Whilst remote working has made life easier for most of us, there is something nice about working with colleagues based nearby.
It means you can meet in-person to kick-things off with a bang. Or catch up over a coffee part way through a project for smooth feedback and collaboration. It even means they’re close enough to join a client meeting to get the insider perspective – which always leads to much improved copy and content outcomes.
I’m assuming you landed here because that’s your situation – you’re looking for support with content writing from someone who is based in Manchester.
The best Manchester-based content writers in 2024
To help you out, I’ve brought together 16 great content writers, all based in Manchester, UK – and I’ve outlined their key strengths in terms of services and subjects, as well as sharing a few examples of work for each content writer, to help you get an initial feel for their work.
I’m a content writer (and strategist) based in Manchester, UK.
I mostly work with small businesses, social enterprises, and early-stage B2B SaaS startups who don’t either have internal expertise on content marketing in the team, or are looking for an extra pair of hands.
I’m a dab hand at getting an effective content engine up and running (content strategy, brand voice, topic planning, content calendar setup, SEO strategy, etc).
I’m also an experienced content writer.
I have particular subject expertise in climate change and HR tech – but I’m always looking to add to that. I can write content of any size or shape, but I particularly love working on in-depth, highly researched, long-form pieces – especially when it involves interviewing subject matter experts or analysing proprietary data.
Laura Howarth is a copywriter and digital marketing consultant based in Manchester, UK. Her background is in publishing and PR, before moving into freelance writing in 2011.
Laura has particular experience writing on fitness:
Ben Hardman is a content writer based in Manchester, UK. Ben works with purpose-driven businesses who aim to make a positive social and environmental impact.
Katy Ratican is a freelance copywriter based in Manchester, UK. Katy writes copy for small businesses and agencies across the UK. She also offers social media training.
Katy’s experience is primarily in writing for ecommerce brands:
Mike Peake is an experienced freelance website copywriter, based in Manchester, UK.
Mike works with small businesses and large corporates alike, and has experience across many industries and subjects – from commercial, to technology, to property, to healthcare, and more.
Amanda Nicholson is a freelance content writer, author, and poet based in Manchester, UK. Amanda’s background is in creative writing and she has published several novels, as well as working as a freelance writer.
Amanda specialises in content about relationships:
James Taylor is a freelance content writer based in Manchester, UK.
James specialises in content and copywriting for SEO – with an example of a previous project being this digital PR and SEO project running an office hygiene facts survey.
Rebecca M. is a freelance copywriter based in Manchester, UK. Rebecca’s background is in digital marketing, so she has a broad understanding of marketing channels and techniques. She mainly works with small businesses and agencies.
Matt Owen is a freelance writer based in Manchester, UK. Matt offers a broad and diverse range of writing services and has a background in comedy writing and joke writing.
A wave of relief immediately washes over you – another stellar piece of content ticked off the to do list and out there in the world.
Job well done 🍻.
Or not…
That ‘publish’ button is often seen as the finish line in content marketing.
But it shouldn’t be.
Days of work on audience listening, research, interviews, writing, editing, design, set up, likely went into creating a piece of content that imparts an important message that will resonate with your target audience.
That message deserves to be heard.
Content distribution (i.e. disseminating the new content across all channels) and content repurposing (i.e. reusing the content over time) are key to that.
In this blog post we’ll explore all things content repurposing:
Your content shouldn’t sound like every one of your competitors’.
With my Content Strategy Audit you’ll identify the creative content opportunities that competitors can’t replicate, and that will truly build brand authority.
Content repurposing is the practice of reusing a piece of existing content in new ways to expand its lifespan and increase its reach amongst the target audience.
That might be recycling the content from one format into another – a blog post turned into a YouTube video, a research report turned into infographics for LinkedIn posts, a video turned into a podcast, and so on.
Or it might be taking one key message or particular elements of a story and transforming that into new pieces of content. For instance, if you’ve put time and effort into an original research report, you might turn each key finding from the research into a standalone blog post.
Content repurposing vs content distribution vs content refresh
I often see definitions and uses of ‘content repurposing’ that seem to be confusing it with content distribution – so let’s take a quick look at the differences before we move on.
Content distribution is the practice of disseminating a piece of content across all marketing channels that your brand uses. So, if you’ve just published a new blog post on your website, content distribution would be shouting about that blog in a LinkedIn post, including it in your next subscriber newsletter, sharing it in any community slack channels you’re part of, and so on.
Content repurposing is the practice of turning that new piece of content into additional pieces of content, either as new formats (e.g. blog to video) or by taking one message or element turning that into its own piece of content.
They’re interlinked because repurposing content should be part of your content distribution workflow: transforming content into different formats means that it can now be distributed across additional channels.
For example, turning a ‘how-to’ blog into a video explainer means that you can now distribute it on Youtube. Using short clips from that video explainer for LinkedIn posts gives you new ways to highlight the content in a platform-friendly way.
In the world of content the phrase ‘create once, distribute forever’ is a common once (thanks Ross Simmonds) – and content repurposing is key to that.
🤔 Is repurposing content the same as refreshing content?
This is another mix up I’ve seen.
Optimizely’s content repurposing guide (one of the top ranking articles for content repurposing search terms), for instance, includes the sentence: “The possibilities for repurposing content are almost endless. You can simply update an existing asset with the latest facts and figures…”
Updating a blog with the latest facts and figures is not content repurposing.
It’s content refreshing (or simply updating), which is a super important part of content marketing – ensuring that key pieces of content remain relevant and avoiding SEO performance dropping over time – but isn’t the same as content repurposing.
The benefits of content repurposing
The key benefits of content repurposing are:
Increase reach of key messages across channels
Improve efficiency – enabling the scaling up of content production
Breathing space for creative thinking.
Content repurposing increases the reach of key messages
Every piece of content you create is full of nuggets of wisdom – topic education, expert advice, best practice viewpoints, inspirational stories, and much more.
If those nuggets exist only in one format, designed for one channel, they’re destined to reach only a small subset of audience members who like to engage with that specific format and channel.
Take a company blog, for instance. Some users will find it through browsing your website. Some users will find it through search engines (if it’s SEO friendly). But many users will rarely visit your website. Others don’t have the attention span to read a blog, or simply prefer to engage with video content over written content. So it only ever reaches a tiny portion of the total potential audience.
If that piece of content is repurposed into new formats or tailored for new channels, the potential audience significantly expands – which means your key messages and nuggets of wisdom can reach further, raising brand awareness.
Content repurposing enables content production to scale
If every piece of content is a one and done, then your content team is constantly having to plan and create brand new content and tell brand new stories across all core channels.
That takes a lot of time and effort – it’s not very efficient.
When content is systematically repurposed via a systematised workflow, the team no longer needs to create every new piece of content from scratch.
Instead, the core ideas and research is already there, and it’s about making the most of that message by using it as a basis and then repurposing it in creative ways over a longer period of time.
A blog stops being just a blog, and becomes instead a blog + video version + short video clips for LinkedIn posts + a newsletter topic + several LinkedIn carousel posts + a webinar topic + the basis for three more blogs, and so on.
Those different formats can all be spread out in your content calendar across a period of time e.g. a month.
It’s a way more efficient way to disseminate a message across multiple channels, which means it’s way easier to scale content production and impact.
Content repurposing gives content teams breathing space for creative thinking
Constantly planning, researching, and creating new content ideas to keep a regular cadence across all core channels is all-consuming.
It leaves a content team that has no time for creative thinking – because it’s always onto the next piece of content.
A more efficient and streamlined workflow (which, as we’ve seen, content repurposing enables) gives content teams breathing space. That breathing space is absolutely vital, because it’s the time when we’re able to reflect on what’s actually moving the needle for the brand, and think creatively about how best to increase impact moving forward.
Plus, thinking up ways to repurpose content into different formats or new pieces is inherently a creative act – it’s bound to spark new ideas on how to (efficiently) increase the reach of a message.
Content repurposing strategy: how to implement repurposing effectively
There are 4 key steps for an effective content repurposing strategy:
Get clear on your most important topics and messages
Get clear on the channels that work for your brand – and how to maximise impact on those channels
Make content repurposing a habitual workflow
Regularly conduct content audits and double down on what works.
Get clear on your most important topics and messages
Not every piece of content is worth repurposing.
The content that is worth repurposing is the content that:
Makes effective arguments that back up your brand’s worldview
Addresses real pain points for your target audience
Demonstrates brand expertise
Provides evergreen education on relevant topic areas.
Because those are the messages that you want to disseminate far and wide to build brand awareness and authority.
For content repurposing to be effective, therefore, you first have to be crystal clear about the most important messages, topics, and viewpoints for your brand and your target audience so that you can make strategic decisions on which pieces of content are worth taking the time to repurpose over and over.
Get clear on the channels that work for your brand – and how to maximise impact on those channels
It can be tempting to repurpose content into all possible formats for all possible channels – but beware of this, because spreading yourself (or your content team) too thinly is a recipe for disaster.
To combat this, it’s important to have clarity on which channels and formats actually make sense for your company before you start repurposing.
This should be led by understanding the channels and formats that members of your target audience use and engage with on a day-to-day basis. It’s also worth considering internal capabilities and resourcing – if no one on the team has experience with podcast production (or is keen to learn by doing), then turning your blogs into podcast topics might not be a viable option right now.
Then do the research to understand how to maximise impact for each channel or format that you plan to use in content repurposing.
Let’s say, for instance, that blog posts have been the primary content format for your company, and that they’ve primarily been distributed via SEO and through LinkedIn posts that use text or image only.
Now you want to use repurposing as a way to start using video content, turning high-performing ‘how to’ blog posts into video explainers to post on Youtube – and then using short clips from those for video LinkedIn posts.
To maximise impact of the repurposed content, you need to understand what makes an engaging explainer video on YouTube for a B2B audience. You need to understand how YouTube SEO works to maximise reach. You need to understand what improves video performance on LinkedIn. And so on.
