Content pillars

Content Pillars

Content pillars are the few recurring themes a brand returns to — the strategic layer between who the brand is (brand-profile) and what it posts this week (batch-content-plan). Good pillars make a feed coherent, ownable, and infinitely easy to plan; their absence is why so many brands post random things that add up to nothing.

The single most important idea in this skill — and the thing almost everyone gets wrong:

A pillar is a theme you own. It is NOT an intent or a format. "Educational," "behind-the-scenes," and "promotional" are not pillars — educational is an intent (the job a post does) and behind-the-scenes is a format/treatment. A real pillar is a subject area like "payroll without a specialist" or "the craft of coffee, demystified." Get this distinction right and everything downstream gets sharper. See references/what-makes-a-pillar.md.

When to use this

• After brand-profile, before planning content at any scale.
• When the user doesn't know "what to post about," or their feed feels random.
• When batch-content-plan needs pillars and none are defined.

When NOT to use this: if a current content-pillars.md exists, load it, summarize it, and move on unless the user wants to revisit it.

Step 0 — Read the foundation first

Load brand-profile.md (and voice.md). Pillars are derived from strategy — positioning, point of view, audience, proof, offers — not brainstormed from thin air. If there's no brand profile, run brand-profile first; pillars built without it are guesses.

Step 1 — Mine the brand profile for raw material

Pull the candidate sources (see references/deriving-pillars.md):

• Positioning + point of view → the signature pillar (the thing the brand wants to be known for; the hill it will die on).
• Audience jobs-to-be-done / pains → audience-relevant pillars (their problems, not your features).
• Proof + expertise → credibility pillars (what the brand can authoritatively teach).
• The human / brand story → a connection pillar.
• Offers / product → at most one conversion-linked pillar, used sparingly.

Step 2 — Generate candidate pillars

From each source, draft candidate themes. Aim wide first (8–12 candidates), phrased as subjects, not formats — "small-business money mistakes," not "educational posts."

Step 3 — Test and select 3–5

Run each candidate through the pillar test (references/what-makes-a-pillar.md):

1. Ownable — can you say why this brand specifically is credible or distinctive here?
2. Relevant — does the target audience genuinely care?
3. Strategic — does it advance a real goal (awareness, trust, conversion)?
4. Sustainable — can you brainstorm 10+ post ideas from it right now?

Keep the 3–5 strongest. A candidate that fails ownable or sustainable is not a pillar. Fewer, sharper pillars beat more, vaguer ones — a feed with eight themes has none.

Step 4 — Define each pillar

For every selected pillar, capture: a clear name, what it covers, why the brand owns it, who it's for, the goal it serves, 5–8 example angles/sub-topics, and the proof/assets it draws on. This is what makes pillars usable by the planning and content skills. See references/pillar-template.md.

Step 5 — Balance the mix

A healthy pillar set has:

• One signature pillar — the differentiator, the brand's distinct POV. Every brand needs one.
• Supporting pillars — audience problems, credibility, connection.
• At most one conversion-linked pillar, used as the minority (promotion rides on the value the others create — see the mix logic in batch-content-plan).

Spread the pillars across goals so the brand isn't all-teaching or all-selling.

Step 6 — Write the artifact

Produce content-pillars.md using references/pillar-template.md. Summarize it back to the user, flag the signature pillar, and invite one round of edits. batch-content-plan and the content skills will read this on every task.

Quality bar — self-check

• Are the pillars themes, not intents or formats? (No "educational" as a pillar.)
• Is each one ownable — with a reason this brand is credible/distinctive on it?
• Is each audience-relevant, not just brand-interesting?
• Could each generate 10+ post ideas (sustainable)?
• Is there exactly one signature pillar, and is promotion a minority?
• Are there 3–5, not eight vague ones?
• Does each pillar trace back to something real in the brand profile?

Edge cases

• User lists generic buckets ("educational, BTS, promo") → explain those are intents/formats, and convert them into real themes derived from the brand.
• Too many candidate topics → narrow to the 3–5 that best pass the pillar test.
• Brand with no obvious distinctive theme → mine the POV and audience pains harder; if there's truly no differentiation, the signature pillar becomes voice + a consistent angle, and you say so honestly.
• Personal brand / creator → pillars are person-led (what they're known for, their journey, their craft); keep them tied to the person, not a faceless topic list.
• Multiple audiences (e.g., nonprofit: beneficiaries + donors) → some pillars may serve different audiences; note which.
• Multi-product / broad business → resist one pillar per product; pillars are audience themes, not a catalog.

Related skills

• brand-profile — read first; supplies positioning, audience, POV, proof.
• audience-research — deepen audience pains that feed audience pillars.
• batch-content-plan — consumes pillars to build the calendar.
• The content skills (caption-writer, reels-script, …) — each post is tagged to a pillar.

References

• references/what-makes-a-pillar.md — the definition, the pillars-vs-intents-vs-formats distinction, the pillar test, anti-patterns.
• references/deriving-pillars.md — the method for mining the brand profile into pillars.
• references/pillar-template.md — the content-pillars.md output schema.
• references/examples.md — ownable pillar sets across six business types.