What is a Mission, Message, and Voice?
I would like to begin, before I say anything else, that you can write wonderful content for your business without teasing apart the differences between mission, message, and voice. Some of us are lucky and all the pieces click together behind the scenes and what lands on the page is perfection.
Most of us aren’t so lucky. Or if we are, we aren’t so consistent.
Here’s what I mean:
You sit down to write content for your business, but you’re left staring at a blank page until you give up.
You keep writing and writing and writing, but you just don’t like any of it!
You wrote something amazing! Once… And you can’t figure out why it worked or how to recreate it.
I live by the phrase “Don’t complicate a cheese sandwich,” so I give you full permission to stop reading and keep doing what you’re doing if you’re creating content that feels aligned with who you are and what you do. Really and truly, there’s no need to complicate matters by trying to understand the nuances of having a mission, a message, and a voice if they flow through you naturally.
But….
If you’re struggling to create content you feel good about. If you haven’t posted to social media or to a blog or you’ve been putting off writing the copy for your website because everything you create feels like garbage. If you want to feel energized and excited by your writing instead of feeling pooped and disappointed.
Keep reading.
I’ll help you tease apart your mission from your message and your voice so you can locate what’s keeping you from creating the kind of content you’re proud of.
It all starts with your mission
If you want potent content, you have to start with your mission.
Why are you doing what you’re doing?
Answers like “Because I’m called to do this work” or “It’s my purpose in life” aren’t going to cut it. Those phrases help you justify to yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing, which is an important step in the beginning, but what you really need is a bridge between your mission and your message. You can only build the foundation for that bridge if you get more specific about your mission.
Your mission starts with you. It comes from “higher up” or “down below.” It provides you with a sense of purpose and meaning. But I have to be blunt.
No one else cares. In almost every case (because there are always exceptions), no one is going to hire you to help you. They will hire you to help themselves. They will hire you because you have something to offer that will make their life better or easier in some way.
For example, are you here reading this blog article to help boost traffic to my website as a favor to me? Or are you here because you’re hoping I might provide you with some insight that will help you write better content for your business?
Powerful missions take your why and turn it into an act of service.
How do you use your purpose to help others? What is it about you, your experience, and your knowledge that will make the lives of others better? How are you being called to serve instead of do?
The best part about rethinking your mission and writing it down is that there isn’t any pressure! Write, cross out, and rewrite what feels most authentic to you. What you write doesn’t have to end up being customer-facing, especially not at first. It’s all for you! It’s simply a way for you to clarify why you do what you do and why what you do matters to others.
The ultimate goal is to write a few sentences that you feel really good about. They can then be used to inspire your message.
Here’s a simple example for an energy coach:
Help others overcome self-doubt, find new solutions to recurring problems, and tap into intuitive insights with mentorship and coaching programs that expand the mind and uncover the soul.
Your message is the bridge between your mission and your voice
Your message is how you make your mission relevant to others. It’s where you turn something personal into something that will resonate with the people who are meant to work with you.
Starting by clarifying your mission is important because you can use what you came up with to start building the bones of your message.
Take the above example. Here it is again:
Help others overcome self-doubt, find new solutions to recurring problems, and tap into intuitive insights with mentorship and coaching programs that expand the mind and uncover into the soul.
It’s very informative, but it’s also dry. I can feel my interest in what the sentence is saying fade away before I even get to the end. Building a separate message makes sure that when other people read your content, they’re engaged from start to finish.
Power Words are a quick and easy way to start thinking about your message. What words can you tap into in your mission that you can explain or expand upon? “Intuition” is a good Power Word in the above example. How do those you work with struggle with intuition? How have you struggled with intuition? Why is reclaiming intuition important? How do you go about reclaiming it?
You know you’re tapping into an aligned message if the same words and concepts repeat. These are the messages you’re most passionate about, and the more passionate you are about what you’re saying, the more powerful you come across through your content.
Your voice is what actually ends up on the page
Once you get crystal clear about why you're doing what you're doing (mission) and you know what you want to share with the world (message), you can think about voice.
Your voice is where you give your business a personality that comes through in the words you type on the page.
Your brand voice is where you invent your own rules on how your content is going to sound so that it's repeatable and predictable. It makes writing content for your business easier, but it also builds trust because your clients and customers know what to expect when they open your latest newsletter or click to read your latest article.
Brand voice rules include the Power Words you want to use throughout your content. It includes the fun stuff, like whether you want to curse, use incomplete sentences, or use made up words. It also includes technical stuff like SEO and readability considerations, like keeping paragraphs short and using bulleted lists.
This step can be difficult for mission-led entrepreneurs because we feel intimately tied to our business. We think we are our business, and our business is us, but that’s not true. Your business is actually its own thing.
Instead of trying to figure out how you want to sound, think about how your business wants to sound.
What is your business trying to be through you? What kind of personality does it have? What aspect of you shines through your business, and which aspects of yourself do you leave for your personal life?
By separating yourself from your business and seeing it as one aspect of who you are, you can take the pressure off to create content that sounds “like you.” It frees you up to experiment and create content that sounds like your business instead.
Mission, message, and voice are never set in stone
A lot of pressure comes with perfection. I spent years and years as a freelance writer not really writing or doing anything to put myself out there at all because I thought I had to have every single thing figured out before I started, because once I started, I couldn’t go back.
I’ve learned that absolutely isn’t true. You can change your mind at any time.
Is there a topic you’ve identified as part of your core message that makes you sigh in resignation every time you think you have to write about it?
Get rid of it!
Feel like your writing is too stuffy and you want to try incorporating words you actually use when you talk?
Go for it!
Want to pivot your entire business because your original mission no longer resonates with what you want to do in the world?
Change it!
Knowing you can change anything at anytime can take the pressure off. It can get your thoughts and creativity flowing. It means what you put down on the page doesn’t have to be perfect, because you can change it whenever you want. But every word you write, even if you have pages and pages of power words and mission statements and articles that never see the light of day, brings you closer to uncovering the mission, message, and voice that are truly aligned with who you are and what you do.