Make content repurposing a habitual workflow
The simplest way to implement content repurposing is to make it a workflow.
By ‘workflow’ I essentially just mean that every time you publish a core piece of content it sparks a standardised process (Atomic Habits habit-stacking style) to repurpose that core piece of content across all other relevant formats.
So if you publish a new long-form ‘complete guide’ style blog on an important topic, that might spark a workflow to turn that blog into:
Additional short-form blog posts on specific topics within the guide
A LinkedIn carousel for each section or message
An explainer video for Youtube – which is then repurposed further into short clips for LinkedIn posts
A webinar slide deck.
🛠️ The best content repurposing tools
There are loads of tools on the market today to help make setting up these content repurposing workflows easy – here’s a comparison of 11 of the most well-known.
Regularly conduct content audits to understand what works
Content audits should always be a regular process for any content team.
They ensure that you understand what content is performing well and identify any content that needs refreshing to stay up-to-date and avoid performance falling.
The former is vital for effective content repurposing. High-performing content is content that is resonating with your target audience, building brand awareness and authority and driving revenue growth.
This high-performing content is the content that you should be focusing repurposing efforts on to increase its reach and impact even further.
💡 Content repurposing examples
Looking for examples of content repurposing workflows that actually work in the real-world? Here are 11 examples of brands that have content repurposing down to an art.
Is it worth engaging a content repurposing agency?
Whilst content repurposing can make for a more efficient content plan, it does take time and effort to implement repurposing effectively.
If you want to try out content repurposing but you can’t spare the time internally to do so, then working with a content repurposing agency could be a good option.
Content repurposing agencies are particularly beneficial if you think that a certain content format or distribution channel could be impactful for your brand, but you don’t have the internal expertise to try it out. For instance, if you want to introduce video content to the mix, but your internal team is focused on quality written content, then engaging a content repurposing agency with video expertise could enable you to test video out more easily.
Remember that you know your target audience, brand voice, and content strategy best, and any decent content repurposing agency will always make it their first job to understand that, before getting started.
From there, the process of working with a content repurposing agency typically starts with the agency’s team analysing your brand’s current content library to identify opportunities for repurposing content. Once agreed, the agency will then create the repurposed content, optimised for each format and channel required.
🚀 Outsource your content repurposing
We’ve seen throughout this article that creating high-quality original research content is no easy task.
Working with a freelance content marketer who has experience with content repurposing can help you to get those workflows in place, without adding extra pressure to the team – and at a lower cost than working with a content repurposing agency.
It’s always hard to implement a new style or process for the first time. I personally find that seeing how other brands and content teams are doing it helps to make things clearer.
So, in this article I’ve put together 10 examples of brands who are doing a great job with subject matter expert content.
Top subject matter expert content examples
Let’s take a look at a few examples of subject matter expert content from some SaaS companies you’ll know and love:
I’m forever on the lookout for examples of great content or content campaigns, and forever losing my notes of inspirational examples.
So, I’ve started a swipe file – a round up of the best content and campaigns I stumble across each month. Subscribe to get them to your inbox, once a month.
Build in public content is a popular format these days with startups. It involves sharing behind-the-scenes information about how a company operates.
It’s particularly common for founders or CEOs to build in public via their LinkedIn profile, sharing insights into how they are thinking about creating and growing the company.
It’s written entirely in the first person and document’s Bruno’s approach in deciding which tactics to implement to accelerate Clay’s growth.
Given their primary audience is marketers, it’s a great piece of content to share, and the first person perspective of Bruno’s first-hand experience makes it even more valuable.
This is a regular format for Clay, with their sales and marketing team often authoring problem-solving blogs which focus on first-hand experience – another example is this one on ‘how to increase prospect retention’ from partnerships lead Stefan Kollenberg.
Sylvera is a climate tech startup focused on carbon project ratings.
They have a team of in-house research scientists who are regularly running research projects across the world, aiming to improve the accuracy of carbon measurement techniques.
They regularly share write ups of the findings from these research projects on the Sylvera blog, in a great example of harnessing internal experts for quality content.
This blog, for instance, shares findings from their forest biomass research.
It includes educational sections – explaining what forest biomass is, or the different methods for measuring it.
With sections which explain the research projects Sylvera is undertaking, and their progress so far.
It’s written by (or ghostwritten for) Pedro Rodríguez-Veiga, who is a Senior Earth Observation Research Scientist in Sylvera’s team.
I’ve been admiring how Lattice uses subject matter experts for a while.
Every single educational blog they publish is littered with quotes from at least one contributing expert, often several.
These quotes are neatly woven into the fabric of the writing, informing and shaping the argument, without it needing to be explicitly called out as an expert interview or guest post.
Here’s an example from a blog about exit interviews, which uses a conversation with executive coach Debbie Nathanson as the basis of the discussion:
But then also adds additional expert voices throughout to add different perspectives on some of the areas of discussion, like this inclusion from HR consultant Matthew Burr:
I interviewed three compensation experts to get their perspective on the biggest challenges in a compensation review, and how to overcome them. The resulting article has a brief introduction, and then three sections – one for each expert.
The sections are written in an interview style, with questions and then the subject matter expert’s response below.
I also worked with the experts to draft LinkedIn posts for them to share the final article with, helping to increase the reach of the article through collaborative distribution.
Legislation is often an important topic to cover in B2B content, especially in areas where regulations are fast-evolving like company climate reporting and disclosures.
But, unless you have an established and knowledgeable legal team, it’s unlikely to be a topic that you have enough internal expertise to cover in-depth.
Collaborating with subject matter experts solves that problem, which is exactly what Watershed has done for their webinar series on the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) – bringing together internal team members with legal experts and experienced sustainability leads to provide valuable educational content without tripping up on the legal details.
It’s nothing revolutionary as a format, but it does a great job at bringing together multiple subject matter experts in a neat way – because everyone’s answering the same simple question, but informed by their own expertise and experience.
Each expert is quoted with the interview question they gave, as well as what they think a great answer to that question would be. There’s then a tip for each one from Ahrefs, which gives them an opportunity to highlight relevant product features.
I leveraged subject matter experts in several different ways to produce a high-quality report:
Survey responses. The survey was circulated to a group of ESG leaders working at mortgage lenders in the UK. Their responses gave a valuable additional dataset to support the report’s findings.
Transition plan analysis criteria. The analysis rests on a set of criteria which determine what makes a credible climate plan. Each climate plan was assessed against that set of criteria. I have a lot of experience in the climate space, but I’m still no expert on transition planning, so I relied on internal and external subject matter experts to refine the list of criteria used and ensure a robust methodology.
Expert commentary. This was the first report on this topic that Kamma had published. To add credibility to the report and the methodology used to analyse lender transition plans, I asked experts at the Green Finance Institute (GFI) if they would review the report and share any feedback or commentary. This was valuable both in giving pointers to improve the analysis, and in giving us an expert comment to launch the report with.
This subject matter expert content example is another one from Clay (unsurprisingly really – they’re killing the content marketing game), a straight guest post blog from an expert outside of Clay’s team.
It works well because it shows that Clay is plugged into the wider network of industry experts and influencers – they are part of that community and are trusted as a brand and as a product by those experts. That’s always going to increase the trustworthiness and credibility of Clay’s brand.
Plus, it brings the trusted expertise and first-hand experiences of those external experts into Clay’s branded content, which makes for content that is incredibly valuable and engaging for their target audience.
Ravio’s aim is to be perceived as a go-to resource for tackling compensation problems and understanding market trends. With this, subject matter experts are a vital part of the content strategy to ensure accurate, credible content.
A format that Ravio often uses is to create a piece of content that aims to resolve a specific pain point for their audience. The article will include best practice approaches, and feature advice from experienced People and Reward leaders to add authority.
The bulk of the article is a step-by-step guide by the Ravio team on how to fix the problem of under or overpaying employees. Throughout, blue call out boxes highlight the perspective of Isha Smith, Global Head of Rewards at Soundcloud – backing up the advice given by Ravio’s article through Isha’s expert advice and real experience.
Podcasts are a perfect format for interviewing subject matter experts to get their insights and experience on subject areas or specific problems.
There are loads of examples of B2B podcasts today which do just that.
A couple of examples that I think do a good job are the Offer Accepted podcast by Ashby and the Content Briefly podcast by Superpath (which is probably the only ‘professional’ podcast I actually listen to).
The trick is to keep it a conversation, letting the subject matter expert focus on sharing their experience and what’s worked for them, so that it provides valuable insight for people who aspire to be experts in that field too.
When podcasts try too hard to be a marketing or sales channel, shoehorning the product into the conversation or spending too much time on sales ads, it stops being a valuable listen and becomes just another brand podcast.
Addressing customer pain points through content demonstrates empathy and understanding with your audience, and if you can support them to overcome those pain points you set your brand apart as an expert in the field.
But they have to be genuine pain points for your specific target audience, or it won’t resonate.
It can be difficult to know if you’ve hit on a real customer pain point.
To help, here’s a few examples of real-world customer pain points, developed from my own experience working with different audiences as a content marketer.
So, I’ve started a swipe file – a round up of the best content and campaigns I stumble across each month. Subscribe to get them to your inbox, once a month.
Example 1: Customer pain points for a Head of Sustainability persona
Let’s say you’re a climate tech company with a product focused on automating emissions calculations.
The niche audience you’re targeting is a Head of Sustainability who leads on climate impact as a single-person team for a supply chain management organisation such as a logistics or procurement company – because these companies act as suppliers for a myriad of other companies who all have to report on their carbon emissions, so emissions calculations are a major need.
Pain points for that Head of Sustainability could include:
The complexity of manually sourcing data from several different people and places internally for carbon accounting and legal reporting requirements – and staying on top of all of those different sources
Feeling held back by a constant need to persuade leadership stakeholders (CEO, CFO) of the business value of implementing climate programmes.
