When you hear the term mission statement, you probably are thinking "boring." At some point while you were in school, you were taught about mission statements and you found it boring. But the good news is that now, when you look at communicating the reason your company exists, a mission statement becomes important and personal.
In his book Epic Content: How to How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less (McGraw-Hill Education, 2013), Joe Pulizzi, "the godfather of content marketing" and head of the Content Marketing Institute (see the following figure), offers an easy way to craft a content marketing mission statement.
Pulizzi says to break down the statement into three parts:
Whom you will serve: The core audience you are targeting
What solution you will offer: What you will deliver to that audience
The outcome: How it will make them better
Here's a breakdown of what goes into each of these sections:
The target audience: Before you determine the characteristics of your personas, you have to identify the niche(s) that work best for you. Aside from doing market research, you need to pick a very narrow group to target. When defining their niche, some companies are afraid to rule anyone out. They think that they may eliminate an important customer segment. But narrowing down the target is exactly what makes this tactic so powerful. By defining your niche carefully, you know that you're speaking to the people who are interested in hearing your message.
You can always add segments later, but remember this: When you target everyone, you don't connect with anyone.
Your solution: This may seem like the simple part of the formula, but it's only deceptively simple. You know what your product does. But in your mission statement, you want to communicate the solution as a promise to meet your customer's needs.
Your desired effect: In this section, you want to spell out what need your product satisfies. Clearly identifying this need is key to determining whether customers believe you fulfilled your promise to them.
As you look at your company's goals, you want them to align with your content marketing strategy. If those goals don't align with your strategy, you need to determine what revisions to make.