Content Pillars vs. Campaign Content: Structuring Your Annual Marketing Plan

Consistent publishing is one of the most reliable ways of improving your company’s SEO rankings—but that’s not the end of the story. Focusing on quantity over quality is a mistake made by many businesses, to the detriment of their brand’s reputation. So, focus on quality also, right? Yes, but it’s easier said than done, and more time-consuming than you may think. 

An effective marketing content strategy has two components.

• Content pillars: Major content pieces that serve as a backbone of your strategy and can be repurposed into any number of assets
• Campaign content: Shorter and punchier assets made to inspire action

Let’s Define Key Terms

Don’t make the mistake of using an unprofitable content calendar. Putting out content just for the sake of publishing is a quick road to bankruptcy. It’s true that publishing regular content can be good for SEO, but that’s not a license to write about anything. Your content pillars and campaign content are the spark and fuel of your marketing engine. They serve two different functions; they unite into a cohesive, synergistic whole to sustain your ROI. 

Content Pillars: What You Need to Know

If this business were a book, content pillars would be your themes. A book’s themes are seldom out in the open, just as you wouldn’t necessarily declare your content pillars. They’re your content strategy’s evergreen backbone, made to filter out worthless content from valuable content. What decides which is which? Your customer. 

Think of content pillars in these terms.

• They need to play nice with SEO—not just today, but also in the future. People years from now might search for this topic and find your article.
• For that same reason, content pillars need to stay relevant. Avoid political or pop culture references no one will remember in six months. Don’t help yourself become outdated.
• Each content pillar should feed multiple marketing streams. This is an overarching topic. It could become either a blog post, a video, the basis of an email newsletter, or all of the above.
• It’s something that grows in authority over time. You want material that other industry influencers choose to cite. When they cite it, they’ll link to it, and search engine algorithms will rate your site higher in authority. In turn, that means better SEO for you.

Campaign Content: What You Need to Know

The micro to your content pillars’ macro: Campaign content is the actual meat of your marketing strategy. This is what readers encounter directly, what they interact with daily. Ultimately, campaign content—both in its quality and quantity—determines whether readers are actually persuaded enough to buy your product. Every bit of campaign content drives your story forward.

• Agenda driven. It exists for a singular reason and has to fulfill it.
• Time-bound. It’s not a long-term play. This material is immediately relevant to your audience today. Tomorrow it might not be.
• Built for user engagement. Leave the strategic thinking for the content pillars. Each content piece is tactically designed to peak a reader’s immediate attention.

Common formats used for campaign content match this intention. You might distribute content across landing pages, email messages, high-energy promotional videos, and anything else tailor-made to attract an audience’s eyes. It should be colorful—figuratively, if not literally. Nice-looking art and animations go well here, so let the design team do its work. 

Campaign content needs to push all the buttons of a hard-hitting marketing strategy: Traffic, engagement, and leads are the order of the day here. And, most importantly, the content traces inside the lines your content pillars have already sketched. No piece of content stands alone. Even unspoken, those content pillars hold upright the structure where campaign content dwells.

It Takes Two: The Hybrid Approach

To succeed in business, you need to start breaking out of “either-or” style thinking. Business is a place where “both-and” style thinking thrives. If everyone else is doing one or the other, consider doing both. A hybrid approach to marketing strategy—integrating both content pillars and campaign content into your operations—is like an open door to prosperity. 

Pillars drive content, whereas content drives conversions. The former defines a marketer’s agenda as much as a year in advance. The latter fills the gaps and meets potential customers where they are, at the moment. Strive to capture the reader’s attention, but it needs to be a relevant kind of reader, a relevant kind of attention. If you sell accounting software, but you’re attracting people looking for auto parts, something may have gone wrong. 

Content pillars help you to: 

• Structure content capable of elevating your brand’s domain authority.
• Attract high-value traffic—not just any traffic, but traffic likely to convert—all year round.
• Nurture your established readers into ongoing relationships, ones that raise their odds of buying.

On the other hand, campaign content can also: 

• Create a sense of urgency in the reader: “This opportunity is slipping away!”
• Capture the interest of readers still unengaged with your marketing funnel.
• Turn interested readers into paying customers.

Together, these are two separate, but unquestionably related, sets of tools for the marketing toolshed. You can’t reasonably expect to get far without either one. Poor content pillars lead to scattershot, irrelevant content that never gains traction. Shoddy campaign content means the conversions necessary to keep the lights on never happen. 

Use both, and use them liberally. 

Step-by-Step Guide

So, how do you actually implement this two-fold strategy into your actual marketing operations? You have to be methodical when introducing a new workflow into an existing one. People aren’t machines. They develop a preferred way of doing things, a way built around what they trust and understand. The first people to “sell” when optimizing a business strategy can sometimes be your own teammates. 

Here’s how to do it, from start to finish. 

Step 1: Perform an Exhaustive Content Audit

Every business has its preferred “way of doing business,” but does that way actually work? Our feelings aren’t measurable, so we need key performance indicators (KPIs) telling us how things are going. Some KPIs may include:

• Number of conversions
• Influencers backlinking the website
• Search engine placement

Now that you have something by which to measure, take a closer look at your existing content portfolio. Are there pieces that received little to no traction? It’s not necessarily because that topic failed to interest anyone, so take a closer look and try to identify why. Similarly, campaign content with lots of views is ripe for repurposing.

Audits help you nail down these unseen details in your marketing operations. They’re hidden opportunity costs holding you back without good reason, and they’re one of the primary reasons why businesses break down.