Personal frustration due to a disconnect between their deep caring about solutions to climate change and the rest of the team’s.
Anxiety at being a team-of-one with a lot of responsibility, making big decisions and implementing new processes, all whilst complying with sustainability laws and avoiding accidental greenwashing – without any colleagues to bounce ideas back and forth with.
These are real pain points I experienced when working with Sustainability Leads as an audience, during my time at Lune.
And here’s a couple of examples of content I produced to address those pain points:
💡 A tip: time and cost aren’t strong enough pain points
Wasting too much time and spending too much money are two pain points that you’ll see come up all the time.
It’s easy to see why: they’re applicable to many people, in many situations. It’s fair to say that most of us would love a bit more time and a bit more money!
But that means they’re also pretty useless as audience pain points to build content on – you’ll end up with basic, generic, surface-level content that your competitors have probably already written.
Get more specific and find out what lies underneath the surface. Why are they wasting time? Why are they spending too much?
Example 2: Customer pain points for a HR or People Team leader persona
What if you were an HR tech company with a platform focused on compensation management.
The niche audience you’re targeting is a Chief People Officer or Head of People at an early-stage startup, who is responsible for setting the foundational processes, bringing on board top talent to grow the company, and retaining that talent.
Pain points for that Chief People Officer could include:
Staying on top of all the changes in employment law and being the in-house expert on these laws – especially new pay transparency laws like the EU Pay Transparency Directive which will have major impacts on hiring and pay processes.
Difficulties getting stakeholder alignment (founders never agree!) on the goals for hiring and growing a team to enable compensation processes to put in place.
Frustration with hiring managers not sticking to the processes e.g. guidelines for running compensation reviews in a way that minimises bias and discrimination
Losing a great candidate for the same reason as the last great candidate was lost, when the problem should have been solved – a lack of flexibility in hiring salary ranges, for instance.
Again, these are real pain points I’ve experienced through working with People Leaders at Ravio. A couple of examples of content I produced to address those pain points are:
How do I know what to pay a new hire? – expert advice and best practices on how to benchmark new hire salaries, including proprietary data analysis from Ravio’s compensation data platform
Expert insights on compensation reviews – interview write ups with 3 experienced People Leaders, exploring the most common pain points associated with annual pay reviews.
💡 How do you identify customer pain points like these?
In short: it’s all about getting time to speak to your target customers – and, more importantly, listening to them.
It can be difficult to find good content pillar examples – there aren’t many companies out there who openly publish their content strategy.
So here’s a trick for you.
Blog categories are a sure-fire giveaway for a brand’s content pillars (and tags often tell you the subtopics within those pillars too) so you can find content pillar examples by browsing through company blog pages.
And an extra tip: if a blog has a bazillion categories and you’re confused about what their content pillars are, then you can be pretty sure that they don’t have a solid content strategy with a set of content pillars – and I maybe would err away from using that brand as content inspiration.
Like this one I came across recently which very much made my brain hurt trying to figure out their topic focus.
There are SO many topics. And they’re SO broad. Like ‘migration’ – are we an international development brand? They’re also a mix of topics and content formats, switching from ‘webinars’ and ‘templates’ to ‘deliverability’ and ‘monetize’. It’s all a bit confusing.
(sorry to drop you in it if you happen to see this Beehiiv team, I’m loving your brand at the moment, just not so much your blog structure).
Content examples newsletter
I’m forever on the lookout for examples of great content or content campaigns, and forever losing my notes of inspirational examples.
So, I’ve started a swipe file – a round up of the best content and campaigns I stumble across each month. Subscribe to get them to your inbox, once a month.
Buffer’s blog has three main content pillars which are clearly relevant to their product of a social media scheduling tool and their audience of social media managers:
Small business i.e. advice on building a business
Social media marketing
Podcasts
These are the key topics that Buffer is aiming to demonstrate deep expertise within. Each of these content pillars then also has subtopics, as you can tell from the tags used e.g. Facebook and Instagram within the social media marketing pillar.
Alongside these topics you’ll also see a couple of other categories which are not content pillars. ‘Latest updates’ is simply the most recent content published across all categories. ‘News’ is Buffer’s company news or product updates – it’s common for company blogs to separate this content into its own category to keep it apart from educational and topic-focused content. ‘Case studies’ is stories of happy Buffer customers – again, it’s common to use categories to keep case studies separate from other content as it’s much more product and bottom-of-funnel focused.
Zapier’s blog has four content pillars which are relevant to their workflow automation product and their primary audience of company and team leaders in small and medium-businesses.
App picks i.e best software tools for different use cases
Productivity
Business growth
Remote work
Alongside these topic-focused content pillars, we again see additional blog categories covering company updates, product updates, and product help articles.
Culture Amp’s blog has five core content pillars, targeting topics that are highly relevant to their employee experience platform product and a target audience of HR and people leaders:
Miro’s blog has three core content pillars which are relevant to their visual workspace product and primary audience of product teams (designers, product managers, developers):
Slack’s blog has four core content pillars which relate to their team communication platform and primary audience of knowledge workers (roles like software engineers, data analysts, researchers, etc).
Whilst these content pillar examples from well-known brands are helpful to see how it works in practice, I can’t tell you the thinking behind those content pillar choices.
So, I’ll finish up with one final example of content pillars – my own content pillars for this very website that you find yourself on.
There are three key personas that make up my target audience:
The commercial-leaning early-stage startup founder (who is often also the CEO). They know that marketing is important for business growth, but they don’t know how best to approach this or which parts of marketing to focus on.
The first-hire early-stage startup marketing lead. They’re a marketing expert but they’re a generalist. They’re implementing the foundations of marketing across all channels which includes content, but they’re time-poor and they don’t have specific expertise in content marketing for startups.
The scale up senior content manager. They’re a content expert who is leading content marketing at their company with a key goal to scale up production and increase revenue impact. They want to continue learning and building their expertise in different content approaches. They want to be part of the current content marketing conversation.
These target audiences and problem areas have led me to the following content pillars for my own content strategy as I’m building my personal brand expertise:
Content strategy
Content planning
SEO
Content distribution
Working with freelancers
Each of these content pillars contains content that is specific to the pain points of each target audience.
For instance, for personas 1 and 2 who don’t have content marketing subject knowledge but are exploring content as part of the startup marketing approach, foundational pieces like ‘the complete guide to content marketing for startups’ are valuable.
That piece is way too basic for persona 3 who has been building and executing content strategies for many years – but a blog like ‘the topic cluster model, explained’ might be valuable for them if topic clusters aren’t an approach they’ve come across before.
That’s just a snapshot of the kind of thinking that goes into deciding and developing content pillars, but hopefully it provides a little more context to help inform your own content strategy and creation.
There are a lot of content calendar templates out there.
Most of them are (frankly) quite shite.
These ones, in my humble opinion, is quite good.
They’re the actual content calendar templates that I’ve used throughout my career as an in-house and freelance content marketer.
This means I’ve spent a ton of time iterating on and adding to the content calendar templates, polishing them over the year.
And now I’m sharing the templates, so that you don’t have to waste time doing the same – they’re completely free and you don’t need to give me your email address to access them, just head to the links below.
There are two versions, because I started off religiously using Google Sheets or Excel, but more recently I’ve made the switch to Notion.
Both templates include guidance on how to use it, with examples to help you get started (there’s nothing worse than a blank template). They’re comprehensive, but fully editable so you can take what you need and leave the rest behind. There’s also a simplified calendar / roadmap view for each, which I find makes stakeholder comms much, much easier.
How to use. At the top of the Notion page you’ll find instructions and guidance on how to use the template and make your own content calendar.
Calendar view. An overview of content being published across all content marketing channels for the next month. Content calendars can contain an overwhelming amount of information, and I often find that it’s easier to look at a quick snapshot of what’s coming up – plus this is very handy for communicating that information to stakeholders or colleagues too. So, this calendar view strips away all the detail to provide that.
Plan. A table / database view which contains all the details that you need when planning, managing, and publishing content across several channels. It contains the following inputs: title, status, owner, publication date, description, notes / next steps, target audience, pillar topic, format, funnel stage, target keyword, draft copy, live link.
Performance. I find it useful to also keep a top-level view of performance for individual content pieces in the content calendar, so there are also views for the key performance metrics. I’ve included separate views for blog performance and LinkedIn performance, because each channel typically has different useful metrics. If there are other channels or metrics that are useful for you to track here, you’ll just need to duplicate the view, edit the content, and add new columns for the metrics you need to see. If you like to keep reporting completely separate to planning, you can just delete these views completely.
Why is Notion a good option for your content calendar?
Everyone’s on Notion these days.
Including me.
It’s my platform-of-choice currently for content planning and management – which means it’s also where my own content calendars live (both my personal content calendar for this website, and professionally for clients too).
Notion is easy to set up and flexible enough to cover the format needs of a whole team, from project plans to company documentation to setting up an effective content calendar, and beyond.
Plus, when it comes to content marketing tools, I’m a big advocate of using what your team already has.
Most project management tools will have the functionality you need for a content calendar – just like Notion does.
So, given so many teams already use Notion (or other tools like Asana, Monday, ClickUp, etc), you rarely need to invest in a standalone content planning tool.
Content calendar template for Google Sheets and Excel
How to use. The first sheet contains instructions and guidance on how to set up your own copy of the content calendar and how to populate it with your own content plans.
Content roadmap. An overview of content being published in the next quarter – a useful snapshot for sharing with stakeholders or colleagues.
Blog calendar. A template for content planning and publication for a blog as the core content channel. It contains the following inputs: title, status, owner, publication date, description, notes / next steps, target audience, pillar topic, format, funnel stage, target keyword, draft link, live link, key content performance metrics – but you can, of course, edit those columns to meet your needs.
