When a new visitor discovers your blog, they will likely have some questions. What is this blog all about? Who writes these posts? What is their goal? Why should I care? These are all questions that should be answered in your mission statement.
The best way to come up with these important questions is to put yourself in the shoes of your visitor. Seek out a new blog that you've never seen before and visit their page. Look around. Click through a few posts. Now, write down every question you have about this blog. Come up with around 5-10 things you want to know about this blog. Here is a short example of some questions you might have:
1. What makes this blog worth reading?
2. Who is this blog written for?
3. Why should I care about this blog?
4. What do they care about? Do they care about what I care about?
5. What makes them different from every other blog on this topic?
Now, answer these questions for your own blog. The things you ask of others is exactly what they will ask of you, so make sure you have an answer for them.
Now that you've answered the important questions, you need to figure out which answers are the most important to include in your mission statement. While crafting your mission statement, there are three key points that need to be addressed:
The "Who" is your target audience. What buyer persona are you trying to attract with your content marketing? What is your demographic?
The "What" is, of course, what services you are providing. What will the customer get out of choosing to use your content marketing services? Tips and tricks? Useful professional resources?
The "Then" represents what the outcome of choosing you will bring to the audience. If I choose your blog...then what? What impact will it have on your audience? How does this differ from the experience I would've had with a different choice?
Once you have refined these three essential pieces of information and how they relate to your content marketing blog, you can create your mission statement using the Who, What and Then as your building blocks. Use these pieces of information to create a mission statement that is personal, unique, creative and influential.
Asking and answering the important questions is key to writing your mission statement, and you need your Who, What and Then to build, but you can't just give readers an FAQ in place of a mission statement. Now comes the hard part: taking all those answers and phrases and compressing them into one to three sentences. Yes, that short.
Ernest Hemingway, a man with a distinct mastery of simplification, once said, "My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way." Writing a mission statement should be your way of putting down on your blog what you aim to do and what you care about in the best and simplest way possible.
This does not need to be where you lay out your entire strategy, your social media plans, or your agency's long, storied history. This should be where your audience decides that you stand out from the rest because you care about them in a way that others do not.
Here are some examples of content marketing blogs with great mission statements that can be examined and learned from while you craft your own.
Copyblogger - "Since January 2006, Copyblogger has been teaching people how to create killer online content. Not bland corporate crap created to fill up a company web page. Valuable information that attracts attention, drives traffic, and builds your business."
Social Media Examiner - "Our mission is to help you navigate the constantly changing social media jungle."
A mission statement should be as effective, inspiring and innovative as your company, so don't hesitate to get creative with it. Have you found any particularly interesting mission statements out there? Let us know in the comments below!