Content Mission Statement | Glossary

What Is a Content Mission Statement?

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A content mission statement identifies several of your content marketing strategy’s critical components to help you give your target audience messages that help them solve problems. During the process of crafting your content mission statement, you should answer questions like:

• Who is our ideal reader or target audience?
• What are we trying to communicate to the reader?
• Why are we trying to communicate this message to the reader, and why should the audience spend time consuming our content?

If you haven’t answered these primary questions, you probably need to hone your content mission statement further. Otherwise, you’ll likely lose sight of your goals, which could lead to wasted resources, including time and money.

You Can Have Multiple Content Mission Statements

While you might want to have one overarching content mission statement that guides your decisions, it often makes sense to have several additional mission statements for niche audience members.

Businesses often have more than one content mission statement because they want to target diverse personas within their target audience. For example, a company that develops plant-identification apps might want to write separate content mission statements to target students, gardeners, and hikers.

Each of these groups has slightly different needs. The student might want to identify a plant’s scientific name so they can write a formal paper about its place in the local ecosystem. A gardener might want to learn whether they can take seeds from a wild plant and sow them in a raised bed. A hiker might want to note the species and locations of plants so they can document their experience or share knowledge with their friends.

By writing a unique content mission statement for each group, you give content creators more insight into how they can engage your audience and get the intended results.

Examples of Content Mission Statements

Remember that great content mission statements answer who, what, and why to keep everyone focused on the same goal. If you need some inspiration, use the following content mission statements as starting points for writing your own.

• “College-aged travelers will come to our blog to find detailed descriptions of travel destinations they can afford.”
• “Upcoming retirees who haven’t saved much will come to our site to learn the basics of financial well-being during retirement and become more familiar with the financial planning services we offer.”
• “Experiences real estate investors will sign up for our newsletter so they can learn about the latest real estate trends and connect with other investors in their area.”

When you have clear content mission statements like these, you can quickly determine whether your next piece of content fulfills your intentions. Does the blog post you have speak to a persona in your target audience? Does it give them the types of information that matter to your business? Will they like reading your content, perhaps so much that they return to your site often, download your app, or purchase a product?

If you ever answer “no” to one of those questions, you need to rethink your approach and find a way to reembrace your mission.

Settings Goals for Your Content

Your content mission statement establishes your goal. After writing the statement and publishing content, you should review key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine whether your content does the job well.

For example, if your mission statement says you want more people to install your app on their mobile devices, you would measure how many people follow your call to action (CTA) and install the app after reading your content.

You can apply the same logic to any behavior you want to track, including whether your audience buys products, pays for memberships, joins your online community, or visits affiliate sites.

Communicating Your Content Mission Statement to Writers

Marketing departments and agencies need to stay as agile as possible so they can adapt to market changes. Research from MarketerHire shows that about 80% of business leaders have hired freelance writers recently. Another 10% say they would consider hiring a freelance marketing professional.

Integrating freelancers into your content marketing strategy has some obvious benefits. For example, you could save money and improve your flexibility. As you need more content, you lean more heavily on freelancers for support. When you don’t need as much content, you save money by using in-house writers or doing the work yourself.

Using freelance writers creates a challenge, too: How do you share your content mission statement and ensure everyone understands your goals?

Scripted makes it easy. When you start a Scripted account, you can complete a short form that lets you communicate your branding preferences, company mission, target audience, and other traits. Your Organization Profile and Style Guide gets automatically populated into your content briefs, so every writer sees your preferences before starting jobs.

As needed, you can include additional notes that hone your needs for a specific project. Perhaps you want to try hiring blog writers who have experience working in your industry. You can search for writers by industry, find someone you would love to work with, and give them specialized instructions for your next post.

Or maybe you want to start using artificial intelligence to generate social media posts that target customers you haven’t engaged yet. Scripted’s platform generates AI content for free. That way, you can test this emerging technology without spending any money.

Better yet, you can have a human subject matter expert edit the AI content for accuracy and voice. If AI strays from your content mission statement, a professional editor can put your content back on track.

Get Started With Scripted

Scripted is the only platform that combines the power of subject matter experts and artificial intelligence. Our proprietary AI tool, called Scout, can help you research keywords, brainstorm topics, and scale your content as needed.

Are you ready to see how Scripted makes content creation easier than ever? Sign up for a free account to experience the benefits you only get when you combine AI and human subject matter experts.

Recommended Readings

Content Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses

How to Scale Your Content Marketing Strategy

How to Get Started With a Content Marketing Strategy

Content Marketing 101: What Is a Content Writer?