LinkedIn calendar. A template for planning and managing content production for a LinkedIn page. It contains the following inputs: title, status, owner, publication date, publication time, target audience, pillar topic, format, funnel stage, post copy, image brief, image link, live link, key LinkedIn post performance metrics.
I’ve included blog and LinkedIn as two key channels typically used for B2B SaaS companies, which is my own personal focus. If you have different or additional content formats or channels that need to be reflected on your content calendar, simply duplicate one of the calendar sheets and edit the columns to align with that content format.
A decade ago, if a marketing team showed you their content or editorial calendar, there’s no doubt that it would be in an Excel format – or Google Sheets if they were a Google company over Microsoft.
That isn’t true today – there are a whole host of content calendar tools and project management softwares out there that can be used for effective and organised content planning (like Notion!)
But some people still love an Excel or Google Sheet content calendar.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
In fact, I salute it.
A spreadsheet does everything you need it to do. Rows, columns, filters, drop downs, tabs for different channels or views – it’s basic, but it does the job.
This free template just exists to make life a little easier – because setting up an Excel content calendar for the first time (whether it’s the first time ever or the first time at a new company) is always a bit of a nightmare.
Content marketing isn’t all sunshine and rainbows.
Sometimes it is – the creative ideas flow, are fun to produce, and perform well.
But sometimes it feels like you’re in a bit of a rut – the ideas are dull, you don’t think they’ll provide real value to the audience, and it feels like all your competitors are just producing versions of the same content.
In those moments, original research content may be the answer to your prayers.
Original research content surfaces fresh insights and angles that set your brand apart. It lends itself to creative distribution campaigns and big brand moments. And the data-led stories that are uncovered are perfect fodder for repurposing into standalone content pieces – giving new fodder for your content calendar.
In content marketing, original research refers to a bespoke piece of research being undertaken for the purposes of creating content based on the findings of that research. The resulting content often takes the form of a research report, such as Buffer’s ‘State of Remote Work’.
The main ways to produce original research are:
Proprietary data analysis. Many tech companies own data as part of their product, which may include compelling findings for content. Ravio, for example, has an extensive database of compensation benchmarking data, and they release key trends from this data in their annual compensation trends report. Even tech companies that don’t explicitly sell data as part of their product may still have proprietary data in terms of how customers use the product – Gong, for instance, regularly publishes findings from analysing how sales teams use their sales platform, through the Gong labs series.
Market survey study. According to a Mantis Research report, survey-based original research is the most common type amongst marketers, wherein a survey is conducted and key findings and trends from the responses are published. An example of this is Lattice’s annual ‘State of People Strategy’ report.
Third-party analysis. Instead of analysing your own proprietary data, collect existing external data to analyse. A marketing company, for instance, could analyse the homepages of 100 tech companies and share key themes and findings. One example of this is Kamma’s ‘State of the Climate Transition’ report which analyses the transition plans of 85 UK mortgage lenders.
Experiment findings. Some products lend themselves to running mini-experiments and publishing the findings – if you had a marketing platform product, for instance, you could run A/B test campaigns testing different variables and publish the findings. Another example of this is Stripe running an experiment to find out if adding a ‘buy now, pay later’ option to checkouts adds friction.
Should you include original research content in your content plan?
Probably!
Original research content has lots of benefits and a few downsides.
Here’s a quick snapshot of the pros and cons:
Now let’s take a closer look at each of these.
In terms of the benefits of including original research in your content plan:
Unique insights and new ideas. It’s easy for content to feel stale when it relies largely on desk research. Original research projects give you data findings that provide unique insights and new angles to create truly differentiated content around.
Up-to-date data. Great content provides evidence for the arguments made. But how many times have you gone to cite a study or research paper, only to find that it was conducted 5+ years ago? Outdated data damages the credibility of the argument. Original research projects give you up-to-date data to cite for the most important arguments in your content plan.
Demonstrate brand expertise. Producing original research content with those unique insights places your brand as a thought leader and authority for the topic area that your research focuses on.
Showcase your data (if applicable). In some cases original research content showcases data that is available as part of a product – like Ravio’s Compensation Trends report, for instance, which includes a round up of key trends from their compensation benchmarking database. This can be a great way to show potential customers the kind of insights that can be gained through buying your product.
Shareability and backlinks. It isn’t just you that wants up-to-date data to cite. If the original research content you produce is relevant to your industry, you’ll find that it gets shared and cited broadly. That increases the reach of your brand, as well as improving SEO performance by boosting the number of backlinks to your domain.
PR opportunities. Journalists love new data findings. When you produce original research content and turn the findings into a great press release, you’re almost guaranteed to gain brand exposure through press and media, which may even lead to speaking opportunities on the topic at hand.
Increased brand awareness. Publishing original research content is a great way to engineer a big brand moment. The attention surrounding the launch of the original research content (PR, shareability on social media and other channels, increased branded search, etc) makes your brand visible to new audiences.
Generate new leads. Done right, original research content provides a huge amount of value through new insights and fresh data findings. It, therefore, makes for great gated content because it actually delivers enough value to be worth giving away your email address for. That can help to generate a new pool of potential leads to warm up and nurture over time.
Repeatable impact. Original research content makes for perfect repeatable content. If the content performs well (in all of the ways listed above), it can be repeated the following year to produce updated data on the same topic. This gives the opportunity to build on the content, adding new insights based on feedback from the market. It also gives the opportunity to start building trends by comparing the new data to that from the previous year. In this way, original research can become a reliable annual brand campaign, becoming a known touchpoint that your audience looks out for each year. Ravio’s Compensation Trends report, for instance, began for 2024 and now has a 2025 edition too.
However, there are a couple of important considerations to make if you are thinking about adding original research to your content plan:
It needs to be high-quality to be successful. Half-hearted original research content isn’t going to work. It needs to provide genuinely interesting data that unearths new insights or challenges existing ones.
That takes a lot of time, effort, and expertise to get right. Ensuring original research content is high-quality isn’t an easy feat – you need to have the time and resources to get it right before embarking on an original research project.
Including data science expertise. Great original research content relies on data analysis and data visualisation. You need to ensure you’re asking the right questions, interpreting the data correctly, and communicating the findings in an understandable way. It can’t be just a content marketing project, it needs collaboration with data science and design colleagues. If you don’t have that at hand, you’ll need to source support externally, or leave original research ideas until you do have the internal resource to make it work.
Your content shouldn’t sound like every one of your competitors’.
With my Content Strategy Audit you’ll identify the creative content opportunities that competitors can’t replicate, and that will truly build brand authority.
How to create and distribute original research content: a step-by-step guide
How do you actually go about creating a piece of original research content? Let’s take a look at the key steps involved.
Step 1: The content plan
Original research content is time-consuming to produce, so it’s important that it has the impact that you want it to.
That means starting with research and a content plan:
Target audience. Which of your buyer personas are being targeted with this piece of content? Why is original research content the right format for them?
Topic. What key pain points and needs does the target audience have that original research could be harnessed to address? What questions are they asking us that we don’t currently have the answer to? Are there any emerging trends in conversations with customers or prospects?
Competitor analysis. What research studies and content already exist on this topic area? What unique angles or insights could we add to this?
Objectives. What do you want to achieve through this piece of original research content e.g. increased brand awareness, lead generation? What wider business goals are being driven through the project?
You’re looking for a topic area that is meaningful to your audience, isn’t completely saturated in the market already, and lacks evidence or data for common opinions or debates.
I recommend putting all of this information into a one-page strategy document that covers the aims and objectives, target audience, the pain points being addressed, the expected themes, and a brief explanation of how the original research will be produced and used.
It’s useful to have all these key elements in one clear place for a few reasons: for yourself to refer back to to maintain focus throughout the project, to make briefing collaborators and partners easy, and to support stakeholder alignment conversations (see step 3).
Here’s an example of how this thinking goes in reality.
Example: Kamma’s climate transition plan analysis
I worked with Kamma on an original research project to produce an analysis of mortgage lender transition plans.
Kamma wanted to own the topic area of ‘climate transition plans’ for their target audience of UK mortgage lenders – with the aim of increasing their brand awareness as experts on this subject.
I repeatedly heard from customers and prospects in this target audience that there was a huge pain point involved in producing a climate transition plan for the first time.
Sustainability Managers were going into the process of creating a transition plan blind. They’re a relatively new concept, and in most cases the Sustainability Manager was working alone on the project. They desperately wanted to know how other organisations were approaching this to know if they were doing the right thing, but there was a lack of transparency in the industry which left them unsure how to create a credible transition plan.
In terms of competitor analysis, there was a lot of educational content out there about transition plans, as well as best practice frameworks from organisations like Transition Plan Taskforce (TPT). But there was a distinct lack of data and insight on how companies (including mortgage lenders) were actually putting that advice into practice.
So, we had the perfect combination for a strong original research content project: a clear pain point from the target audience, and a topic area that is underserved with data insights.
The result was a report titled ‘The State of the Climate Transition for UK Mortgage Lenders in 2024’, containing two key pieces of original research. Firstly, the report centres around an analysis I conducted of 85 mortgage lender transition plans, against a set of criteria that make for a robust and credible climate plan. Secondly, it also includes findings from survey responses by ESG and Sustainability professionals in the mortgage industry, to bring qualitative insights too.
✨ Explore more original research content examples
I always find that looking at examples of how other companies are doing content helps me to understand different approaches and get inspired.
So, I’ve put together a set of original research examples to help you do just that.
Once you have the rough plan and objectives for the content that will be produced, it’s time to create a project plan.
Original research content takes a lot of time to get right and will involve several collaborators and stakeholders, so a strong project plan is vital – for original research content you need to be a great project manager as well as a content creator.
List out all of the tasks required to create, launch (see step 8), and distribute (see step 9) the original research content.
Then put those tasks against a timeline with how long each will take, and what the eventual publication or launch date will therefore be.
Make sure to highlight any important dependencies – tasks that will be delayed if other tasks are not completed in time.
