Much has been written on content marketing and the need to treat content as a strategic asset of your business.
I want to expand on the original idea in Joe Pulizzi’s blog Why Your Enterprise Needs a Content Mission Statement, because it only mentions marketers. As a sales person and a marketer, I have a problem with the invisible line that separates sales and marketing content – it’s not visible because it exists in people’s heads as a result of their silo’ed upbringing in either sales or marketing.
To quote from Joe Pulizzi, CEO of the Content Marketing Institute “Every organization needs a content marketing mission statement, but it’s not about what you sell, its what you stand for.”
That is agreed, it’s the “Why” you exist before the “What” you sell. Before I write any more I thought I would run our WittyParrot Mission statement through the Pulizzi mission statement test.
The WittyParrot Mission:
WittyParrot is built on a profound, but simple idea. To make it easy to find relevant information and then to use it, so that anyone can communicate faster, more effectively and more consistently.
We exist to improve the consistency in communication, productivity and responsiveness of knowledge workers by placing the information nuggets they need at their fingertips, thereby eliminating lost time searching for, cutting and pasting and editing emails, documents and presentations.
Our goal is to help companies to manage, maintain and track effectiveness of messaging and to communicate with one voice to amplify their brand.
Our initial customers are B2B enterprises who seek to enable inside, direct and channel sales teams to communicate more effectively with customers
Analyzing the mission
On analysis it’s a bit long-winded and we can condense it – we didn’t have time when we wrote it, to write a shorter one, (we are due to refresh our messaging next week anyway, so thanks Joe).
The target audience: – Knowledge workers in B2B enterprises, initially salespeople – whether inside, channels and direct sales.
What will be delivered to the audience: – Make it easy to find relevant information and then to use it, to improve consistency in communication, productivity and responsiveness
The outcome for the audience: – Eliminating lost time searching for, cutting and pasting and editing emails, documents and presentations and to communicate with one voice to amplify their brand.
What do you do with it?
Pulizzi posits that a content marketing mission statement is useless unless you use it.
- Post it. (Where it will be easily found by writers and creatives in places where you post non-product oriented content, Facebook, Blog, open forums).
- Spread it. (Bloggers, marketers, creatives, everyone who needs to know it).
- Use the mission statement as the litmus test to decide what gets published.
What about the Sales team?
That’s great for the marketing department and bloggers, but what about salespeople?
The WittyParrot Mission Statement Visual
A 10-person sales team will generate a minimum of 32,000 brand messages per year, if daily each sales rep just has 4 conversations with prospects, sends 8 emails, (either solicitations or follow-ups), holds one presentation and has 3 other conversations. Unless intelligent granular content is provided in a way that is easy to consume, re-use, combine and personalize, salespeople will make it up.
Content Re-use across the Company is Critical
Whether a company is in start-up mode, or a mature F1000, the content we utter through our advertising, Website and the lips of the sales and marketing team, is how we will be perceived.
Content is delivered through the marketing team in blogs, video interviews, press releases, analyst briefings, advertising and marketing collateral and via the sales team in solicitations, sales letters, sales conversations, presentations, webinars and proposals whether in person or on the phone.
Oh and don’t forget customer service, analyst relations, human resources and product management.
How then can we reuse content for clarity of purpose and maximum value across the organization? This is a very big question and I don’t plan to answer it here, but I do want to point to short demo video below, which conveys powerful concepts around intelligent content re-use and how sales and marketing can begin to speak with one voice.
I’m grateful to Scott Abel from The Content Wrangler for sending me the excerpt from Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper’s book, Managing Enterprise Content as it specifically addresses the types of content reuse in an organization. More on this topic in future posts.
