
In an increasingly noisy world, people are looking for businesses to believe in. The business world is filled with hype, over-commercialization, and marketing nobody can believe. Fortunately, there's one simple, yet overlooked way your business can stand apart from the muddled masses: by having a strong company vision statement.
A strong vision statement isn't just for putting on the walls of the company lobby or the back of business cards. It clearly communicates that this business lives what it preaches.
The secret to increasing sales is simply to increase the marketing of your products and services. Or is it? There's one other critical part of the puzzle that needs to be addressed in order to grow a business. Without this, all the marketing in the world won't help.
If you're a small business, you have a noise problem. There are so many ads out there that your potential customers just block them all out. This means that most marketing campaigns are just a visual form of white noise that people instinctively ignore. So your have to find a way to stand out and seize the attention of a jaded audience. Unconventional marketing is not a choice; you have to be different if you want to beat your competitors.
Behind the scenes of your business, you make products or deliver services. But on the front lines, where interactions with customers occur, you have to deliver more than that in order to have a dynamically growing company. You must deliver a promise and hope.
The promise revolves around the benefits your actual products and services deliver. The hope is what can set your business apart from all the other companies that promise to deliver the same things you do.
Elon Musk is an entrepreneur who has been in the news recently but someone you may not know much about. He started his entrepreneurial career at the ripe old age of 12 by creating a simple video game and selling it for a profit.
Since that early success, he has gone on to found Paypal (the popular online payment system), Tesla Motors (the first viable production electric car), SpaceX (one of the largest space exploration companies in the world), and Solar City (one of the largest solar panel companies in the world).
Tom Watson, Sr., the legendary leader of IBM, reportedly said that in order for a company to become truly great, it needs religion.
The kind of religion Watson was referring to is the idea that a great company needs to have core beliefs. It needs to have a unifying message that all employees adhere to. Some refer to this as a vision and mission statement for the company.