Give each task an owner too so that it’s clear to all involved in the project who needs to be doing what, by when.
This project plan will be a living document throughout the production and launch of your original research, a project management tool to keep things on track.
Now that you have the strategic thinking on what the original research content should be, and the project plan that covers the details, it’s time to get stakeholder alignment.
I can’t stress enough just how important this step is.
Original research content projects tend to be pieces of content that have a strong viewpoint or challenge the status quo. They also tend to be more visible than your average blog, because you typically use them to make a big brand splash via PR and other channels.
For these reasons, internal stakeholders will definitely have an opinion on how the original research project should be run.
There’s nothing worse than getting stuck into the project and then finding out that your CEO thinks it should be done differently.
Plus, those internal stakeholders normally have strong networks, and you’ll likely want to harness that network to gather insights and/or to support the launch and distribution of the findings, so it’s good to get their buy-in and support early on.
Internal stakeholders also includes any team members that you will need to be involved in the project – data science, designers, etc. This is the opportunity to make sure the timeline works for them, and identify any elements or ideas that you’ve missed.
I’d recommend setting up a meeting with all the stakeholders, to run them through your strategic document as well as the planned timeline and ensure alignment. Then set up separate calls with each key collaborator e.g. data science, design, etc to go into the details.
Step 4: Data gathering and analysis
Original research isn’t original research without gathering data.
If you’re using proprietary data from your own product, this will be where that collaboration with your internal data science team comes in – to pull the data needed and to analyse it to find key trends and insights. It’s important that you tell an accurate story, not the one that you want to see.
It may also be that you’re working with a partner as a data provider, in which case this step involves all of that liaison with them to get the right data to include.
If you’re conducting a survey, this step is even more important, because the quality of the content rests on the quality of the survey questions and the number of responses received.
A piece of advice: be open to whatever insights and trends arise. If you try to create a piece of original research that ‘proves’ an opinion your brand already has, you’re missing the point. You can’t control the data or the survey responses that you receive (and if you do, it will be obvious that the methodology is dodgy as hell). New angles and ideas are incredibly valuable, so be open to whatever comes of the research.
💡 My top tips for running a survey
I’m no market research expert, but I have run a lot of surveys in my time to gather data for original research content.
Here’s all my best pieces of advice:
Minimise open-ended questions. It’s always tempting to include lots of open-ended questions that require text-only answers. Whilst this can give great insights and quotes to include in the content, it also means that there’s lots of qualitative data which can’t be used to formulate key statistics and data findings.
Avoid leading questions. The survey questions need to be as clear and objective as possible, to ensure that the answers received are honest and unbiased. If you write questions hoping to get a specific response back, you’re only reducing the credibility of the resulting data.
Include demographic questions. The demographics of survey respondents will often impact the answers that they give – factors such as age, gender, location, company type, etc. It’s important to include these so that you can understand how they impact the results. Plus, this is also where you’ll gain additional segments to analyse the data against. For instance, you might find that there are very different trends at play in the responses from employees at early-stage startups compared to those at established public companies – and that’s always valuable insight to point out.
Prioritise sample size. The number of respondents to your survey is important, because you need a substantial sample size for the findings to be statistically significant. Use a tool like Surveymonkey’s sample size calculator to find out how many responses you should be aiming for as a bare minimum.
Make a survey distribution plan. As we’ve seen, getting a substantial number of survey responses is vital to success. Spend time thinking about how to maximise this. This might involve working with partners to distribute the survey more widely. Or it might include putting budget behind it – paid ads, an incentive e.g. gift card competition for completing the survey, or paying for additional responses using a tool like Pollfish.
Step 5: Content draft – copy and design
With the findings determined, it’s time to get drafting.
If you’ve had a rocky ride up to this point in terms of stakeholder alignment, I’d recommend first putting together a content outline which defines how the piece of content will be structured, the data findings that will be included, and the key themes or narratives that the content will focus on. Get the stakeholders to check the outline and add any comments before you start drafting the full piece.
Structure and data visualisation are key when it comes to quality original research content.
They tend to be pretty meaty pieces of content, often a lengthy data report or white paper, so the structure is important to ensure that readers can navigate through the report and easily find the data findings that interest them.
Great data visualisation ensures that the findings and insights that you’re surfacing are clear and easy to understand for all readers – and gives you beautiful, shareable assets that visually tell the narrative of the key findings to use throughout the launch campaign.
I’d recommend viewing this content drafting phase as a collaboration between content writer and designer. The structure and visualisation is never going to be on point if the designer simply receives a big old Google Doc with the copy. They need to be involved in how the data findings are turned into content – the visual and the written need to be aligned. This is especially important if you’re planning to produce a landing page or microsite as the key asset, rather than a static PDF or article.
Step 6: Content review and edits
There are likely to be lots of people involved in the review process – all those internal stakeholders, plus any external partners or subject experts that you want to gather opinions from.
This is always a frustrating part of the content creation process, managing an influx of comments and trying to keep on top of the timeline.
My best piece of advice is to build in way more time than you think you will need for reviews and edits. In my experience, that wiggle room is always needed.
Step 7: Publication and launch campaign
Publication time!
The launch of the original research content is key to making it a big brand moment – so it’s important to include the thinking on how you will launch the piece in the project planning phase (see step 2) to make sure you have everything ready at the same time.
This will likely include:
Landing page – copy, design, development. If you’re gating the content, then this should include a snapshot of key findings and the form to download the full report. If you aren’t gating, then the landing page might be the bulk of the content itself, hosting all the key findings in a format like Klarna’s annual ‘The Checkout’ report.
Teaser posts leading up to launch. This can be beneficial to build momentum and anticipation for the release of the report – on whichever channels are important for you.
Network comms. To maximise reach it’s always worth engaging your wider brand network with an ask to share the report with their audience – partners, collaborators, friends – both those of the company as a whole and of key employees. Create a communications pack which contains draft copy for sharing the report via email and LinkedIn post, as well as graphics to share too.
Share and engage via all your key marketing channels. Prep copy and imagery for announcing the report release via all the channels you use: email, social media, website pop ups, communities you’re part of, a launch webinar or in-person event, and so on. If momentum picks up and people are talking about the report, engage with it.
Press release. Original research is great for PR, because journalists love to share new insights and data findings, so have that press release ready to go – ideally share the report with them under embargo the day before launch.
Employee advocacy. If you have employees who are active on key channels such as LinkedIn, work with them to prepare a series of posts highlighting the launch.
💡 To gate, or not to gate, that is the question
Should you gate the original research content, or not?
It’s a good question, and it all depends on your goals – which should have been defined back in step 1 of the process.
If the priority is brand awareness, increasing website traffic, or improving SEO performance, then don’t gate the content. Having the content freely available on a webpage will be beneficial for all these aims – search engines will be able to index it and there are no barriers to your audience interacting with the findings.
If the priority is to generate new leads that can be nurtured and warmed up over time to become a potential buyer, then gating the content is worthwhile to support this aim.
If you do choose to gate, I’d always recommend building additional content around the gated piece to maximise brand awareness and SEO benefits at the same time – create standalone blogs that showcase key findings and themes, build snapshots of the data into the landing page where users can download, share key findings across other channels, and so on.
Step 8: Ongoing distribution
It’s easy to launch the original research and then consider it done.
But, a lot of time and effort has gone into the creation of this piece of original research content, so you want to squeeze as much impact out of it as possible.
So your project plan (see step 2) should also include the campaign plan for the ongoing distribution of the original research.
This should always include:
Drip feed insights across key channels. Every single one of those data findings or survey questions tells a story, so continue sharing them across all key channels – including supporting employees and partners to draft posts sharing insights too. And don’t forget to make use of those beautiful data visualisations too!
Surrounding topic cluster. If SEO is an important channel for you, then I’d highly recommend building the original research content into a wider topic cluster to help build topical authority and drive organic traffic to the report.
Nurture leads. If you’ve released the original research as gated content, then make sure you have a plan for how you will nurture the leads gained from content downloads.
We’ve seen throughout this article that creating high-quality original research content is no easy task.
Working with a freelance content writer who has experience with working with original research content can take the pressure off, freeing up time for your marketing team to focus on everything else that’s on their plate.
That had me confused for a hot minute, because SME stands for Small or Medium-sized business, right?
Turns out that, yes, it does.
But it also stands for subject matter expert in the world of content marketing.
That puts subject matter experts firmly in my bad books alongside other confusing acronyms with double meanings – like MVP (minimum viable product or most valuable player), ATM (at the moment or automated teller machine), and PTO (paid time off or please turn over).
Anyway, enough of the inner ramblings of my mind, and back to the point of this article.
Subject matter experts are a must-have in content marketing. Content led by expert input is always much higher quality, offering real value to a target audience and elevating a brand’s reputation.
But how do you find subject matter experts? And how do you work with them effectively?
Lucky you’re here, because that’s exactly what this article covers:
What is a subject matter expert in content marketing?
A subject matter expert (SME) is someone who has extensive professional knowledge of the subject area that your brand is creating content about.
They will have clocked up several years working in that field, giving them lots of personal experience and learning to draw upon.
They may be a well-known figure in the industry, regularly called upon as an expert by others – a panel speaker during events or conferences, a featured expert in news articles, a podcast interviewee – though this isn’t a necessity: you don’t have to be visible to be an expert in a topic area.
Let’s take HR tech as an example. Content writers in HR tech might call upon employment lawyers, compensation consultants, or experienced Chief People Officers as subject matter experts.
Or, content writers in climate tech might speak with climate scientists, experienced Heads of Sustainability, or climate startup founders as subject matter experts.
💡10 real-world examples of subject matter expert content
Examples of how other brands are putting a content concept into action are always helpful, so I’ve put together a few great examples of content that harnesses subject matter experts for high-quality, valuable content.
Why are subject matter experts important in content marketing?
