What Are Content Pillars? (And How to Choose Yours)

Content pillars are the core themes or messages that your content consistently returns to.

Rather than creating content reactively and posting whatever feels relevant that week, content pillars give your output a clear focus. Over time, they help your audience build a consistent picture of what your brand knows, believes and stands for.

It is one of those marketing terms that gets thrown around quite a lot.

But what does it actually mean?

And how do you choose the right content pillars for your business?

Let's take it back to basics.

What are content pillars?

Put simply, content pillars are the key themes you want your brand to talk about consistently.

They give you a framework for deciding what content to create, while still leaving plenty of room to be creative.

Without them, content can quickly become scattered.

You might publish a useful industry insight one day, a company update the next, and a post about an unrelated trend after that.

Each piece might be perfectly good on its own.

But together, they do not necessarily tell your audience anything meaningful about your brand.

Content pillars help connect the dots.

Every article, social media post, video or newsletter does not need to explicitly mention a pillar. Instead, the idea runs underneath your content, creating consistency without making everything feel repetitive.

There is also a slight difference in terminology worth mentioning.

At Different Resonance, we often talk about messages rather than content pillars. Content pillars are the broad themes your content consistently returns to, while messages are the specific ideas or points of view you want people to take away from that content.

For example, our content tends to focus on three areas: breaking content marketing down into easy-to-understand ideas, sharing what we learn from running a business, and talking about the positives of Hull.

Those are our content pillars.

Within each one, we have different messages we want to reinforce. When we talk about content marketing, for example, we focus on communicating the principles underpinning our marketing approach. Storytelling through "show, don't tell", being remarkable by looking beyond the obvious, and appreciating the fundamentals of marketing no matter what tactics you use.

The two work together. Your content pillars provide the subject areas, while your messages shape what you want to say about them.

The important thing is not what you call them. It is having something consistent behind what you create.

How many content pillars should you have?

For most businesses, two to four content pillars is a good place to start.

Any fewer and you may struggle to create enough variety.

Any more and you risk losing focus.

The point is not to create a list of everything your business could talk about. It is to identify the small number of areas that you want to consistently associate with your brand.

Four focused pillars will usually be more useful than ten vague ones.

And remember, your pillars are not a prison.

They are there to provide direction, not restrict creativity.

You can still respond to something happening in your industry, share an interesting observation or talk about something completely unexpected.

The question is whether most of what you create contributes to the bigger picture.

How do you choose your content pillars?

There are three questions I would start with.

1. What do you know?

Start with your expertise.

What does your business understand better than most?

What could you talk about confidently and consistently for years?

Your content pillars should be built around genuine knowledge rather than subjects you think you should be talking about.

2. What does your audience care about?

Now look outwards.

What problems do your customers have?

What questions do they regularly ask?

What are they interested in?

What misconceptions do they have about your industry?

The strongest content pillars usually sit where your expertise and your audience's interests overlap. That is where you can provide something genuinely useful rather than simply talking about yourself.

3. What do you want to be known for?

This is perhaps the most important question.

Imagine someone comes across your business a year from now.

What would you like them to say about you?

Perhaps you want to be known as the business that makes complicated subjects easy to understand.

Perhaps you want to challenge conventional thinking within your industry.

Perhaps you want to become known for practical advice that people can actually use.

Work backwards from that perception.

How do content pillars work in practice?

Once you have established your content pillars, they become a filter for your content.

Before creating something, ask yourself which pillar it connects to.

That does not mean every post needs to announce which pillar it belongs to.

In fact, it should not.

The pillar should simply provide the thinking behind the content.

Imagine a specialist engineering business wants to become known for making complex subjects easier to understand.

It might build its content around three pillars: industry insight, practical expertise and better ways of working.

It could create a LinkedIn post explaining what a new industry regulation means for customers, a blog breaking down a common technical problem, and a video showing a different approach to a familiar process.

On the surface, those pieces are very different.

But together, they reinforce the same picture of the business.

They show that it understands the industry, knows its stuff and is willing to challenge the way things have always been done.

That is the real value of content pillars.

They create consistency without requiring repetition.

Over time, your audience begins to make the connection themselves.

They start to associate your brand with certain ideas, subjects and perspectives.

And that is exactly what good content marketing should do.

Content pillars are not a content calendar

It is worth making one final distinction.

Content pillars tell you what you want to be known for.

They do not tell you exactly what to post every Tuesday.

That is where your content strategy and content calendar come in.

Your pillars provide the foundations.

Your audience, current conversations, creativity and wider marketing activity provide the ideas.

This is important because content should never become predictable simply because you have a strategy.

The strategy should make it easier to create better content, not make every piece look the same.

So, what are the right content pillars for your business?

No universal list of content pillars applies to every business. The right ones come from your own expertise, your audience and the reputation you want to build.

Start with those three things.

What do you know?

What does your audience care about?

And what do you want to be known for?

Find the overlap, and you will usually find the foundations of your content strategy.

Content pillars are not complicated.

The difficult bit is deciding what really matters.

Get that thinking right and creating content becomes much easier because you are no longer starting with a blank page every time.

You have a direction.

And more importantly, you have a reason for what you are creating.

If you would like help figuring out your content pillars, feel free to get in touch for a chat. The coffees are on us.