is selling pet products, then you can create content related to that. For instance, tips and tricks to take care of a cat or a dog, or information about types of dogs. 

3. Inspirational Content Pillar

Not only does it educate the audience, but you can also add some inspirational content to engage the audience. This type of content pillar aims to create a vision for the audience and make them aspire to do something positive. The examples of inspirational content are success stories, motivational quotes, and others. 

4. Entertaining Content Pillar

The entertaining content pillar might be one of the most popular content pillars. No surprise that these days, making an entertaining yet high-value is a go-to strategy to drive leads and conversions. With the unique and funny content that particularly relates to the target audience, it will drive high results. Creating an entertaining content pillar is useful to directly communicate with the audience, and it is mostly used for B2C or business-to-consumer. 

5. Engaging Content Pillar

As the name suggests, the engaging content pillar has a function to generate engagement. In order to create an engaging content pillar, you need to create a topic that is relevant to the target audience and still aligns with your brand voice and products. 

How to distinguish between a content pillar and a content cluster or topic cluster

When we have already understood the content pillar, we need to know the similar terms, the content cluster, or what is known as a topic cluster. Basically, a content pillar and a content cluster are related to each other. A content cluster is a branch or further classification of a content pillar about a generic topic or theme. A content cluster or topic cluster can be further divided into a more specific topic called a sub-topic. 

For example, you are running a coffee bean supplier company, and you have “Coffee Roasting” as a content pillar. You just need to classify on a specific topic cluster, such as “How to Roast Coffee”, then the subtopic can be “How to Roast Coffee Bean in Oven” or “How to Roast Coffee Bean Manually”. The relation between the content pillar and the content cluster is connected by internal links within the website. 

Example of a content pillar for SEO from real brands

To better understand the content pillar, you need to know from real examples from the biggest brands. These brands have successfully utilized the content pillar and amplified their authority on their website. These are examples of the 5 content pillars from several brands for an SEO campaign on their website. 

1. Shopify 

Shopify is one of the most successful SaaS companies that optimally activate their content pillar. The e-commerce platform, developed in 2004, has become the main player in this business these days. Shopify’s content pillar is related to online business; it creates content about business-related topics, such as dropshipping, and other marketing-related content. 

Content pillar: e-commerce, small business, online business

2. Semrush 

Semrush is a SaaS, or software as a service, company that provides a comprehensive service for other businesses that run an SEO campaign. As an SEO tool, Semrush has created much content derived from its content pillar about SEO and marketing, such as “How to do keyword research in 2026” and “What is online advertising?” 

Content pillar: SEO, marketing, paid advertising

3. DHL

DHL is a renowned logistics company from Germany. This company was born in the United States in 1969, but since 2002 has been acquired by Deutsche Post, which made its headquarters move to Bonn, Germany. As one of the largest logistic company, it creates content about business tips and international shipping. 

Content pillar: international shipping, B2B business, small business, logistics

4. Coursera

Coursera has become one of the largest and most recommended virtual learning platforms these days. This platform was founded in 2012 and has been growing over time, attracting more people to use it to learn new skills and get new opportunities. As an online learning platform, Coursera focuses on creating content based on its content pillar about career, certification for jobs, health, and others. 

Content pillar: career advice, IT and data certification, health certification

5. NordVPN

NordVPN has been around since 2012 and has become one of the largest virtual private network (VPN) providers these days. Not only providing VPN service, but NordVPN today also expands its offerings to include antivirus software. No wonder the content created by NordVPN is always related to cybersecurity and data privacy regulations, and connection issues. 

Content pillar: cybersecurity, data privacy law, connections, application guide

Example of a content pillar for social media from actual brands

After comprehending the content pillar for SEO, we have curated some of the examples of content pillars on social media based on actual brands. For social media, content pillars are divided by several core themes and intentions. Do you want to make it educational, entertaining, relatable, promotional, storytelling, or else? Here are some examples to dissect. 

6. Penguin 

Penguin’s social media is mostly promotional. Here, you can see that they simply shared a newly released book and created a caption that revolves around that book release. Started with a timeline of the release date, a little bit of history about the author, and a short synopsis of the book. It is simple, straightforward, but contains all essential information. 

7. IKEA

IKEA’s social media is a combination of promotional and entertaining content. They always work with customers’ psyche by demonstrating how great their products look in real-life applications. In the video below, you can see the IKEA content on Instagram. It is actually a regular advertisement, but less narrative and focuses on aesthetics and action.

8. Adobe

Another content pillar of social media is inspirational. It means you offer audience values and new ideas that can encourage them to take certain actions or promote growth. In this video, for instance, Adobe shows how their products change someone’s life through direct testimonials. 

