Connect with your audience by covering the topics they care about the most.
Plan out a network of interlinked blogs that answer related questions and help each
other rank.
Write and publish content that helps people, and watch your rankings go up!
Find topics and outlines catered to your business.
If you work in marketing, you have probably heard the newfound buzz around Pillar-Based Marketing, or PBM for short. And if you haven’t heard much about PBM yet, you will, as it is quickly becoming one of the most effective forms of content marketing. How do we know, you ask? Because we invented it. But rest assured, PBM is more than some catchphrase, fad, or flash in the pan. It’s a concept we at DemandJump have spent years developing, using, refining, and ultimately perfecting. PBM is the reason you are on this page right now.
As industry leaders in the PBM field, we are passionate about educating others on Pillar-Based Marketing and spreading the excitement for all that comes with it. That includes covering things like:
We discuss all of those topics and more in the following blog. Let’s dive in!
PBM is a written content marketing strategy aimed at delivering content to a target audience using the exact topics and phrases they are searching for in Google. PBM takes topic networks (a.k.a. clusters of search queries) around a term you want to rank for and organizes them based on how often they are being searched. It also accounts for how connected each query is to one another. From there, a pillar strategy is developed to generate written content about everything in the topic cluster using the exact same keywords as your audience.
It’s important to thoroughly understand how content plays a role in Pillar-Based Marketing before you can really understand what to look for in a PBM platform. So without further ado let’s examine PBM content.
In a Pillar-Based Marketing strategy, there are three types of content:
While all three content types share some similarities, they also have a handful of key differences. Let’s break each one down in more detail.
A pillar is a roughly 3000-word piece addressing the center of the topic cluster, i.e. the main phrase you want to rank for. Depending on what your company does, this could be anything from “Used Tractors” to “SaaS Marketing.” The point of the pillar is to write from a broad perspective on everything your topic encompasses. So, if your topic is “Used Tractors,” you would cover other nodes in the content cluster like:
Whatever your topic is, it should be broad enough that writing 3000 words won’t be too much of a challenge but specific enough that you won’t need much more than that to effectively discuss it.
Generally speaking, the most effective pillar types fall into categories like:
Other considerations or tips about pillars to keep in mind are:
In a PBM plan, just below your pillars are your sub-pillars. These pieces should be about 2000 words long. If a pillar page addresses the number one search term, then your sub-pillars should address the next most important terms. For example, if your pillar is about “5-Gallon Buckets,” your sub-pillars might be:
For each sub-pillar you should be able to get into some deeper detail than your pillar while still covering a handful of topics.
Other considerations or tips about sub-pillars to keep in mind are:
Last but certainly not least are your supporting blogs. These 750-1000 word articles should answer specific questions your audience has. These should be based on topics that are searched often but are inherently too narrow to write thousands of words about. For example, if your pillar topic is “Covid-19 Testing,” your supporting blogs might be:
Other considerations or tips about supporting blogs to keep in mind are:
It’s important to understand that PBM is about more than just those three types of content, keywords and links. PBM means creating content that performs well and produces a high ROI. So how do you do that? By working with a PBM platform.
Perhaps the best way to understand what a PBM platform has to offer is to examine the current process of content marketing without one. So, before we break down all the specifics on PBM platforms or answer the question of “What is a PBM platform?,” let's examine the process of creating a PBM strategy or template without the help of an outside platform.
Marketers have a really hard time creating meaningful content, let alone getting traffic to it. In fact, over 90% of all content is never seen. If your material isn’t showing up on page one, it’s practically a guarantee that no one will read what you’ve created. People just don’t click past page one of Google often.
As far as creating content that is meaningful and relevant, that can be quite challenging as well. In general, marketing is about making educated guesses. The majority of content comes from the questions:
While those may seem like smart enough questions to plan content around, the truth is that without data you can’t really know the answer to any of those questions. Even if you get lucky and do guess the right answers, finding the best keywords to use or understanding exactly how to write all of your content can still be difficult. Plus, with a method that is based on educated guesses, it can be hard to quantify your results and prove the value of your marketing efforts. That’s where PBM tools and platforms like DemandJump come into play.
A Pillar-Based Marketing platform is a software company that empowers the use of a PBM strategy. Simply put, a PBM platform should make it easier to create a pillar strategy and the actual written content that goes into it. The main goals of PBM companies are really two things:
In other words, PBM tools should take the guesswork out of content marketing altogether.
Full disclosure: At the time of writing this blog, DemandJump is the only PBM platform on the market. But, because PBM is such an effective marketing approach, we fully believe that by the time you may be reading this, there will probably be competitors in this space as well. So with that in mind, we are going to help you answer the question “How do I choose a PBM platform?” Specifically we are breaking down:
and more so you can conduct your own PBM platform comparison.
“Tools” in PBM marketing can mean a couple of different things. It could refer to a platform itself, or it could refer to the features that make a platform useful. For this article, we are going to keep it simple and say tools refer to any products or features that help optimize and automate parts of the PBM process. At DemandJump, for example, we offer a whole suite of tools.
Yes. Full stop. PBM is a successful content marketing strategy and proves its worth time and time again. By using PBM tactics effectively, DemandJump has helped clients go from 0 first-page rankings to upwards of 300 in just a matter of months. The reason you are even reading this article is because PBM effectively made it rank on the first page of Google.
We don’t just “sell” PBM, we embrace it and are living proof of its value. So if you want to know whether or not a PBM platform is successful, ask them for their own case studies. They should be able to demonstrate the following for their clients:
PBM can be successful for anyone, it’s just a matter of finding the right PBM platform to partner with.
DemandJump exists to make it easy to create and implement a PBM strategy. If you’re ready to:
then DemandJump is the platform for you. To learn more about PBM or DemandJump, check out DemandJump University or try it free today!