A thorough audit provides the means to important next steps.

• Optimize your current workflows to find what’s working and what isn’t. No guesswork needed.
• Identify underperforming types of content—or even topics—destined for the cutting room floor.
• Assemble hard data necessary for persuading teammates of the need to try new workflows.

Step 2: Select Your Core Content Pillars

Content pillars form the basis of nearly every marketing decision going forward. Your content marketing pieces will follow a topic or a theme defined in advance by your chosen content pillars—so choose wisely. The decision must be an informed one, based around key factors.

• Missing keyword opportunities in your current marketing operations
• Actual interests of your audience, particularly unique challenges they’re facing
• Business goals, meaning that wherever you want to be in a year, your content pillars can steer you there

What’s more, each pillar in your marketing structure serves its own purpose. They uphold different aspects of future campaigns, so plan accordingly. Decide the focus keyword for each pillar, what stages of buyer awareness fall under them, and what kinds of topics these pillars cover. Think about assigning unique buyer personas to different content pillars to aid in your decision-making. 

For instance, let’s say you’re an HVAC company with a content pillar about HVAC SEO. You’re not going to directly write content about SEO for HVAC companies because it’s irrelevant to your audience. Instead, fill that content pillar out with topics about HVAC local to your area, which offers a great way to conduct local SEO while you’re at it. 

Step 3: Plan Themes for Each Marketing Quarter

Divide the year into four 3-month sections. These are your core campaign units. Each bears its own theme in your marketing strategy, as defined and guided by the content pillars you’ve chosen by this point. Every quarter should field at least one, if not two, major campaigns aimed at pushing your business forward. 

To put this into practice, try designing your own campaign calendar for the next year. Let the content pillars inform your agenda. These campaigns should have their own names and timelines, with preset objectives that align with where you want to have the business in a year. 

Step 4: Distribute the Workload

Marketing campaigns won’t appear out of thin air. They need execution and oversight; only your teammates can provide it. This is the part where you lay out a roster of everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, assigning them to tasks that suit them. 

As you make your assignment decisions, try to account for a few factors.

• Format this piece of content requires, since some teammates function better as writers than as video producers, or vice versa
• Different departments that need to liaison with each other to complete a job
• Key milestones to track progress for a given campaign, as specific and measurable as possible

Step 5: Develop Templates for Your Content Calendar

It’d take too long to create a totally new document from scratch each time you want to publish a blog post. Templates are a way to establish a predefined, structured layout for future marketing workflows. Instead of working impromptu, subject to the whims of any individual on your team, templates can help your marketing stay on target. What’s more, you can design them around your content pillars for a closer alignment. 

Some of the things these templates could include are: 

• Soft and hard deadlines
• Expected formats on which the content may appear, such as video, articles, etc.
• Focus keywords this content piece will target

The sky’s the limit here, and you don’t have to think of everything at once. Content calendar templates are highly modular. You can get some live experience with an active campaign, identify where your shortcomings are, then come back and change the doc from a place of knowledge. 

Step 6: Define Your KPIs

Knowing the key performance indicators of a campaign is critical. You’ll define these in advance and return to them often. While every campaign is different, here’s a small sampling of KPIs to get you started.

• Bounce rates
• Amount of time someone spends on the page
• Organic traffic sessions
• Paid click originations
• Click-through-rates (CTRs)
• Amount of revenue traced back to the campaign

With these steps, you’ll be in good shape to implement a strong hybrid strategy for your marketing campaigns. 

Work With Monthly Templates

Forecasting a month in advance is within anyone’s reach. Your business can lean on monthly templates to harmonize its content pillars and campaigns into a complementary stream of action. Let content pillars inform the nature of campaigns at every turn. 

Give each month its own: 

• Dedicated content pillar asset
• Set of corresponding campaign materials
• Designated plans for promoting the campaign across desired media channels

It would be wise, for example, to organize your work around different content themes to keep everyone on the same page. You might also consider color coding different months according to their matching content pillar and campaign types. 

Best Practices and Pitfalls

Even the best-laid plans go awry when meeting unpredictable, real-world conditions. It may behoove you to learn these best practices and pitfalls developed by other marketers’ hard-won experience. 

For instance, try to avoid filling your calendar plate with more than it can handle. Months can have a fixed quota of publishable content, so seldom venture beyond it. Doing so may overwhelm you and your content teams. 

Likewise, make a habit of reviewing your content portfolio periodically. High-performing content pieces deserve better than languishing on websites no one checks anymore. On the flip side, you can repurpose your best pieces for new formats, if not adapt them to different topics altogether. It’s an excellent way to squeeze fresh juice out of your past work. 

Keep Your Radar On

Be sure to assign your teammates to tasks that fit their skills. Have a centralized project tracking system in place to view a macro-level picture at any given moment. It’s too easy for individual workers to fall into their own workflows, fail to communicate, and ultimately impact deliverable times for the rest of the team. 

For much the same reason, treat this annual marketing plan like a living organism. It’s by no means a “set it and forget it” system. If anything, you’ll need to return to it and revise your content calendar regularly, if you’d like to get the most out of it. Moreover, organizational drift may inevitably have you slipping unconsciously away from your content pillars, which you want to notice and correct promptly. 

Content Is Like an Engine

Good content strategy is like the wires and power beneath the hood of your car. It’s an entire, interlocking system made to both promote the business’s goals and achieve steady growth over time.

But if you find yourself still trying to publish without a solid plan, it may be time to rethink. Single Origin can help you build out a content calendar tailored to enhance your ROI. Reach out and see what we have to offer today.