As content marketing begins to go mainstream, it is now essential to make it better.
Your business has a mission that clearly and succinctly defines why it exists.
When you also develop a written mission statement for the content that drives engagement with your community, it will be easier to create more effective content.
If you are unclear about the role of content for driving your marketing efforts, reread the first chapter of Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business. If you do not have a copy, you can download that chapter for FREE here.
Most big brands use content primarily to build-brand awareness. That’s one purpose. However, in addition to attracting the attention of buyers, your content marketing should also be designed to directly influence profitable customer actions.
Let’s break the development of your content marketing mission statement into three important considerations.
#1 – What is the Purpose of Your Content?
Your content must make your business more attractive to its ideal buyers so that they want to buy your product and service offerings. In fact, if your content does not lead to profitable outcomes, then you are not practicing content marketing.
To begin designing your content marketing mission statement, turn the spotlight on your business and consider what it is about the business that makes it uniquely capable of helping its customers. These qualities are often personal, and the foundation of what is known as purpose driven marketing.
Thus, your business strengths will help to define the customers that your business can best serve.
My direct experience running multiple businesses before digital, and now immersed in this new space, uniquely qualifies me to help others to make the transition as I did.
It turns out my ability to organize, clarify, and simplify is especially useful in a digital world that is becoming increasingly complex for many mainstream businesses like the ones I used to own and operate.
How about you?
What are the particular qualities about your business that enable it to help your customers and prospective buyers like no other?
#2 – What Will Your Content Deliver?
Now that you are getting clear about the purpose of your content, it will be easier to focus on what will help your audience do more of what they want to do. Delivering tips and advice is not nearly specific enough. You have to offer practical solutions.
A suggestion for achieving that clarity is to create an avatar that represents your ideal customer. If you can make your avatar come alive, it will do the same for your content. So, give him or her a name, age, lifestyle, business routine, etc. Better yet, take that description and go to Fiverr and hire a designer for five dollars or so to create a graphic representation of your avatar.
When your content is laser-focused to help your avatar, it will help everyone like him or her. Focused content is essential for developing or refining your tribe.
Your business wants a loyal tribe, not just followers. So get specific. Tweet This
Your content will be more effective if you tell stories that provide practical lessons, a subject we will focus on later this year. One that I share from time to time is how I used content to launch my landscape business in the late ’80’s. It effectively communicates the idea that content marketing is nothing new.
Again, all you have to do these days is adapt to digital and social media.
#3 – What are the Outcomes from Your Content Marketing?
To put it simply, your content should have your prospective buyer wanting more. When you consistently deliver so much value, you whet the appetite for more and better.
When your content puts your prospective buyer in a better place, they know your products and services will do the same. So, your content effectively sells for you, just not in a traditional way.
Live presentations are a form of content that is at the heart of my business model. If my presentations deliver, the audience members receive value that then has them asking to buy my book, hire me to speak at their event, or coach their team.
Of course, not everyone buys. This is why your content marketing should never stop.
If you want to think of your content marketing as selling you can. I prefer to think of it as priming the pump so that the buyer is ready when they decide the time is right to buy.
More is Not a Content Marketing Strategy
As I write this I’m reminded of one of the more popular articles of this blog last year. More is Not a Content Marketing Strategy further underscores why you need to have a content marketing mission statement that keeps you and your team focused on what matters most to your audience.
After all, that’s what were talking about here – strategy. I just didn’t want to use the “S” word until now because I know it tends to be associated with extensive work.
However much time you invest in building your content mission statement, you will get it all back in the form of clarity or new business that it is designed to attract.
About the Author: Jeff Korhan, MBA, is the author of Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business – (Wiley 2013)
He helps mainstream businesses adapt their traditional growth practices to a digital world. Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
