Avoid Vibe Marketing, Use Content Pillars

Content marketing is one of the most underrated skills in business.

We consume it every day, but when it comes to creating content ourselves, it suddenly feels overwhelming. Where do you start? What do you say? And how do you make it not completely suck? Enter: Content pillars.

What Are Content Pillars?

Content pillars (also known as content buckets or themes) are broad topics that align with your brand’s purpose, audience interests, and business goals. Think of them as the categories your content falls under. These themes are the backbone of a smart, sustainable content strategy—and they're the key to creating consistent, purposeful content that isn't terrible or generic. Instead of 'vibe marketing', content pillars give your team a focused framework that ensures every post, article, or video has a clear role to play. I'd recommend having 3-5.

For example, a personal trainer might have content pillars like:

• Training Tips
• Nutrition Advice
• Client Transformations
• Mindset & Motivation
• Behind-the-Scenes

Each piece of content created should refer back to one of these themes.

Why Content Pillars Matter

1. Consistency

Posting about everything and anything leads to confusion for you, your team, and your audience. Pillars provide a roadmap, making it easier to plan, batch, and scale content while keeping your messaging consistent. If you're a founder, this also makes it easier to delegate and scale out your team while you work on other stuff.

2. Support SEO and Discoverability

Building deep, focused content around specific themes can improve your website’s SEO performance. Google loves topical authority -- content pillars help you build it.

3. Align with Business Goals

Content pillars ensure that your content is strategic. When your themes tie directly to your products, services, or brand purpose, you can move audiences down the funnel more effectively. At the end of the day, marketing is there to support sales through customer engagement and acquisition (among other things).

4. Time Saving

You always know what types of stories, posts, or assets to create because your themes act as filters. It removes the guesswork of what to post about.

How to Identify Your Content Pillars

Here’s a simple framework:

1. Understand Your Audience

What are their interests, pain points, and aspirations? What are they searching for? I like to align my content around problems or questions that people are likely to be searching for because then the purpose of my content is to simply answer that question.

2. Align with Your Brand Purpose

Your pillars should reflect what your brand stands for and what you're trying to be known for.

3. Map to the Buyer Journey

Choose pillars that reflect different stages of awareness—educational content for discovery, testimonials or case studies for decision-making, and personal stories for brand affinity. You can tailor your content under these pillars to attract customers at different stages of the funnel (i.e., new customers versus existing ones).

4. Audit and Test

Start with 3–5 pillars and test them. Track engagement and performance to refine them.

Split Your Content to Maximise Value

One of the most underutilised parts of content creation is content splitting. You might have spent hours creating a video, blog post, or podcast... how can you maximise the time you've already spent and squeeze more value? Let's talk Long-Form vs Short-Form content.

Long-Form

Content that takes a lot of time and effort. Generally, it's 10,000+ words or longer than 10 minutes. Long-form content is best for explaining complex topics or comprehensive insights. It's great for SEO rankings, thought leadership, and evergreen content. Examples:

• Podcasts
• eBooks
• Whitepapers
• Ultimate guides
• In-depth articles

Short-Form

Content that is lower effort and faster to make. It's normally less than 1,000 words or 2 minutes. The aim of short-form content is to capture attention and boost engagement. Examples:

• Social media posts (either generated by you or sharing posts by others)
• Email newsletters
• Infographics
• Short blogs
• Short videos

Short-form helps you grab attention. Long-form helps you build trust.

Putting Long- and Short-Form Content Together

I mentioned Content Splitting. This involves making 1-2 high-effort pieces of long-form content that I can then split into multiple 3-4 short-form pieces. An example might be writing a really long blog post and then turning each heading section into an Instagram carousel. Or turning your 10+ minute vlog into 10 mini YouTube Shorts. If you're going to invest a lot of time and energy into long-form content, you want to use it for as long as and in as many ways as you can.

Building your Content 'House'

I'm a visual person. I created a content 'house' on Figma with actual pillars (with poorly drawn Corinthian Columns) to help visualise what my pillars are, the customers I am targeting, and FAQs that could form the basis of content found from resources like AnswerThePublic, Google Trends, and Google Search.

Here's an example using the same fitness coach scenario from above:

Final Thoughts

Content pillars are not a rigid rulebook, but they do help provide a flexible foundation. They help you create with purpose, reduce content fatigue, and maximise value for your audience.