Do you have a Documented Vision for your business?

This is the first of my 10 vital ingredients that you need to ensure your marketing will be fruitful and produce the return you seek for the investment you make.

Often when you’re starting out, or running a small business, that investment will be your own time, though as you grow, it will likely require you to commit budget.

People frequently ask me how they should be allocating their precious time and money to best effect when marketing their business. Without a thorough understanding of what you want to achieve for your business in the long-term it is difficult to give you a considered response.

If you tell me that you want to get a handful of local clients to fill your calendar with appointments each week for the service you offer as a sole trader, it will be a different approach than for someone else who wants to build a team in one location and then open branches of their business across the country.

So business growth aspiration will be one aspect of the vision for your business, and this will require revenue and profit targets, and perhaps an idea of headcount for the size of team you want to hire – maybe over a 3 or 5 year period.

But there are other aspects to consider when visioning the future for your business – which means thinking about the values that are important to you and those you want to work with. How and why you are doing business (beyond making money) are important points to reflect on here.

You can read more of my thoughts about the Purpose, Passion and Principles that are at the core of your business brand on my previous blog posts via the links above.

The reason you need to document all of this is two-fold – partly because the process of writing it down (or committing to video or drawing if that’s your preference) will help you to clarify your thinking and strengthen your resolve. This in turn will give you a reference to return to when you need to get back on track or evaluate your progress.

The second reason (and perhaps more relevant to marketing) is because a written vision statement will help you with getting your message out into the world to the people who need to engage with it.

This will form the starting point for all of your written communications, making blogging, social media, emails and website copy much easier to produce. Plus it will inform the look and feel of your brand identity through graphic design.

Find out how you’re doing with applying this to your business marketing and discover if you’re missing any of the other 10 vital ingredients by taking my FREE QUIZ here today.