How to Choose the Right Type of Content for Your Brand

It’s a pretty well known fact these days that if you’re going to build a brand that sticks around, you need to offer valuable content for your audience.

This fact isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so choose the content you want to share – and start building it.

Where a lot of entrepreneurs go wrong is assuming that means they need to be a writer or hire someone to create blog content for them. Please don’t waste your time.

Here’s a new way to think about creating consistent content for your brand.

What is Content?

Defining this concept is simple but it’s a lot more than words on a page. Content is something, just about anything, that you offer to your subscribers and potential customers to keep them interested in the brand you’re building.

Examples of content:

• Articles
• Videos
• Social media posts
• Images
• Ebooks
• Checklists
• Podcasts

What is Pillar Content?

In the content world, we used to think of “pillar content” as just your “content” and everything else was the distribution of your main pieces of creative work. In the past couple of years, there has been a pretty notable shift in the way we use the word—ie. it means everything now.

So the term “pillar content” is gaining popularity to mean the larger, website hosted media. These are things like your podcasts, blogs, and videos. These are things have a longer shelf life and take longer to create. They exist outside of social media and you have control over the message in them.

We’re going to largely be talking about how to choose the right pillar content for your brand here. If you want to talk about your lead gen content, your social media posts, or the type of imagery you should use for your brand, send us an email.

Do I Need to Make Pillar Content for My Brand?

Yep. If you want to build something that people remember, you need to create content. You need to give people something so they can understand and connect with your business.

Ideally, your subscribers and visitors aren’t just your friends and family—they don’t know you or your brand the first time they happen upon your website.

Your visitors have their own lives, their own distractions, and they’re likely already dedicated to other brands—it’s your job to grab their attention and hold it long enough for them to make a purchase. After that first purchase, it becomes your job to get them to the second purchase (and a third, and a fourth, etc).

Providing consistent pillar content is the best way to do that.

How to Know What Type of Pillar Content to Create for Your Business

For a lot of brands, “making content” means creating a blog.

We live in a society where people are constantly connected in new ways, so we always tell the people we work with—often to a great sigh of relief—that there are a lot more options than writing articles.

When it comes to sharing your message, go with what comes naturally to you or that you’re most familiar with. It seems crazy to choose the thing that seems the easiest, but hey – this is your business!

So many entrepreneurs fail at this initiative because they choose the wrong platform to share their message from. Here’s what happens:

You choose to have a blog but you don’t like to write. So you put off writing until the end of your todo list and it never gets done. Months go by without a new post, your brand loses trust, and your community disengages—hello loss in sales.

Here are a few different options for you to consider.

• If you’re a Chatty Cathy with a passion to share, start a podcast.
• Prone to off-the-cuff brilliance? Use lives and upload them to Youtube.
• Love to teach by showing? Create a You-tube channel and upload pre-recorded videos.
• If you love to read and write, start putting your ideas and information into your blog.

Every single one of these options have a way to do create for free so if you don’t know what you’ll love to create, you can try out everything and see how it works.

There are a lot of opportunities for building great content for your brand, you just have to find the right one (or several) for you.

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Connect with Your Brand Values

This is the fun part. Your brand belongs to you, the message that you share with the world is entirely under your control. Once you know the platform for your pillar content creation, you just need to keep finding a way to share your message through that medium.

Consistency is the key here—you need to be able to produce regularly so that you can keep people engaged and you can get new people interested in your brand on a consistent basis. This way, people that are interested in your brand know exactly what to expect, and when to expect it.

You’re main focus with your pillar content will always be something that connects with your brand’s values. It shouldn’t come out of left field, and your audience shouldn’t feel thrown off by a new topic.

This is the main source of content that you’ll use to guide your marketing strategy. At Dandelion, we call it your Taproot Marketing Strategy because your pillar content is the stable infrastructure to build your brand on top of.

How Pillar Content and Social Media Work Together

Now, this is the basis of content marketing, and it doesn’t encompass all of the Taproot Strategy, but it’s a good place to start.

Once you’re sure of the main outlet for your regular pillar content, you’ll be able to build your entire marketing calendar and all of your additional content around the central topic.

For example, the pillar content we create is both blog and videos posts. When we build our marketing calendar, we schedule the alternating blog and video posts first. Then we schedule our email initiative and the social posts that will tie back into the article. All of the topics are interconnected in a way that allows us to have more marketing initiatives within the scope of our strategy.

When you focus on building out your content this way, it’s much easier to connect with your values, stay consistent, and control the message of your brand while you grow.

What type of content can we expect to see from your brand? Let us know in the comments.

Photo by Alice Achterhof on Unsplash