Generate Leads with the Content Pillar Approach

By Michelle Drewek, mdrewek@lessitermedia.com
Digital Media Manager, Lessiter Media

Quality leads are a vital part of business. A common strategy for lead generation involves guiding users to a downloadable piece of content that is free of charge in exchange for the user’s information. This strategy has sound reasoning, but tactically misses the mark in terms of realized potential.

Your audience is full of diverse personalities that consume content in different ways, and you want to appeal to as many of those preferences as possible. Marketers regularly make the mistake of creating a distribution plan that only includes direct links to a lead magnet via social media and email as the sole forms of distribution instead of creating a variety of assets that lead to the download. But who has time to create dozens of unique pieces of content? That’s where the Content Pillar Approach comes in.

Kapost defines a content pillar as “a substantive and informative piece of content [eBook, guide or report] on a specific topic or theme that can be broken into many derivative sections, pieces, and materials.” Put simply, the pillar is a large piece of content that you can turn into many smaller pieces of consumable content to attract users through a wider range of channels.

Click here for an example of a content pillar diagram. As you can see, there are 267 derivative assets from this 1 pillar. That’s 267 efforts to reach an end user instead of relying solely on email and a handful of social media posts. And, it only cost a fractional amount of time to develop because it all came from the 1 piece of pillar content instead of being 267 original pieces.

Sounds great, right? But I’m sure you are wondering where to begin. To help you get started in creating your own content pillar plan, I put together a quick guide below to lead you through the process. If you have any questions or would like more information on how you can make the Content Pillar Approach work for you, message me and we can chat some more!

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Source: Kapost