Content is an integral part of your health or medical education work. It’s what brings you traffic, leads, and customers. However, creating daily content for your website and several social media accounts might get tiresome. That’s why, to have a clear, easy, and strong content strategy, your content marketing needs a strong sense of purpose. Content pillars help you with that. They allow your health education brand to stay focused and ground your strategy in sound search engine optimization tactics.
In this blog, we will discuss what content pillars are, why they are crucial, and how you can build strong pillars that drive results.
What are content pillars?
Content pillars, sometimes referred to as “content buckets,” are groups of three to five topics or themes that serve as the backbone of your overall content strategy. These are the subjects that your health and education brand will continuously talk about, promote, and create content for. Each of your pillars might include a variety of material, including tweets, blog articles, reels, social media posts, podcasts, videos, and images.
What is the importance of content pillars?
Now that you know what content pillars are, you must be wondering why they are important for the success of your health education brand. Here are four benefits of content pillars:
1. They make planning easier
Having specific subjects to discuss enables you to plan material for your education brand efficiently and allows you to gather anecdotes, case studies, source information, and more.
2. They strengthen your medical or health education brand
Content pillars can assist you in producing consistent content that is in line with your strategy. Consistent, high-quality content helps establish your health or medical education brand since the content you create is easily identifiable as yours. LilDoc is an excellent example of a meducator in action. When you look at their social media, you can tell their content pillars are engaging for kids and carefully crafted.
3. Your content is more balanced
Examine your blog or one of your social media accounts. How frequently do you make the same point or ask readers to take the same action in your post? Whether you post medical facts, quizzes, or inspirational quotes, make sure to post more of what your audience wants and expects from you balanced with other content. Having content pillars makes it easier to balance the material for your health or medical education brand. You can give your posts titles that match your content pillars to make your key themes clear in your social media content calendar. By doing so, you’ll be able to see visually whether your material is balanced and take appropriate action.
4. You will gain more backlinks for your brand
Backlinks are an essential component of search engine optimization (SEO). These are links to your site from authoritative websites. When you gain backlinks, you increase the trust and authority of your education website. When Google notices that reputable websites are linking to your page, it will rank your website higher to make it easier for more leads to locate your valuable content. It believes the material on your site is accurate. You can gain more backlinks with pillar content that is well-researched and informative to receive backlinks from authoritative sites.
How to build strong content pillars?
Now that you know how beneficial content pillars are, let us look at how you can build content pillars that drive results.
1. Know your audience.
To develop effective content pillars, you must first have a solid understanding of your intended audience to construct content pillars that will appeal to them. Consider what your intended audience would like when creating a content pillar. What are their expectations for your page? Is there a subject that will pique their curiosity? What will persuade your intended audience to choose and buy from you?
2. Brainstorm core topics.
After you’ve identified your intended audience and what they value, you can begin brainstorming ideas. Since pillar material is designed to be in-depth, you should start with broad topics that you can further subdivide. It will be difficult for you to grow a topic into pillar material if you start with the one that is too specific. For instance, as a health or education brand, you can make “how to stay healthy” one content pillar and then subdivide it into how to have healthy skin, hair, or liver.
3. Look at the competition.
Unless you’re creating content about a unique subject, chances are you will have competitors, and you will be competing for the same space in a health or education segment. To find gaps, opportunities, and advantages for your pillar content, you need to conduct competitive content research. Take a look at their content. What type of content is doing well? How can you improve their existing content? The goal of competitive content research is to take inspiration from your competitors.
Build your content pillars.
Content pillars help you build a strong content strategy and attract clients to your health and education brand. With this guide, you can get started identifying your content pillars and creating content around them.
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This article was written by Tarang Goel, a freelance content writer specializing in social media and marketing, and law student.
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