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What Is A Pillar Content Strategy?

Greek Pillars
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By now you know that publishing blog posts and articles on your staffing company’s website can help you drive traffic and improve SEO. But it’s not just about churning out blog posts every week. The content you create must be informative, useful and thoughtful in order to be effective.

Pillar content can help you achieve that goal. It’s like content on steroids, providing your audience with extremely useful information and providing your staffing firm with endless ways to repurpose the content in other forms.

If you are looking to gain traction in a new market or strengthen your foothold in your existing niche, a pillar content strategy should be one of the main tools in your toolbox.

What Is Pillar Content?

Pillar content, sometimes referred to as cornerstone content or 10x content, is a substantial and informative piece of content that can be broken into smaller sections or materials. Examples of pillar content include eBooks, reports, whitepapers and guides.  All of these forms of content can be broken down into other forms like blog posts, videos, emails, social media updates, SlideShare, etc.

Pillar content, first and foremost should comprehensively answer one question. It should be relevant and useful to your target website audience and it should be compelling enough that people not only want to download it, but they also want to learn more about what your business has to offer.

The final key element of pillar content is staying power. While the staffing industry is always evolving, pillar content should be as evergreen as possible, or in the case of reports, should hold value for at least the upcoming calendar year.

Why Is Pillar Content Important To Include In Your Marketing Plan?

In short, pillars of content help your website get found in searches. Why? While search engine optimization (SEO) has changed extensively over the last decade, one element of SEO hasn’t:  The power of meaty, informative content.  Such content serves a purpose for your audience and it also becomes recognized by Google and other search engines as a useful resource for people searching specific topics. So not only will it boost your rankings over time, but pillar content will also help establish your website as a place of thought leadership in your niche and it can help you establish a foothold in new niches.

Pillar Content Helps Your Staffing Company Gain Traction In A New Niche

In March 2020 when state governments across the country began closing down non-essential businesses, the economy ground to a near halt, leaving many staffing companies to wonder “what now?” Rather than simply wringing their hands and waiting for the crisis to end, forward-thinking staffing companies are pivoting into new niches where demand is stronger than ever.

On the flip side of the COVID-19 crisis, healthcare, essential retail, logistics, warehouse, supply chain, manufacturing and other industries have found themselves in a desperate need for employees to keep up with an exponential increase in demands. Staffing companies in any niche can help companies access the employees they desperately need, but breaking into a new industry quickly isn’t always easy.

That’s where pillar content can help.

The right pieces of pillar content and supporting content can almost instantly establish your staffing company as an expert and thought leader in a new industry. By offering insights and advice to potential clients who are experiencing a need for employees like they have never experienced before, you can uniquely position your firm as a company that is ready, willing and able to get the job done.

Pillar Content Can Facilitate Long-Term Planning

Have you ever sat down and tried to think of a month’s worth of blog posts, infographics, video content and more? It’s difficult. Including a pillar content strategy in your marketing plan can help alleviate that strain. If you come up with monthly or even quarterly topics for pillar content, you can easily create dozens of other pieces you can post on your blog, social media profiles, YouTube channel, SlideShare channel and more, all that support the core pillar topic and provide useful information to your audience and new avenues to connect with potential clients.

Where Does Your Pillar Content Go?

Typically, you place your pillar content on a pillar page on your website. This page provides all the information someone is searching for about a topic in one place, making it easy for users to access what they need and further boosting SEO benefits.

This pillar page doesn’t just house your content, it captures leads, as you can require email addresses in order to download the content. If your topics are useful, informative and important, people will not hesitate to provide their email address to access your advice.

Additionally, pillar pages can help your staffing firm by:

  • Increasing the time spent on your website.
  • Decreasing bounce rate.
  • Lots of social media shares and backlinks to your website.
  • Long-term traffic boosts (thanks to the evergreen nature of the content).

Don’t Forget to Promote Your Content

Pillar content won’t produce traffic and leads overnight. You must promote your pillar page and your content on social media and other outlets to pique interest and attract visitors. So, along with your content strategy, you need a promotion strategy.

You can push your content out through a CTA Fly-in on your homepage, your email newsletter, blog, social media channels (ask employees to re-share and boost visibility), paid social media posts, paid promotions, PR outlets, and more. Know where your target audience lives and promote your pillar content there.

Are You Ready To Create A Pillar Content Strategy?

Because pillar content goes so much deeper than standard blog posts, it takes a lot of time, effort and resources to develop and promote. If you are interested in gaining traction in a new niche or strengthening your foothold in your niche, contact Haley Marketing to learn how we can help you leverage pillar content to achieve your goals.

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