Subject matter experts elevate content. They offer deep knowledge and lived experience in the topics which makes for more useful and trustworthy content – increasing your brand’s reputation as a source for valuable insights.
In particular, working with subject matter experts leads to:
Higher content quality
Unique angles and POVs
Brand trust and credibility
Increased reach and engagement
Improved SEO performance.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these.
Subject matter experts lead to higher content quality
Quality content addresses genuine problems and pain points of your specific target audience.
That can be difficult to get right, which is in large part because content writers are rarely experts in the problems that they’re writing about.
They can get pretty close, because great content writers are quick learners who are highly skilled at research.
But no amount of research compares to lived experience of the pain point at hand.
This is especially true if your audience is a higher level, expert audience with years of experience in their field. The pain points that they have will rarely be solved even by the most excellent desk research by a writer.
It’s painfully obvious to readers when content is too surface-level to meet their needs, and that prevents an audience from seeing your brand as a go-to resource.
Subject matter experts will have the deep understanding of the problem that you need to ensure your content is truly valuable to the audience. They’ll be able to share their experience, and their learnings and approaches to mitigating that problem.
Your content shouldn’t sound like every one of your competitors’.
With my Content Strategy Audit you’ll identify the creative content opportunities that competitors can’t replicate, and that will truly build brand authority.
Subject matter experts bring unique angles and POVs
The experience that subject matter experts have means that they’ll think of ideas and connections that you can’t as a content writer.
They’ll bring up anecdotes and examples that add colour to the content you’re creating, showing your audience that your brand has a close understanding of their experience.
Plus, every time I speak to a subject matter expert about one topic or pain point, I come away with a whole host of new ideas to explore.
Their knowledge of a broad subject means that they will naturally connect dots during a conversation that you might not otherwise think of – so it’s a great way to find new angles and ideas for future content plans too.
Those unique angles, anecdotes, and perspectives are incredibly valuable for successful content, because they’re what differentiates your content and your brand from everyone else out there.
Subject matter experts enhance brand trust and credibility
High quality content with unique angles and points of view is always going to be great for brand reputation.
It positions the brand as a one that leads with expertise, and a brand that real industry experts are willing to work with to share their expertise.
In turn, this means that audience members are more likely to place trust in your brand, and turn to your content as a credible source of insights.
Plus, we naturally trust people that we recognise have first-hand experience with a topic or problem – we want to learn about their experiences and approaches, so that we can apply that to our day-to-day work as inspiration.
Subject matter experts increase reach and engagement
If more members of your target audience trust the content that your brand produces, then you’ll naturally see an increase in reach and engagement.
Plus, partnering with subject matter experts can be almost like partnering with influencers.
If you collaborate with subject matter experts that already have a strong personal brand and following, then you’ll reap the benefits of that following when you share that you’ve worked with them on a piece of content. Members of their audience that didn’t know about your brand before (or didn’t trust it) will now be more likely to engage with your content and brand.
Even more so if the subject matter expert is willing to share the content themselves to their audience!
Subject matter experts mean improved SEO performance
E-E-A-T stands for: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
It means that the quality of content is now crucial for SEO performance. The content needs to demonstrate deep understanding of the subject matter and real-world experience with it, in order to build that authority and trustworthiness.
All of this is helped by working with subject matters and including their voice within your content – we’ve already seen how they increase the quality of content through bringing that experience and expertise into play.
The ‘authority’ element also relates to how much coverage an author or brand has on the broad topic area. If your brand has lots of helpful, quality content on a topic area, you’re more likely to rank for it – which is where a model like topic clusters can be incredibly valuable.
So you’re sold on the idea of leveraging subject matter experts for higher quality content. But how do you actually find subject matter experts?
Here’s the most common ways to find subject matter experts:
Internal experts. This could be founders or senior leaders who have a strong opinion about an industry or topic area. It could be job roles internally that fit the profile of your target audience. If you’re an HR tech company, maybe your Chief People Officer would make a great subject matter expert, for instance.
Partners and advisors. Many companies today have a partnerships function, which focuses entirely on building relationships and collaborations between your company and other people or brands in the space. Those existing partnerships are likely full of subject matter experts who are already bought into your brand’s mission. Beyond that, the company’s wider network might include advisors who have relevant experience. For startups, that could include your VC investors.
Customers. Contacts at existing customers can fit the subject matter expert profile you’re looking for. It also gives you a great chance to build the relationship with customers by helping to raise their profile through collaborative content.
LinkedIn searches. Use LinkedIn to find people who fit the profile you’re looking for based on their job title and experience, and reach out to them by DM with a specific question or an interview request. If those people are regularly posting on LinkedIn, they’re more likely to be up for content collaborations that might further raise their own personal profile.
Industry communities. Today there are a whole host of Slack channels and LinkedIn groups for every single niche you can think of – and they’ll be full of industry experts.
SME tools. Tools like Help a B2B Writer, Featured, and Leaps can help you to find subject matter experts who can share advice and experiences on a particular topic, or answer a specific question for you.
Survey tools. Survey tools like SurveyMonkey or PollFish enable you to pay for audience participation. This can be a way to find experts to answer specific questions via a survey – but be wary, because the audiences used are often very broad.
Paid collaborations. There are influencers in all industries today, including B2B. You could pay for a content collaboration with an influencer and use this to leverage their expertise for the content.
💡Tip: look for subject matter experts with an existing personal brand and following
The best case scenario is that you interview a subject matter expert, leverage their insights to create a great piece of content that solves a real pain point for your target audience, and they then share that content with their own audience, increasing reach and impact.
That only works if they’re already active on a channel like LinkedIn, and have an engaged following that fits your target audience – so seek that out.
How to persuade subject matter experts to work with you
Once you’ve found subject matter experts, you still need to persuade them to collaborate with you.
A few tips on this from my own experience:
Give a brief introduction first. Send them a brief overview of the topic or the piece of content you’re hoping to create, and ask them if it resonates with them first. It won’t always be a good fit – it might just not be a problem they’ve experienced themselves – and this avoids wasted time. Plus, if it isn’t the topic for them, they almost always come back with an intro to someone in their network who is a good fit!
Be clear about the ask. A vague ask is likely to be ignored. Explain the process – how will you gather their insights, and how long will it take? Explain exactly what you want their contribution for – how will their insights be included in the content. I’d always recommend sharing an example of a previous piece in a similar style to give context.
Make it easy. When you work with subject matter experts, you’re always asking for a piece of their valuable time. And they’re always busy people with lots going on. So make it as easy as possible for them to contribute. If they’re struggling to find the time for an interview, send them the questions by email and ask them to send bullet point note answers. Never expect them to write the content for you.
Make it valuable. Whenever I work with subject matter experts, I always feel overly bad about asking for their time and expertise for my content needs. But I forget that most of these experts are trying to build their own personal brand and increase their own exposure. They’re often excited about the idea, because content collaborations help them get their name out there in an expert capacity. So make it valuable, explain how it will help them gain brand exposure in a way that supports their own goals. If they’re a LinkedIn user, I highly recommend drafting a couple of LinkedIn posts for them using the insights shared – it’s hard to keep on top of posting on LinkedIn, so it’s always appreciated, and it supports your content distribution too.
Build in plenty of time. I’ve made the mistake before of having a piece of content drafted, and thinking ‘this section could really do with an expert comment’. You’re ready to wrap it up and get it published, so you want to interview them to get their input ASAP. They’re busy, and they didn’t know this piece of content even existed until today. Try to think through expert input for every new piece of content whilst you’re in the planning phases, and reach out to experts then. Then build in more time than you think you need to – finding a slot in their busy calendar to chat isn’t always easy, and they’ll normally take a few days to review the content once it’s drafted.
Aim to develop an ongoing relationship. If you find a subject matter expert who is keen to contribute, make it a priority to cultivate that relationship. It makes collaborations so much easier in the future if you have an existing list of friendly subject matter experts who are happy for you to shoot them a quick question every so often, and who will always say yes to working together.
Interview tips: how to get the most out of your subject matter experts
If you’re anything like me (read: a huge introvert who is better at writing than talking), it can be pretty nerve-wracking to interview a subject matter expert.
There are four things that make SME interviews easier for me personally:
Remember that you’re doing something for them too. In my early subject matter interviews I would find myself repeatedly apologising for asking them to spare their time to talk to me. I’d always feel that I was asking too much of them, getting them to do me a massive favour. SMEs wouldn’t agree to collaborate with you on a piece of content if there wasn’t something in it for them. Usually it’s that they want to build their own brand and be seen as an expert – many of them even offer consultancy services, so it’s free marketing for them. It’s a positive thing for both sides. I still thank SMEs for their time, that’s just politeness, but I no longer start SME calls feeling guilty for taking up their precious time.
Go to the interview well prepared. This is a basic piece of advice for any kind of interview, but it’s a good one. Before you get to the interview, make sure you’ve read up on both the topic and the subject matter expert. You don’t want to ask your SME basic questions because that’s a waste of everyone’s time, you want to get to the expertise quickly. If they’ve written on the topic before (website, LinkedIn posts, PR opinion pieces, etc) then get to know their point of view. Then use this information to prepare questions that will unearth a new angle or insight.
Let the interview be open ended. Prepare those questions, but leave room for improvisation and additional questions during the conversation. Subject matter experts are knowledgeable people. I find they almost always go off on tangents outside of the questions I’ve prepared, because they make connections between that question and other topics or problem areas. Those tangents are your friend: they’re often where those unique angles, insights, and anecdotes arise.
If you didn’t catch it, ask them to repeat it. Subject matter experts know their topics inside out, in a professional capacity. They’ll often use technical language and they might mention concepts that you haven’t come across yet. It’s also easy to simply mishear – especially if you’re holding an interview virtually. Sometimes it feels like you’re being a nuisance if you ask them to repeat themselves, but you aren’t, and it avoids you trying to decipher missing notes during the drafting process. This is especially important for technical language or concepts, because making those things easy to understand for the audience is an important part of your role as a content writer.
