A content marketing mission statement captures the essence of content strategy in a single sentence, which is then used to help inform your work.

The concept is one which comes from Kristina Halvorson’s book ‘Content Strategy for the Web’.

Econsultancy’s Best Practice Guide describes such as mission statement as “a rallying cry around which your team can assemble, and a directional statement that can help inform decision making and greater autonomy.”

The mission statement should incorporate an understanding of your audience, their needs/circumstances, your objective and the value you are creating.

Here’s an example of a content marketing mission statement, it describes our own aim at Econsultancy to produce content around the theme of digital transformation:

“To curate a definitive guide to digital transformation that helps time-poor senior executives understand how it could add value to their business.”

Breaking this sentence down, the content marketer can see that:

  • they should curate content – it doesn’t have to be new.
  • they should provide a variety of information for a variety of viewpoints, to create a definitive guide.
  • targeting time-poor senior executives means the content has to be engaging from the get-go.
  • the end goal is showing the possible value in digital transformation, and hence in our content.

A handy template

I think it’s fair to say this isn’t rocket science, but it’s the kind of basic objective setting of which marketers can often lose sight.

Using the simple template below you can create a content marketing mission statement and stick it on your desk as an aide-memoire.

template content mission

There’s plenty more to consider when setting content strategy, such as:

  • Persona generation
  • Customer journey mapping
  • Developing positioning and tone of voice
  • Channel and format selection
  • Optimisation and testing
  • Content calendars

For more on these topics, Econsultancy subscribers can download our Content Strategy Best Practice Guide or check out our training courses (face-to-face or online).