Most digital marketing campaigns have a content component. You publish content to drive traffic to your website, show thought leadership, and capture inbound leads through offers. But there is more than one way to run a content marketing campaign.
In this article we examine the difference between two content strategies, a traditional content plan, and a pillar content plan. We’ll look at the differences in the types of campaigns, and the pros and cons of each. It’s our hope that you can use this information to decide if a traditional or pillar content plan is right for your marketing campaign. For more detailed information on planning your marketing campaign, see our 9-step guide to planning your content campaign: SEO Analysis for Lead Generation.
What is a Content Plan?
The content plan is part of your content strategy, specifically its the written, visual, and video assets that you’re going to publish and promote as part of your campaign to raise awareness, drive website traffic, and generate leads. There’s lots to talk about when developing a content strategy, but that’s beyond the scope of this article. This article assumes you have the content strategy. Once you do, the content plan documents when each asset will be created, published, and promoted, and documents responsible parties at each step in the process.
Traditional Content Plan
What we’re calling a traditional content plan documents several pieces of content as well as other assets to be created and published during the campaign. To support inbound lead generation, a traditional content plan also includes landing pages with content or service offers for visitors to download or sign up for. These might include white papers, ebooks, lists, webinar registrations, newsletter sign ups or service registrations.
Typically, several articles and assets are created prior to the start of the campaign so that there’s a battery of content to promote from the start of the campaign. Additional content is created as the campaign progresses and adds to the content driving traffic to landing pages and offers.
While this approach isn’t by any means the same for all campaigns, it’s common because content takes a lot of time to produce. Even more so if you’re relying on people outside the marketing team, such as internal subject matter experts to create some of the assets. This approach provides the flexibility to launch the campaign, drive traffic to your website, and generate leads before all the content is completed. This approach is just fine for long running campaigns that span multiple quarters that focus on core products and services.
What are Pillar Pages?
The idea of pillar content has been around for a while, but it started gaining more conversation in May of 2017 when HubSpot started releasing content about Topic Clusters and pillar pages driving SEO rank. Later that year, Jay Baer confirmed that “search was responsible for more website traffic than social.”
This was a seismic shift for search engines as they indexed content and parsed search queries to map search results to user intent.
HubSpot summarized the change in approach:
“Nowadays, most [people] are comfortable posing complex questions to search engines, and they expect an accurate and timely result. Searchers who want a specific answer also use many different phrases in their queries. And now search engines are smart enough to recognize the connections across queries. Algorithms have evolved to the point where they can understand the topical context behind the search -- [the searchers intent]. [Search engines] tie [those searches] back to similar searches they have encountered in the past, and deliver web pages that best answer the query.”
Simply put, search intent is key and search engines are becoming better at interpreting what people are looking for. This is where content pillars, or pillar pages come into play. A pillar page is a single web page that comprehensively covers a core topic. The pillar page content is built from related subtopics. Taken together, these subtopics form topic clusters around the core pillar page topic.
Within the pillar page are links to content pages that are related to that same topic. The subtopics published as part of the topic clusters link back to the pillar page and each other. This linking action signals to search engines that the pillar page is an authority on the core topic being covered.
See our pillar page on creating pillar pages to boost SEO for more information.
Two Types of Pillar Pages Boost SEO
You can create two common types of pillar pages to boost SEO:
A resource pillar page which organizes links to internal and external links on a core topic into sections that are easy to navigate. This creates a helpful resource on a given topic by linking to the most relevant content. This type of pillar page improves SEO, even though many of the links may send people off your site which is not optimal for your business. You can, however, generate inbound links from the sources you include on the page.
Tip: Since inbound links are a key benefit of resource pillar pages, develop an outreach plan to the sources you're linking from so that they can link back to your pillar page.
The 10x content pillar page. This is the more common type of pillar page, and it’s the type of pillar page we prefer for ourselves and our clients. It’s a single page with comprehensive information about a core topic. The page is made up of your original content; you’re owned media. The best way to explain a 10x pillar page is that it’s an ungated content offer. What’s the quickest way to make a pillar page? Take an ebook you’ve written, deconstruct it and rewrite it so that it works as a single web page.
The key is to offer the content as a gated download in addition to the pillar page content. The ebook content is the same as the pillar page content.
“HubSpot did a study and found that 90% of website visitors prefer to read lengthy content in a PDF as opposed to a website page.”
So, even though a pillar page has all of the same information, you will still capture lots of leads from visitors who choose to download it!
In addition to leads, search engines will index the page, and see the links to it from your other published content improving your rankings and allowing your content to become the featured snippet for specific search queries. This will increase the number of people who find your pillar page, brand, and services.
What is a Pillar Page Content Plan?
A pillar page content plan is similar in many ways to a traditional content plan:
The plan documents the content and assets to be created and promoted as part of the campaign.
It includes content and other offers to capture leads and sign ups.
There are four major differences in a pillar page content plan:
All the content is created at the start of the campaign.
That content is offered in ungated form on the pillar page.
That content is also packaged as an ebook for download so the content itself becomes one of the key offers and drivers of lead generation.
The separate pillar page subtopics are published at the same time as the pillar page as individual blog posts with links back to the pillar page. These links will help improve your SEO rank for the topics and subtopics covered in the pillar page.
Even though all the content is created ahead of time, each individual article should be launched separately at some point in the campaign, with heavy promotion at first before moving into the standard rotation of campaign content. In this way, from a content promotion perspective, each subtopic gets its own time in the spotlight and provides a cadence to the larger story you’re telling on the pillar page. You can integrate this approach into other aspects of the campaign by publishing other assets and coordinating article promotion with other related campaign events.
So the key difference between a pillar page and traditional content plan is when the content is created.
With a pillar page content plan, all the content is created up front. Creating eight to 20 separate pieces of content prior to campaign launch is a heavy lift. You should also review content you already have to see if you can use it for the pillar page. We feel the SEO benefits your brand gets from the pillar page justify the lift. We also feel there are many more advantages to the pillar page approach.
Want help with a content audit, we can do that. Check out our Inbound Growth Plan and let us do the heaving lifting for you!