And the same is true for your content – we want customer-centric content, not brand-centric content.
Content that empathises with a target audience’s pain point is engaging in an authentic way, showing the audience that your brand understands the unique challenges they face.
Content that educates on solutions to those pain points demonstrates brand knowledge and expertise, sowing seeds of trust, reputation, and memorability.
Content that showcases how your product can solve the pain points in a way no other solution can (or how it has already solved this pain for others like them), helps to convert audience members into customers.
But how can you effectively bring audience pain points to the core of your content marketing efforts?
That’s what we’ll explore in this article, covering:
Pain points are the problems or challenges or things that cause pain in the day-to-day life of your specific target audience – that your product or service can help them overcome.
Lots of things can be pain points, but you want to go deep and find real pain – the specific problems that audience members are actively trying to fix, and would be willing to put time, money, and effort into solving.
Finding out the most pressing audience pain points should be at the top of the list for any start up, because understanding those pain points is vital to creating a product that provides real value and to commercialising it in a way that will deeply resonate with the desired audience (messaging, marketing, sales, etc).
Most articles (like this one, for example) on pain points deem that there are four main types of pain points:
Financial pain points i.e. spending too much on existing solutions or a lack of budget for a solution
Productivity pain points i.e. spending too much time solving the problem that could be used more valuably elsewhere
Process pain points i.e. an overly-complex task or process
Support pain points i.e. limited support to solve a problem or complete a task.
I personally think this is too rigid.
Pain doesn’t fit neatly into boxes, it has a thousand different variations for a thousand different people. To use pain points effectively means committing to the detective work needed to seek out exactly what pain the real-life people we want to buy our product have. The nuance and the detail is important. So feel free to use these four boxes if it’s useful for you, but do so with caution.
The first step in identifying audience pain points is to know the niche target audience you want to attract most.
Most startups neglect audience development. They dive right in to creating a broad range of product features based on their assumptions of a very general target audience, with little evidence of that audience’s real pains and needs. This brings with it a huge risk of building a product that nobody needs. The same is true with content.
Narrow the target audience down to bring focus and effective targeting.
If your leadership team can’t (or won’t) do this overall, then do it within the content strategy that you own: define the niche target audience that your content will aim to build trust with. It might be that you have multiple segments of different personas or buyer profiles – that’s all good, they’ll just have different pain points so will require different content.
Once you know your audience, identifying their pain points comes down to one simple thing: listen to your audience.
I truly believe that one of the most important things you can do to improve the quality, differentiation, and just overall success of your content engine is to get better at listening to your target audience.
And it really doesn’t take much to be better at listening to your audience than your competitors are, because the vast majority of content marketers are not conducting audience research ‘nearly enough’ – according to Tommy Walker’s 2024 ‘State of (Dis)Content’ report.
So what are the best ways to listen to your audience and gather insights on their pain points?
Here’s the main ways to go about this:
Sales and Customer Success calls. The best case scenario is that your commercial team already record all of their calls with prospects and customers. Even better if they use a tool like Gong which automatically creates call transcripts and groups snippets of conversations together based on common themes. If this isn’t the case for your team, ask if you can join a call once a week – just to sit quietly in the background and make notes, nothing more.
Prospect and customer feedback. Regularly gathering customer and prospect feedback and ideas is incredibly valuable for all teams – sales teams need to find the most common objections and come up with ways to handle them, product teams need to understand the most requested bugs to fix or features to build, and so on. Because of this it’s highly likely that your company is already documenting customer feedback somewhere – be it in a slack channel, notion document, google drive file. Having access to that feedback is pain point gold.
Webinars or events. The questions or discussions that come about during webinars or events with your target audience can unveil things that are concerning them.
SEO research. Conducting keyword research on relevant topic areas via an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Answer The Public will help you to identify the common search queries of your target audience – many of which will be problems they’re looking for help to solve.
Social listening. Be active in the channels and communities that your target audience hangs out in (join Slack communities, follow industry influencers on LinkedIn, browse relevant forums or Reddit threads, etc) and see the kind of questions or discussions that commonly arise.
Industry research. Run surveys with your target audience (which can double as an opportunity to gather data for original research content too) or regularly search for new industry insights from other brands that contains data or surveys about your target audience – industry reports like Tommy Walker’s ‘State of (Dis)Content’ or Ravio’s ‘Compensation Trends reports’ typically include a survey element, and the answers given may well give you valuable information about the mindset of the audience answering them.
1-2-1 audience interviews. If it’s possible to set up calls regularly with people who fit the niche target audience, then this is the absolute best way to delve into their pain points, because you can ask specific questions tailored to the insights you want to gain. It’s also typically the hardest way to listen to your audience. Other stakeholders within the company already need access to prospects and customers, and you never want to demand too much of someone’s time. It can work when there’s an existing relationship with marketing e.g. if you’re already working on a case study with them or a collaborative piece of content like a webinar. Equally, you could also go outside of customers and prospects, and even offer an incentive like a voucher to set up a 30 minute chat with you.
💡 What should you be asking during audience interviews to find real pain points?
I’ve learnt a lot about deducing customer pain and value from working alongside Alicia Carney (a brilliant Product Marketer and friend), and one of her pieces of advice is to skip the surface level chat and ask the questions that feel vulnerable – you’re aiming to ‘avoid them serving up canned responses of what they think I want to hear.’
– Who owns [problem] in your business? – When you’ve had an awful day and you want to close your laptop and rage quit, what has happened? – When you have an amazing day and you’re buzzing with excitement about your job, what has happened? – How does this challenge impact your goals and daily work? – If you had a solution, how would it change things for you? – How are you currently solving this problem, and what frustrates you about it?
How to effectively address pain points in content marketing
Once you’ve identified the most common and pressing pain points amongst your target audience, it’s time to address those pain points through content.
There are lots of different ways you could approach this.
Here’s a few ideas that work well:
Educational content that validates the pain point e.g. a blog or video titled ‘The problem with X’ which explores the pain point at hand.
Entertaining content that validates the pain point e.g. social media posts using meme formats that enable you to highlight the shared misery you’ve heard from your audience – like this one or this one from Ramp’s LinkedIn.
Community content that validates the pain point through personal stories of others who share the same problem e.g. include as a discussion in an event, start a thread in community Slack channel, share quotes from real people in a blog, use it as the topic for a podcast episode etc.
Share best practice approaches for overcoming the pain point
Share resources e.g. tools, templates that can help to overcome the pain point
Conversion-focused content that highlights how your product can help to overcome the pain point
Case studies demonstrating how other users have overcome the problem with the help of your product.
💡 Explore real-world examples of customer pain points
I always find it helpful to understand how other brands are approaching content marketing, and that includes how they use customer pain points to inform the content produced – so I’ve put together a few examples to help put things into context.
And then all you need to do is build these ideas into your existing content plan for production and distribution.
Using a framework like an empathy map can be a helpful way to distil the information gathered from listening to the target audience into a more concrete set of common themes.
Personally I find it useful to have a ‘content ideas dump’ for any ideas for future content, including if a new pain point comes up that might be worth including, or I think of an idea for a piece of content to address an existing pain point. It just helps to make life much easier when it comes to planning your next batch of content. I typically have my ‘idea dump’ as a separate tab on my content calendar because I like to have all my planning together, but you could equally have a separate document where you jot down ideas to come back to later.
I’d also highly recommend including pain points as an input on your content calendar – so that every piece of content created is deliberately associated with a validated pain point for the audience being targeted with that content. This helps to keep the focus on addressing pain points once you move from strategic thinking mode into delivery mode.
💡 Tip: lean on your sales team to distribute pain point content
Content that addresses common pain points is perfect fodder for your Sales and Customer Success colleagues to use in customer conversations – building the relationship by helping them solve real problems they’re facing, and showing them how your product can get there more quickly.
So, make sure that they’re aware of the content when it publishes and that they add it to their arsenal of content to share during outreach or ABM campaigns.
Pain point SEO is an approach which aims to increase lead generation from organic search (Google, Bing, etc) by targeting high-intent keywords that align with the real pain points of your target audience.
Search intent in SEO simply refers to the main goal or purpose that a user has when they type a query into a search engine. Content that aligns with search intent is more likely to rank because it actually gives the user what they were looking for, providing real value.
That’s common sense.
Search intent often aligns with pain points, because it’s common for users to make searches based on a pain that they want to solve.
Most searches starting ‘How to …’ will be aiming to overcome a pain point.
Bottom-of-funnel SEO content formats like competitor alternatives or ‘best [category] software’ also typically align search intent with overcoming pain points, because these users are actively looking for a solution that will solve their problem, and they’re probably happy to invest money in that solution.
So, with pain point SEO, the idea is to identify the pain points (and therefore intent) of the target audience you want to bring to your website, and then conduct keyword research to find high-intent keywords that relate to that problem.
It’s basically everything we’ve already talked about in this article in terms of using pain points as the foundation for effective content that resonates with your audience – but applying that to SEO-driven content too, so that instead of blindly producing content based on keywords that seem high potential, you’re producing content targeting the search intent associated with known pain points for your specific audience. It’s lower volume, but higher likelihood of converting to customers.
This isn’t revolutionary by any means, but it is different to the high-traffic approach that many companies have typically taken to SEO. Targeting high-traffic keywords will bring more visitors to your website, but those visitors are likely to be less-ready to convert to a customer than those coming from high-intent keyword searches.
So, pain point SEO (and pain point content in general) is all about finding the people who actually have a real need for the solution you offer, and showing them that your brand is the one to trust to help them solve that need.
Your content shouldn’t sound like every one of your competitors’.
With my Content Strategy Audit you’ll identify the creative content opportunities that competitors can’t replicate, and that will truly build brand authority.
That covers all the classic types of pillars, right?
Wrong.
The missing piece: content pillars.