9. Hubspot

As a channel that focuses on webinars, HubSpot consistently prioritises its educational content that is relevant to the target audience. Their visuals remain simple but easy to navigate. Not only does the educational content, but the HubSpot YouTube channel also contains promotional content to introduce the new features and advantages of the HubSpot application. 

10. Cotopaxi

In a collaboration project, you need to make sure that all parties involved are mentioned proportionally. Let’s take a look at Cotopaxi, an apparel company that made a giveaway event with an outdoor/active lifestyle influencer with the username @myrandainthemountains. Here, everything from the background, rules, and deadline is mentioned in detail to get people’s complete ideas of the event. 

How to compose a content pillar strategy for marketing in general

To get a better comprehension of what a content pillar is, we will learn together on how to develop a content pillar strategy for marketing. These are the steps you need to take before creating content pillars for your brand.

1. Identify the target audience

Determining content pillars is not an easy thing to do; you need to know your target audience and which channels they are mostly used. This is an initial step before defining the content pillars and creating content for the marketing campaign across channels. 

By identifying the demographic, interests, motivations, and problems of your target audience, you can set up a content pillar to achieve your goals. In this step, you need to do some research about what they actually need and what are the problem they are actually facing. Then, you can give a solution to solve those problems. 

2. Conducting competitor research

Before determining a content pillar, you need to scrutinize your competitors and understand why they can achieve their goals. This is important to understand their strategy and what they have made. With this research, you will eventually know the content gap that you and your competitor have not addressed to get better results in marketing. Then, you can take the opportunity to stay competitive. 

3. Determining the pillar theme

After understanding your target audience and doing competitor research, you can define the core theme that is relevant to your brand. Please note that the content pillar must be an inherent part of your product or service specialty and not randomly chosen. Instead of creating many content pillars, you just need to define 3 to 5 content pillars as your content foundation. 

4. Define topic cluster and marketing channels

Once content pillars are defined, break the main or general content into smaller segments or clusters. Then, break them into the specific subtopics that have a huge volume to drive traffic. If you have determined the subtopics, then you need to find the best content formats or marketing channels, including blog posts, social media, email marketing, newsletters, or videos. 

With the breakdown of the cluster, your marketing team will stay on track, find the relevant content, and avoid creating irrelevant content. By maintaining the topic cluster derived from the content pillar, your channel will gradually reach the target audience because it is deemed an expert and helpful for the audience. 

5. Creating content marketing planning 

If all of the topic clusters and subtopics are determined, you can find the relevant keywords for the subtopic. Then, create a content marketing plan to make sure that the content is finished and published accordingly. Content plants also help the sustainability of content marketing across channels, whether it is for SEO or social media postings. 

These days, creating content pillars can be done easily and automatically with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). The AI can help you to determine the content pillars and break them down into the subtopics that are relevant to your brand. There are many AI platforms you can use to define content pillars and topic clusters, such as Quillbot, Semrush, SurferSEO, Clearscope, and others. However, you still need to recheck the results from those tools before directly implementing your content marketing campaign. 

Conclusion 

Content pillars are the key for the marketing team to get better results when conducting a marketing campaign, and as an attempt to achieve the target. Before creating content, marketers need to define content pillars as a foundation for deciding the theme or core topic that relates to the brand. It is also useful to guarantee that the content across channels is not out of line and always relevant to the target audience. Furthermore, content pillars can ease the challenge for marketing to find new ideas by mapping the fresh keywords derived from the cluster content. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about What is Content Pillar? 

1.  Who is the person who has a task to create content pillars? 

Content pillars are developed by the person who is in charge, as the content manager, content strategist, and other persons in marketing positions. However, creating content pillars is the task of the marketing team in general to ensure all of the published content remains relevant to the target audience and aligns with the marketing goals. 

2. What are the types of content pillars to optimize engagement on your marketing channels? 

There are five types of content pillars, including promotional content, educational content, inspirational content, engaging content, and entertaining content. Before choosing one of the types of content, you need to align it with your target audience to make sure that your content has high engagement. 

3. What are the benefits of content pillars for all businesses? 

Content pillars will help businesses thrive in content creation, and they also help them to reduce distractions. This makes their website and social media content, or other marketing channels, aligned with the brand’s value and image. By maintaining this consistency, it is easier for search engines to index and detect the page or content. 

4. Do we need content pillars for SEO content writing? 

Yes, we need content pillars for SEO writing. SEO relies on regularity, consistency, and a meticulous structure. These aspects will help improve your page authority and trustworthiness, and automatically affect its rank on search engine page results. 

5. What is the impact if we do not use content pillars for marketing? 

Without content pillars, you will find it hard to organize your ideas and build your brand’s identity. Once this happens, your page authority will also plummet. Audiences or potential customers tend to look for this regularity as it will be easier to identify a certain brand.