Content writing is among the most important components of any marketing strategy. If you want to build a strong brand that not only obtains ample amounts of new customers but also keeps these customers engaged, you will likely need to provide your audience with content that appeals to them. Let’s say that a user enters your website when searching for a specific product. If your website is well-designed and flows properly from page to page, there’s a good chance that the user will make a purchase.

However, most businesses aren’t satisfied with someone purchasing one item and then never again visiting the website. When a user isn’t purchasing a product, it’s still important to provide them with a great user experience. By creating blog posts and similar types of content writing, it’s possible for you to provide site visitors with content that will keep them engaged long enough to make a purchase or return in the future. Think of content writing as a method of converting a website user into a loyal customer.

Content writing has also proven to be highly effective at displaying consistent brand messaging to customers who read the content. Every time you perform content writing, you have the opportunity to carry the brand’s unique tone and identifiable voice across numerous channels. While content writing mainly involves writing blog posts and articles, it can also include writing scripts for videos.

As mentioned earlier, when content writing is properly implemented on your website, you will be effectively performing conversion rate optimization, which means that site users will remain engaged long enough to become loyal customers. This article provides you with a more in-depth look at how important content writing is for any business or brand that wants a strong web presence.

Benefits of Content Writing

High-quality and well-written content can be beneficial for your website and brand in many ways. The primary benefit of content writing is that your brand will be able to develop consistent pieces of information that your customers will expect when they visit your website. An essential component of the growth and long-term success of any business is to provide customers with consistency. Any business that delivers inconsistent user experiences will most likely become less popular and reputable as time goes on.

As touched upon previously, content writing gives you the opportunity to use a unique style, voice, and tone throughout every channel that your business is part of. Along with your website, the writing you do can also be placed on social media platforms. When users from Facebook visit your website after reading a post you wrote on Facebook, they should be greeted with similar content. This technique is exceedingly important because it allows you to keep customers happy and engaged with your brand.

5 Ways to Include Pillar Content into Your Content Writing

Content writing can be difficult to properly implement if you don’t have much experience with this type of writing. The tools and strategies that are used to perform content writing change on a continual basis. Some of the issues that arise with standard content writing and marketing include:

• Low search rankings
• Poor website traffic
• Lack of a content creation strategy
• Sales and content teams being disconnected from one another

You can mitigate these issues by creating pillar content, which is a more specialized type of content writing. Pillar content essentially involves placing a page on your website that acts as a cornerstone for the majority of the content you place on your website. The content on this page will typically be more than 10,000 words on various subjects and resources that users can benefit from. By placing inbound links into this content, users will be able to reach other areas of your website with ease.

An Example of Pillar Marketing

Let’s say that a marketing agency makes a pillar page that’s centered around Facebook marketing. The page could contain additional info about subjects like:

• Third-party Facebook tools
• Inspiration for Facebook posts
• Facebook advertising
• Best practices for written content
• Everything you should know about Facebook analytics

Each cluster of content will link to the pillar page. If you want your pillar content to be effective, it’s important that you surround this content with other pages and articles on your website that offer similar content that will engage users. Pillar content differs from regular content because of how it’s used. In general, pillar content is comprised of an ample amount of regular content.

1. Gives Your Audience What They Need

Effective pillar content should provide your audience with the content that they need. It’s important, however, that you don’t assume what topics and pieces of information your audience will find relevant. If you have yet to perform extensive research on your target audience, your content writing may not be as effective as you want it to be. To begin the process of creating pillar content, spend some time brainstorming a selection of topics that you want pillar content to be focused on.

With these topics in hand, you can then perform extensive keyword research to identify the phrases and topics that are able to rank highly on Google, are regularly searched for by your main audience, and are comprehensive enough to link out to related topic clusters. Some questions you should ask yourself while writing pillar content include:

• Does the content I’ve written match up with the search queries that my target audience makes?
• Does the content I’ve written answer questions that my audience asks?
• What information can I provide that isn’t available anywhere else?

2. Simple Navigation

Because your pillar content serves as the core component of your entire marketing strategy, it’s essential that your readers are provided with simple navigation that allows them to:

• Access related content and topic clusters without issue
• Browse the pillar content in a straightforward manner

To make sure that your navigation is simple, the functionality, content, and design of the page must work together to reach the goals you have. Without proper navigation, your users could leave your website and enter a competitor’s website to reach the content they’re interested in without as much confusion.

3. User-Friendly Design

Even though the content on the pillar content page is the more important element of this page, you should also focus on implementing a user-friendly design to ensure users have a good experience. Along with being visually appealing, the content should also be responsive to make sure that it works correctly on any device.

If your pillar content works perfectly on desktop computers but is zoomed in on smartphones and tablets, the part of your audience that primarily uses mobile devices will invariably have a worse opinion of your brand. Consider performing usability tests if you want to be more confident about the design of your pillar content page.

4. Link Building

If you don’t incorporate internal hyperlinks into your pillar content, the content will only serve as an extremely lengthy blog post. As you’re writing the content for the pillar page, you should always be asking yourself if the content you’re writing can be linked to relevant articles and topic clusters on your website. Keep in mind that there are several ways to build links. Along with hyperlinks, you can also include linked images and buttons in your content.

These links will also provide search engines with the ability to connect the pieces of content that are related to one another. When more connections are made between different pieces of content on your website, it’s more likely that your website will obtain high rankings on search engines like Google and Bing.

5. Branding

When you’re developing content for your pillar page, you should aim to provide consistent branding across all of your content. Each piece of content should have similar formatting and language. If you want your primary audience to remain engaged with the content, it’s highly recommended that you use the tone and voice that applies specifically to your brand. If the language in your content differs considerably from the tone and voice of your brand image, your main audience may be confused and disinterested in the content you write.

How To Produce Effective Content Writing

If you want to produce effective content writing, doing so isn’t as difficult as it might seem. The easiest way to produce effective and consistent content is by first creating a robust content strategy, which should make your content writing efforts more structured. The content you write should be emotionally engaging and clearly written. It’s also highly recommended that you incorporate SEO best practices into your content, which extend to keyword research as well as keyword integration.

The first step in writing great content involves writing content that your audience wants to read. Engaging content will educate your audience on the products/services you offer, match the brand persona you’ve developed, and build additional avenues for customer engagement. Once you perform research on your target audience and know what subjects you should write about, consistency should be a core focus of yours. By writing weekly or monthly posts, your readers should remain engaged with your website and brand.

If you find that you don’t have time to write all of the content on your own, you could either allow your marketing team to assist with content writing or hire a separate agency to help you. While both options produce results, it may be better to hire a separate agency. When you hire a content writing and marketing agency, they will be able to focus all of their efforts on delivering content that matches your brand and is released at set intervals. You may be spreading your marketing team too thin if you attempt to have some of them write content as well.

The most effective forms of content marketing at your disposal include:

• Blogs
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Emails
• Newsletters
• Infographcs

A strong web presence can help your business grow and be successful on a long-term basis. However, success will likely be difficult to maintain unless you implement an effective content writing strategy that meets customer needs and provides your audience with content that will keep them engaged and interested in your brand.