Your company sells a product or an offering, but your branding communicates so much more than this. It communicates the value your product provides. The way your offering is different from your competitors’. The personality you display in your content and embody in your company culture.

Your vision statement is a key piece of this branding that helps to communicates all this and more.

Here, we’re going over everything you need to know to get started crafting your company’s vision statement and how to put it to use.

We’ll cover:

Plus, we’ll include some of our favorite vision statement examples to help you get inspired to create your own bigger-picture company impact.

What is a vision statement?

A vision statement outlines your company’s long-term goals. A good vision statement describes the bigger-picture impact of the work you’re doing day-to-day. A great vision statement includes all of this and inspires your employees, your customers, and your community to join you in realizing this vision.

You want to make sure you’re creating a great vision statement—and we’ll break down how to do that.

What’s the difference between a mission vs vision statement?

The difference between your mission statement and your vision statement is important but simple: Your vision is the result of your mission. 

Your vision statement fits into a larger part of your brand identity that also includes your mission statement and your company values. Here’s a quick overview:

• Your mission statement defines what you do, who you do it for, how you do it, and why it matters.
• Your vision statement outlines your long-term goals, the impact of achieving this mission.
• Your values are the guiding principles and beliefs that your brand embodies.

Your vision statement then should be the result of your mission statement. By working towards your mission, your company will achieve the long-term, bigger-picture vision for your brand, your customers, and sometimes even society.

This distinction is good to remember, especially considering how often mission and vision statements get confused. When you’re presenting this to your employees and your customers, make sure you’re being as clear as possible.

How to write a vision statement

Now that we’re clear on what a vision statement is and why it’s important, it’s time to get started drafting your own. Here’s how.

1. Think big

You want to draft a great vision statement that describes your company’s long-term goals and the impact of achieving them to inspire your customers, your employees, and your community. That means thinking big during a brainstorm before narrowing your ideas and messages down.

Here are some questions to start with:

• What do you want your business to change for your customers? For the world?
• How does your product or offering help your customers? How would it change the industry if everyone was your customer?
• How does that value you provide your customers change their lives? How does that change society?
• What does the success of your business look like in 10 years? What does that success look like for your customers?

Go through and answer these questions to start identifying the bigger impact of your business. And remember not to edit yourself just yet—giant goals like solving the housing crisis or improving access to healthcare are on the table. This is your vision for the long term, not exactly your promise to deliver right now.

2. Connect to your mission

Even though your vision statement should be future-looking, it should still be logically connected to what your company is working on today. That’s where connecting your mission statement comes in.

Once you have a few big ideas that you want to cover, pair these up with your mission statement. Does achieving your mission accomplish these big ideas?

Let’s consider an example. LinkedIn’s vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Its mission is to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.

Even though the vision is an expansive and aspirational one, it’s still connected to the mission. If you can connect all professionals and enable productivity and success, then you can create economic opportunities for the workforce globally.

Remember, it shouldn’t be the next step result of your mission, but it should be related.

3. Make sure you’re including emotion

The scope of your vision should be inspiring, but that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook with copywriting. Once you have the ideas down—the long terms goal or goals and the impact of achieving these—it’s time to start fine-tuning.

When you’re determining which words to use in your vision statement, remember you want to evoke an emotional reaction.

Bildkälla

The emotional reaction should be positive, and it should be motivating. Other than this, though, it depends on your brand whether you’re hoping to inspire joy, action, peacefulness, or anything else. Once you determine how you want people to feel in reaction to your vision statement, make sure to choose your words accordingly.

4. Keep it short

Your vision statement should be one or two sentences at most. If it’s helpful to create a longer document that breaks down the vision for your company for your leadership team or board, that’s a worthwhile exercise. But that shouldn’t be the marketing copy that you’re using in your branding.

Keep it short, simple, and straightforward. That’s the best way for everyone to understand, remember, and most importantly connect with your vision.

5. Share it widely

Your vision statement is foundational marketing copy, and you should make the most of it—-for your company culture, your customer marketing, and even your prospective employees.

You should be sure to include your vision statement in your employer branding, whether that’s on your career page or in your company descriptions. In fact, LinkedIn found that a strong corporate brand can reduce cost per hire by more than 50%.

And be sure not to focus only on sharing with people outside of the company. Your employees are working towards your company’s mission each day, but that’s still on the path of your vision. Make sure to communicate that clearly.

11 inspiring vision statement examples

I don’t know about you, but I hate starting from a blank page. There are too many options, not enough guidance. That’s why examples are so helpful to start a brainstorm or a copywriting session.

Here are 11 exceptional vision statement examples to use as models, guides, and sources of inspiration to write your own.

1. Shopify

Shopify’s vision statement is succinct and straightforward: “Make commerce better for everyone, so businesses can focus on what they do best: building and selling their products.”

Bildkälla

Even though it’s straightforward (and directly builds on its mission statement to “Make commerce better for everyone”), the statement still communicates a big appealing goal. Who hasn’t had a clunky process with commerce, whether it’s a transaction that doesn’t go through or a return process that’s impossible to complete?

That’s why this structure is great for a template: Make [blank] better for [blank], so that [blank].

You can fill in the blanks to use this for your own vision statement—even just to get started.

2. Zoom

Zoom has a strong vision statement: “Communications empowering people to accomplish more.”

The ubiquitous video meeting platform does an excellent job of sharing how its vision fits squarely into its brand identity.

Bildkälla

No surprises that a company focused on communication expresses this so effectively.

3. Lego

Lego’s vision statement is simple and joyful: “A global force of learning through play.”

