How to Find Your Niche and Create Content Pillars
Have you ever heard the phrase, “you may be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, but there will always be someone who doesn’t like peaches?” Well, the same rings true for content. Even though it seems like it’s smarter to try to reach everyone you possibly can on social media, your message simply won’t resonate with everyone.
That’s why you need to find your niche and nurture it to grow a loyal following.
So what exactly is a niche?
It’s a group of people who have a particular shared interest in a specific topic. For example, what we specialize in is social media marketing, which is a niche of digital marketing. Or an attorney who specializes in family law, which is a niche of the legal field.
Figuring out your niche is relatively straightforward but incredibly important in identifying who you speak to in your content. After you’ve determined your niche, you want to create a persona or avatar to shape your language.
A persona or avatar is a hypothetical or imaginary person that you create that represents your ideal customer.
This person should be incredibly specific. You should know the age and gender of your ideal customer, their income range, what some of their interests are, where they spend their money, what their pain points are, and how you can specifically help this person.
After you’ve figured out who exactly you’re speaking to, it’s time to figure out what in the world you’re going to say to them. This is where you create content pillars. These pillars are the overarching topics you will want to share with your audience. The ideal number of pillars is three to five, each of which should offer value differently.
Let’s break that down. If you owned a retail store selling clothes, you would want people to care about your store, but also your entire brand. So you may have a content pillar that shows best-selling items. Then a second pillar could be gift guides, and the third could be styling tips for how to wear your clothes.
Content should always do one of three things: entertain, educate, or inspire.
Really consider this as you’re building your pillars and thinking of what to post under them. Tips, hacks, how to’s, before and afters, and industry secrets are all great examples of content you could post!
Each month you’ll want to come up with engaging content ideas to go into each of those buckets. At Seven Willows, we do all of this for our clients so they never have to spend time coming up with what to post about. But if you’re not one of our clients just yet, click here to download our 7 Days of Content Guide to get started.
A great platform to help you get started with some content ideas is TailWind. While it is a publishing tool, it also comes with a feature that suggests daily content for you and makes it much easier to maintain consistency.
Let’s work together!
Seven Willows is a social media marketing agency for entrepreneurs looking to take an energetic + intuitive approach to social media marketing while growing their online presence + community. We combine elements of mindset, energetic alignment, trends, and industry knowledge to design a unique social media strategy created just for you. One that will make you fall back in love with social media.