Creating and Scaling Pillar Content for Startups

These pieces are typically evergreen, meaning they stay relevant over time, and they can be repurposed into smaller pieces to fuel ongoing campaigns. For startups, building pillar content is essential for establishing authority in your industry, driving organic traffic, and supporting SEO efforts.

As Saad Khan, a GTM consultant, notes, “Startups need to stop thinking about individual posts or one-off pieces of content and start focusing on building comprehensive pillars that educate and engage their audience.” This article explores how to create, scale, and distribute pillar content to drive sustained growth for startups.

Why Pillar Content Matters

Pillar content serves multiple purposes: it educates your audience, improves your search engine rankings, and positions your company as a thought leader. 

By addressing broad topics in a detailed, structured manner, pillar content also allows you to repurpose smaller chunks of that content into blog posts, social media updates, email newsletters, and more.

Key Steps to Creating Pillar Content

1. Identify Core Topics Relevant to Your Audience

The first step in creating pillar content is to identify key topics that are both relevant to your target audience and aligned with your product or service. These topics should be broad enough to provide multiple subtopics, but specific enough to engage your audience. 

For example, if you’re a SaaS company offering project management software, your pillar content could revolve around productivity, team collaboration, or agile project management.

• Actionable Tip: Use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to identify top-performing keywords and content topics in your industry. Choose topics that align with your audience’s pain points and your product’s value proposition.

2. Create Comprehensive, Detailed Content

Once you’ve identified your core topics, it’s time to create pillar content. This content should be in-depth, offering insights, actionable tips, and a clear structure. 

A typical pillar piece might be a long-form blog post (2,000 to 3,000 words), an ultimate guide, or a comprehensive how-to resource.

• Actionable Tip: Structure your pillar content with clear headings, subheadings, and bullet points. Make sure it’s easy to navigate and provides value at every stage. Include examples, case studies, and visuals to keep the reader engaged.

3. Optimize for SEO

Pillar content plays a key role in driving organic traffic, so it’s essential to optimize it for search engines. Use your target keywords naturally throughout the content, and ensure you have appropriate metadata, internal links, and external links to authoritative sources. 

This will help your content rank higher on search engines and drive consistent traffic over time.

• Actionable Tip: Include your primary keywords in the title, headers, and throughout the body of the content. Use internal links to connect related blog posts or landing pages to enhance the SEO value of your pillar content.

Scaling and Repurposing Pillar Content

One of the biggest advantages of pillar content is its scalability. Once you’ve created a comprehensive piece, you can break it down into smaller, bite-sized pieces to fuel other areas of your content marketing strategy.

1. Break Down Into Blog Posts

A single pillar piece can be broken down into multiple smaller blog posts. Each subtopic from the pillar content can serve as an individual blog post, providing more focused insights on a specific area. 

This approach allows you to keep your content fresh and regularly updated without creating brand-new topics from scratch.

• Actionable Tip: Use sections from your pillar content as inspiration for blog posts, adding more detailed examples or updated information to create standalone pieces.

2. Repurpose for Social Media

Short-form content, such as social media posts, can also be generated from your pillar content. Key points, statistics, and quotes can be turned into engaging social media updates. 

For example, a guide on team productivity can be repurposed into a series of LinkedIn posts sharing individual tips from the article.

• Actionable Tip: Turn key takeaways from your pillar content into a series of visually appealing graphics, quotes, or even short video snippets for social platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

3. Use in Email Marketing

Pillar content can also be repurposed for email marketing campaigns. Use sections of your content to educate your subscribers over time. 

A multi-part email series, for example, can take key insights from a larger pillar piece and deliver them to your audience in digestible chunks.

• Actionable Tip: Create an email drip campaign based on your pillar content. Each email should provide a snippet of the content and encourage subscribers to click through to the full article for more in-depth insights.

Case Study: HubSpot’s Pillar Content Strategy

HubSpot is a great example of a company that has mastered the art of pillar content. Their ultimate guides and resource hubs cover broad topics related to marketing, sales, and customer service. 

Each pillar page is comprehensive, detailed, and serves as a central point for related content.

HubSpot’s pillar content also serves as the foundation for smaller, more focused blog posts, infographics, and video content. 

By doing this, they consistently drive organic traffic and engage their audience across multiple platforms.

• Results: HubSpot’s pillar content strategy helped them establish themselves as an industry leader, increase organic traffic, and generate leads through evergreen content that remains relevant over time.

Practical Tips for Startups

• Plan Your Content Calendar Around Pillars: Instead of focusing on one-off blog posts, plan your content strategy around your pillar topics. This ensures that all your content is connected and supports a broader goal.
• Update Pillar Content Regularly: As your industry evolves, so should your pillar content. Regularly update it to ensure it remains relevant and useful to your audience.
• Track Performance: Use tools like Google Analytics to track how your pillar content is performing. Pay attention to metrics like organic traffic, engagement rates, and conversions.

Conclusion

Building and scaling pillar content is a powerful way for startups to establish authority, drive organic traffic, and fuel ongoing marketing efforts. By creating comprehensive, evergreen content that addresses your audience’s key pain points, you can build a solid foundation for your content strategy. As Saad Khan advises, “Think about content holistically—pillar content allows you to create once, but use forever.”