Done right, content pillars are a fundamental part of any strong content strategy.
They ensure focus stays hyper-dialled in on the problem areas that your brand actually has expertise in solving and that that actually interest your niche target audience.
So how do you effectively introduce content pillars to your content marketing approach?
That’s what we’ll explore in this article, covering:
Content pillars (or ‘topic pillars’) are a set of foundational topics or themes that a brand’s content will cover.
The content pillars are determined as part of developing a content strategy, and should be focused on the niche interests and pain points of your specific target audience that your product or services specialise in solving.
Why are content pillars important?
Content pillars are important for four key reasons:
Content pillars ensure content always resonates with the target audience
Content pillars help to build a strong brand voice
Content pillars build topical authority for SEO
Content pillars bring organisation and focus to content marketing efforts.
Let’s take a closer look at each.
Content pillars ensure content always resonates with the target audience
The biggest reason that I see content marketing fail is that the content produced does not resonate with the target audience.
Effective content marketing requires a deep understanding of the niche target audience or ICP that you want to interact with your brand. If you don’t have that, then frankly there’s no point in bothering to build a content engine.
Content pillars are a great foundational approach to ensure that content does resonate with your target audience, because you’re doing the work first to understand what problems your niche audience have that you have enough expertise (either internally or through collaboration with subject matter experts) to address through content.
Content pillars help to build a strong brand voice
If you’re consistently producing content around a set of strategic content pillars then your audience will quickly learn to associate your brand with those subject areas.
This becomes what your brand is known for and how your audience explains your brand to others – which is why it’s so important that the content pillars align with the problems that your product or service can solve for your target audience.
Content pillars build topical authority for SEO
Content pillars give focus to the topics and themes that your brand wants to ‘own’ in the market. This is great for improving SEO performance, because consistently publishing content on a given subject area shows search engines that you are an expert in that subject, which naturally builds topical authority for your brand and website.
In SEO, topical authority is a measure of a website’s expertise on a particular subject area.
Increased topical authority gives search engines trust (and your website users too) that your website is the place to go for valuable insights on a subject – and you’re rewarded for this by better keyword rankings for terms related to that subject.
Content pillars bring organisation and focus to content marketing efforts
Because content pillars bring focus to content planning, giving a core set of themes and topics that you’re always listening to and planning new ideas around.
This creates a more organised and well-structured content calendar because ideas naturally link to one another and you’re always seeking balance between the core pillars.
And a more organised content calendar also means more organised and well-structured content hubs and channels too, making it easier for users to understand your brand and find relevant content.
🌟7 content pillar examples
It’s always helpful to see how other brands are implementing approaches, including content pillars – so I’ve put together a list of examples to help.
Content pillars seem to get a fair amount of stick on the wonderful world of the internet.
The main arguments against content pillars are:
Content pillars are too rigid – content needs to be able to flex outside of a given set of topic areas.
Content pillars lead to lazy content – brands will end up generating any old content that relates to the chosen topic areas to ‘fill the feed’, rather than thinking strategically about which content pieces will move the needle towards business goals.
The first may be somewhat true, but common sense tells you that if there’s a question that keeps coming up that feels important to cover through content but doesn’t perfectly fit within one of your content pillars, then that’s fine. They’re there to be a framework or guide to maintain focus and propel growth, but the world won’t end if you occasionally share content that goes outside of them. In fact, sometimes this can be an important experiment to inform the next iteration of your content strategy.
The second objection bottles down to using content pillars incorrectly: using the topics as a crutch, without the right thinking behind them. The whole point of content pillars is to ensure that the content you create is always hyper-focused on the problems that you can use your brand’s expertise to explore and address. The content pillars act as guidance on this, but each individual piece of content still needs to adhere to that.
Ultimately a lot of the posts and articles that I see talking about ‘the problems with content pillars’ seem to be largely for clickbait purposes – people trying to have an opinion for the sake of having an opinion, finding problems where there are none, or completely misunderstanding how to use content pillars effectively.
Here’s a couple of examples to show what I mean.
The blog ‘content pillars don’t work’ by The Two Lauras explains content pillars as follows: “If managing a photographer’s social media, the pillars might include studio shots, behind-the-scenes photos, final photo reveals, booking information, and highlighting the gear used.”
Those are not content pillars. They’re content formats or types. They’re also all very brand-centric content ideas, so it’s no wonder they don’t work well.
It’s the same with this one by Sydney Delucchi – she uses ‘quotes’ as an example of a content pillar. Again, not a content pillar.
Both of these examples focus on content pillars for social media, but the principles should be the same no matter what marketing channel is your primary focus.
So, do content pillars actually work?
Yes, content pillars do work. They have several benefits, as explored in the section above ‘why are content pillars important’. But they only work if you implement them effectively.
Which is kinda true for most approaches and strategies really – it’s ultimately up to you to decide which approach best fits your goals and target audience. And if you’re not sure, I’d recommend working with a content strategist to help you figure it out.
How do you decide your content pillars?
There are three key factors to consider when deciding content pillars:
Target audience pain points. What are the problems that customers and prospects are regularly mentioning in conversation with your team? Content that explores and addresses these pain points will resonate with your ideal buyers.
Brand expertise. What problems does our product or service solve for our target audience? What subject areas does our team and network have a higher-than-average level of expertise in? Topics that closely align with your brand and product will ensure that you’re building a warm audience of potential buyers.
SEO potential. Which parent keywords hold the most potential (relevant search intent, and a good balance of keyword volume and keyword difficulty) for strong SEO performance? Some topics are typically underserved with content, and others are heavily saturated – deliberately aiming to ‘own’ underserved topics can help to quickly build relevant organic search traffic.
Themes that stand out across each of these three factors are perfect candidates for content pillars – they should be the topics that your target audience are looking for support in, that relate to your product or service, that you can offer real value and expertise in, and that can drive organic traffic to your website.
It’s then also worth considering what the key subtopics are for each content pillar you come up with. The content pillars will typically be big subject areas that contain lots of smaller themes and topics – so this will help your content planning and organisation later.
As one content pillar example, one of the SaaS brands I work with is Ravio, a compensation management and benchmarking data tool with a target audience of People or Reward Leaders at fast-growing startups in Europe.
Given their product and audience, let’s say they have a content strategy guided by three core content pillars:
Compensation management
Fair pay
Compensation market trends
Each of those pillar topics contains many smaller topics.
Compensation management, for instance, could include topics like:
Total compensation benchmarking – which can be further broken down into salary benchmarking, equity compensation, variable pay, employee benefits
Compensation reviews
Salary bands
And so on.
How many content pillars should you have?
3-5 content pillars is the right kind of range to aim for.
This might sound like a low amount, but that’s deliberate because having too many content pillars reduces focus.
With a lot of content pillars, your content efforts are spread thinly across all of those topic areas. That means you’re less likely to build brand credibility and topical authority in any of them. It makes it more difficult for your audience to understand your brand and the problems you can help them to solve. And it also leads to messy and confusing content hubs or channels – I’m sure we’ve all seen company blogs with a huge list of topics or categories to choose from, and felt overwhelmed with where to start!
If you feel that there are more than five content pillars that are important for your brand to build content around, then I’d suggest two things.
Firstly, clearly define each content pillar you want to include in your content strategy. Document a few ideas for individual pieces of content within that content pillar which address real pain points for your ideal customers. Think about what you would name the corresponding category on the blog page of your website.
It’s worth doing this because often when we think we need more than five content pillars, we actually just need to refine the ideas we have a bit further – I typically find that there’s a lot of overlap or lack of clarity within the planned content pillars.
Secondly, if you really do have more than five content pillars that make sense for your brand, I’d recommend ranking them in order of priority and then start with the top three as your content pillars for the year ahead. When you refresh your content strategy next year, you can then focus on the next three content pillars, until you have a solid foundation for each content pillar that can be built on effectively.
Realistically, you aren’t going to ‘own’ every topic you want to until you’re a giant with decades in the content game (like the Hubspots of the world), so it’s still better to start with a few topics and go deep on them.
Plus, focusing on select topics really does make for better content – you’ll find yourself listening more closely to new ideas and problems in that topic area, and all the research you (and any other writers you work with) conduct on that topic area will make each piece of content you publish even richer. This is what builds that brand expertise and topical authority, so it’s very important.
Are content pillars the same as pillar pages?
No, content pillars aren’t the same as pillar pages.
‘Content pillars’ are sometimes confused with ‘pillar pages’ – which is understandable given their lexical similarity, but they are actually slightly different.
Here’s the difference.
As we’ve seen, content pillars are the set of foundational topics or themes that a brand’s content will cover, determined as part of a brand’s core content strategy.
Pillar pages are a feature of the topic cluster model, a long-form page or blog which gives a broad overview of a topic – often with a headline like ‘the complete guide to [topic]’ or ‘[topic]: a step-by-step guide’ or ‘an introduction to [topic]’.
The topic cluster model is a specific approach sometimes used in content marketing and SEO. For topic clusters a group of webpages (typically blogs or articles) is produced, which all share the same overarching topic. Each cluster always has one pillar page at the core of the topic cluster which gives a broad overview of the topic, and several pieces of cluster content which discuss one aspect of the topic in more detail. The pillar page hyperlinks to each piece of cluster content, and the cluster content links back to the pillar page, so that the whole topic cluster becomes connected.
So they’re slightly different.
But combining content pillars and pillar pages is incredibly powerful for building brand recognition and improving SEO performance.
Combining the two would look like this:
First determine the content pillars that will be foundational to your brand’s content.
Then use the topic cluster model to plan and produce a topic cluster for each content pillar – and potentially also for any important subtopics within the overarching content pillar topic.
Your content shouldn’t sound like every one of your competitors’.
With my Content Strategy Audit you’ll identify the creative content opportunities that competitors can’t replicate, and that will truly build brand authority.
Tabitha Whiting: High-impact content for high-impact startups 