How to Save Time by Using the Content Marketing Pyramid

Content marketers deal with content creation, publishing, and promotion daily. They understand the importance of compelling content for engaging a broader audience, supporting business goals, and proving their marketing strategy works.

But here comes the challenge:

Content creation takes tons of time. Often, content marketers deal with all content production levels: They develop a content strategy and publishing plan, decide on content formats and topics to cover, do research before writing, search for websites to place the content, etc.

No wonder 40% of marketers consider their content strategies inefficient: With a focus on all the above, they have no time for efficient promotion, which is critical for achieving your business and marketing goals.

To save time, funds, and energy, it is a must to have a step-by-step strategy. In 2023, it’s high time to rethink your approach to content marketing and direct your attention to the pyramid principle of dealing with content.

What Is The Content Marketing Pyramid?

The concept isn’t new, but many content marketers “forget” or ignore it for some reason, though it can save them time and boost the results.

Invented by Curata, the Content Marketing Pyramid is a “strategic framework that enables the execution of a content campaign, assuring optimal content consumption, reuse, and reach.”

In other words, it’s a principle that helps you concentrate on corporate objectives and marketing plans instead of wasting tons of time on content creation. You divide content into levels and structure it according to the marketing goals you want to achieve.

Depending on your marketing plan, your content marketing pyramid will have a definite structure.

Let’s say, your objective is to increase shares in the mobile market. Clever move! With the number of mobile users exceeding desktop ones and users spending more time on mobiles, your marketing plans might be:

  • to do some innovations in mobile, or
  • to empower the mobile workforce.

With objectives and plans established, you can start creating a content pyramid that will structure everything and save you time on writing content for mobiles.

Content Pyramid Levels

To save time and effort, divide your content into three levels:

1) Core Content

It’s the source material for all other assets of your content pyramid. It’s original, well-researched, and in-depth explored. Once created, it becomes the heart of your strategy for getting the required results for your corporate objective.

And now, instead of spending hours on ideas generation and tons of content assets creation, focus on your core content and make others fly around it. To save even more time, choose a highly promotable asset that helps you make a buzz and lets people speak about it.

The trick is that your content becomes user-generated, saving you precious time on its promotion. Do you need any examples of highly promotable content?

Case studies, ebooks, books, cheat sheets, snowfall projects, guides, applications, educational videos — you choose! According to CopyCrafter, such content aims at providing facts to inform and explain. In other words, create something useful for your target audience and something that will help them solve a problem.

2) Derivative Content

It’s all about assets derived from your core content and aimed to support and promote it: You have information already, so it’s a chance to save time on brainstorming, idea generation, and research.

Take chunks from the core and create more derivative content with fewer efforts, producing a variety of formats and repurposing them to cover a broader audience.

Examples of derivative content include long reads, slide shares, infographics, presentations, and guest posts. Their goal is to engage the audience and lead them to your core content. As Hobo with a Laptop mentions, bloggers can turn such content creation into a profitable online business: So, if you have resources, you can outsource derivative content to independent specialists.

3) Micro-Content

It’s the content marketing pyramid’s foundation that takes less effort but brings better results. It builds awareness and facilitates a conversation about your content. Micro-content is your curated content and social media posts.

Let’s face it, micro-content appears the most time-consuming category for marketers as it demands frequent publishing and constant promotion. To shorten social media promotion time, try the following tricks:

  1. Make a buzz.
  2. Go viral.
  3. Use social media templates.
  4. Link your social media networks.
  5. Invite brand advocates and work with influencers.
  6. Concentrate on two-three networks instead of trying to cover them all.
  7. Schedule publishing.
  8. Set strict time limits for every social network.

According to surveys, users are on social media for 3,6 hours daily! The above tricks will let you shorten this time to one hour by spending 10 minutes on monitoring, 20 minutes on schedule, and only 30 minutes on sharing your micro-content.

Why Use The Pyramid Principle?

“What does make this pyramid principle different from my awesome content strategy?” you may ask.

Three things:

  1. It helps you focus: all your marketing efforts will be documented and coordinated now.
  2. It makes you more productive: you’ll create only compelling content providing cohesive messages and concentrating on the required results.
  3. It saves your time: you will stop spending hours on ideas generation, topics research, data gathering, and wondering about what content formats to use for better promotion. With the pyramid at hand, you have all these questions answered already.

It’s like a chain, an algorithm to follow:

Core content to meet objectives and marketing plans —> A variety of formats to support and promote core content, engaging people and leading them to it —> Micro-content to let people know about you and facilitate conversation.

Got it? If that’s still not satisfying and convincing enough, I have a few more reasons for you to give a content marketing pyramid a try:

Your Benefits Here

As a reward for your patience, here come your core benefits of using the pyramid principle of content creation:

You will have better control of your workflow. With a clear picture of objectives in mind, you will share the strategy with your team (you don’t work alone, do you?) to concentrate all efforts and time on working toward the same goal.

You will generate more content in less time. With a clear message of your core content, you won’t spend hours thinking about what to write next.

You will become flexible in content creation. With a clear picture of all content levels from the pyramid before your eyes, you are free to choose which level to start.

You will send a consistent message. With an assigned value for each content piece, you will be able to reduce inefficiencies in your content strategy.

You will produce diverse content. With your target audience preferring different types of content, you will keep in mind more content formats to cover all of them. As you understand, the text is not the only format to consider for your content marketing strategy.

Final Thoughts

The concept of the Content Marketing Pyramid isn’t new: Specialists have been using it for several years already, framing their content creation process into three levels and, therefore, organizing the more efficient content promotion. However, some still don’t know about it, and almost half of content marketers still consider their strategies inefficient. Isn’t it a signal that it’s time to try a new approach to content creation?

So, decide on your core content to promote, and focus on creating derivative and micro-content that takes less time and effort to craft but brings more results. If you work with content, the Content Marketing Pyramid may become a proven technique leading to your productivity growth.

Anything to say on the topic? Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments!


About the Author

Lesley Vos

Lesley Vos is a seasoned web writer specializing in sales copywriting and storytelling. Currently blogging at Bid4Papers, she also contributes to publications on business, content marketing, and self-growth.

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