Developing a content marketing mission statement for your brand or business establishes the basic framework your content uses and helps steer the decision making process for coming up with new ideas. A generalized “create content that brings positive attention to our brand” philosophy is so open-ended that it lacks focus which can lead to content that’s barely relative to your business’s overall message.
A content marketing mission statement can streamline the process of rounding down all of your small business marketing ideas into a handful that will work best. According to Internet marketing company, Hubspot, 56% of survey respondents said they were doing content marketing without a plan.
A content marketing mission statement is a focused synopsis that explains why a business or brand exists. It is what the organization intends to achieve and how that organization plans to accomplish it. The mission statement emphasizes the overall purpose of your content and is supposed to aid in achieving business and brand objectives. Developing a mission statement involves researching existing marketing trends as well as understanding the relationship between your brand and your customers.
The mission statement itself needs to answer who is the brand’s target audience, what kind of content the brand will be providing the audience, and what the brand hopes to accomplish for the customer with that content. It is also not always a one-time process as marketing trends change over time. The mission statement changes the content creation process into one that creates content for the sake of being content into one that produces content with a developed goal.
After establishing a mission statement, you can test ideas against the questions “how does this content relate to our brand objective” and “why do our customers care” as an effective gate keeping method. If the idea does not pass the gatekeeper questions test, it’s not going to add much value to your small business marketing strategy and should be dropped in favor of content that passes the test.
For example, a local golf course may have a mission statement along the lines of “attract the community to play golf at our course and stay throughout the day to enjoy our other amenities.” This mission statement steers promotional and marketing content towards attracting potential customers to play a round of golf and enjoy the next several hours at the clubhouse. The content development team might use this mission statement to focus on content that emphasizes upcoming special events at the golf course for social media sharing and listicles like “10 Things to do at Our Club Other than Golf” or “Our Staff’s 5 Favorite Meals/Drinks at the Bar.”
Alternatively, a locally owned radio station that mostly plays popular music may develop a content marketing mission statement along the lines of “inform our listeners about community events and news that interest them.” So the station may opt to produce content related to annual town festivals or poplar-music related concerts within the broadcast range instead of minutiae about a business-as-usual city government budget meeting.
Writer Bio: Dan S is a former news journalist turned web developer and freelance writer. He has a penchant for all things tech and believes the person using the machine is the most important element.
