Why a Company Mission is an Essential Part of a Content Strategy

This is the third part of a four-part video series of a conversation I had with Justin Champion, digital nomad and author of Inbound Content. If you missed any of the previous interviews, you can find the video and transcription for part 1 here and part 2 here. In part three we talk about how a companies mission (their why) helps shape and guide their content creation.

You can watch the video here or (if video isn’t your thing) read the transcription below.

Todd: I want to go back to the beginning, the first question we asked you about strategy okay. We like to talk about leadership, and leaders, and executives and how in our book how they need to change their mindset of thinking. If content becomes a strategic imperative, what is the source of the ideas in the content? Not necessarily the content itself, that's kind of a “they ask, you answer” thing where you might document a specific answer. But I'm talking about the tone and the foundational piece of it. We talk a lot about the company's mission, their why, and their culture being really critical to the whole process of inbound. Can you talk a little bit about how those kinds of foundational things for executives and leaders with mission and culture is reflected in content.

your content mission statement should be so clear that if you were to give it to somebody joining your organization they would be able to create a piece of content immediately without talking to anybody

Justin: So understanding your business' why is extremely important. The way that I help businesses figure out what their why is by building a content mission statement. What a content mission statement essentially is, is this is what my business does and what we sell but that's probably not what you're trying to communicate to your audience, right? Maybe you're communicating to them how you're going to make a difference in their lives around this specific piece. So, understanding the why behind your business and what you're ultimately trying to do can set the entire tone for your content strategy. And your content mission statement should be so clear that if you were to give it to somebody joining your organization they would be able to create a piece of content immediately without talking to anybody because they ultimately know the purpose and the vision of what the business is trying to accomplish.

Todd: That's really interesting. I couldn't agree with you more that executives need to understand and communicate that mission and culture very clearly so that they can let their team go produce without having them send every piece of content back up the food chain to find out if it fits the mission and the strategy and the structure. That's one of the big things we talk to clients about as well. Because one of the things we've seen that has hindered content creation and enhanced the kind of advantages that companies can get is that there's this kind of paralysis around content. Whether it's 17 people have to sign off on it and everybody's afraid to send anything out because it might make the guy at the top of the food chain, or the lady at the top of the food chain, unhappy. Again, I believe that the mission culture relates to dealing with that problem. Have you foreseen that? And if you have how do you kind of recommend companies deal with that?

Justin: Yeah so that happens all the time. And that's a byproduct of being disorganized. If you're going to create content and you're going to create a content marketing process for your business we talked about how you need to know your buyer persona and plan out the next steps of everything, but once you actually start creating the content it can get hairy really quickly if you don't have a specific process or framework in hand. In Inbound Content, the book that I wrote with HubSpot Academy, is it shows how you can develop a framework for creating content for your business. And that includes a style guide, that includes a review process.

The review process is huge. You really need to understand who needs to look at this. What are they looking at this for? Are they looking at it for grammar? For subject matter? But I think like you said some people if they're disorganized they create a piece of content and then it gets circulated and if you're not clear about it it's going to take forever.

There needs to be like a content owner. There needs to be somebody who manages the process and then figures out what is that process. Is there an editor? Is there somebody else who needs to look at this and if you can design the process and get buy-off from the executive team on that, then you won't have those bottlenecks. But you don't want to create bottlenecks because then it's going to be really hard to create content. And whenever you make anything difficult whether it's creating content, whether it's trying to learn how to change your oil in a car, you're not going to do it. So, you want to try to make it easy and seamless and make sure that others can do it as well so that your car's not running out of oil.

In part four of this four-part series we talk about how content marketing is like a puzzle and the changing technology that is going to have a big impact on marketing in the near future. You can watch and read the fourth, and final, part of the interview here.