The toy company uses its vision statement to frame its impact reporting. The Lego Foundation is “reaching more children with learning through play,” and the company shares the progress on this goal.

I love how consistent and playful Lego’s branding is, and using the vision statement in action is an extension of this. Plus, it’s good to show that a vision statement isn’t just an aspirational goal—it really is the effect of achieving your mission.

4. Drift

Drift’s vision is clear: “A world where people are free to have a conversation with any business, at any time, on their terms.”

Bildkälla

Drift’s chatbots allow businesses to field incoming questions and connect with customers or potential customers at any time. The vision statement shifts the perspective. Instead of focusing on the value to businesses, it highlights the value to all of us as customers. No more waiting to call with questions during business hours again.

5. Labster

Labster is an educational platform for virtual labs and scientific simulations. The company’s vision: “To make science education accessible to any student with an internet connection and a laptop. To help teachers educate and empower the next generation of scientists to change the world.”

Bildkälla

This statement appeals to both key user audiences for Labster—students and teachers. Even more, it presents the unlimited potential impact for all of us if we provide future generations with critical science education. Inspiring.

6. Coded Minds

Coded Minds is an edtech startup with a concise but impressive vision statement: “To be the revolutionary platform of choice for educating the next generation of leaders in the 21st century.”

Bildkälla

I like this visual because it outlines that company’s long-term goals clearly: The mission is what the company does, the vision is what the company will achieve, and the values speak to why it’s important to achieve it.

This exemplifies the simple significance of the mission, vision, and values exercises.

7. Zendesk

Zendesk’s slogan positions the company as the champion of customer service. Zendesk’s vision is the bigger-picture result of championing customer service for everyone: a global economy powered by lifelong customers.

Bildkälla

One of Zendesk’s core brand beliefs is that customer service is so important because it impacts all of us. Like Drift, Zendesk is aware that we are all consumers who work with businesses and often need support when we’re doing so. By championing customer service, Zendesk helps businesses help customers—and by ultimately improving consumer experiences, the company is building the economy. The vision is a grand one, but the logic follows nicely.

8. Alltech

Alltech develops agricultural products to help farmers raise livestock and crops to feed the world. The company shares why in its vision statement: “We firmly believe agriculture has the greatest potential to shape the future of our planet.”

Bildkälla

This is an inspiring vision that’s particularly motivating for mission-driven employees. It’s a reminder that the day-to-day office and lab work is contributing not only to feeding the world but shaping the future of our planet. That’s a reason to join a company.

9. Nike

Nike’s marketing copy is always crisp and energetic. Their vision statement is no different: “We see a world where everybody is an athlete—united in the joy of movement.”

Bildkälla

The key idea that everyone is an athlete resonates with the rest of Nike’s branding. The second part of this statement emphasizes the power of claiming and recognizing this shared identity: Unity.

10. Billie

Bille outlines its vision for the company that goes beyond razors and presents a more important purpose: “We want to undo the unfair social pressures women face, starting with double standards around shaving and bodycare, and celebrate the infinite ways women can look, feel, and be in the world.”

Bildkälla

The best part is that this purpose appears throughout the website and product copy, too. The company not only announces its long-term goals, but it references them consistently.

11. Ikea

Ikea might be known for its flat-pack bookshelves and beds, but its vision statement doesn’t mention furniture or furnishings at all: “To create a better everyday life for the many people.”

Bildkälla

This sounds vague, but really it’s big. Ikea’s vision statement captures the impressive impact that accessible, quality furniture can have on people. It makes life better.

Plus, this leaves the future of the company open to expand beyond furniture—something that would be good to use in your own vision statement, too.

Get started writing the vision statement for your business

You can see from the examples that your vision statement doesn’t need to be complicated or lengthy. Instead, it needs to communicate the long-term purpose of your business and what you’re hoping to achieve. Now, use these examples for inspiration and work through the step-by-step to get started drafting your own vision statement. Good luck!

Here’s the thing about digital marketing channels: there’s no shortage of them out there, but as a new store owner, you cannot afford to be on every one. Nor do you have the time to figure out which ones are best for you.

Detta troubling image concepts what it feels like to be a new ecommerce store owner.

So, we’re going to save you hours by sharing the top seven ecommerce marketing channels for new businesses—including the pros, cons, and tips for getting the most out of each one!

The top 7 marketing channels for ecommerce stores

Below are the top ecommerce marketing channels we recommend for new store owners to drive sales and maximize profit.

1. Influencer marketing

As a new store owner, influencer marketing is one of the guaranteed ways to fast-track your journey to market. There are micro-influencers in every industry, and consumers respect and follow the recommendations and words of authority figures they know.

Pros

• Builds trust.
• Easiest way to spread word of mouth.
• Cheaper than mainstream media.
• Very effective if executed properly.

Cons

• Difficult to predict ROI.
• A change in the influencer’s reputation could impact your brand.
• Can be hard to identify and get responses from influencers.

Tips

Gretta Van Riel, a multiple 7-figure ecommerce store owner, uses influencer marketing as her primary marketing channel. Here are some tips from her on how to get the best out of influencer marketing:

• Give your influencers creative freedom. They know their audience better.
• Do not overwhelm influencers in your initial outreach message.
• Be clear with deliverables. Quantify where possible. For example, they will write one round-up blog post mentioning your product and three social media mentions (Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok). And what are you giving them in exchange? A free trial, unlimited or early access, or a discount?
• Stay small. Micro-influencers oftentimes have better engagement than macro-influencers.

2. Social media marketing

Organic marknadsföring i sociala medier refers to using the free posting and online store options available on major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, and more.

Many consumers use social media to learn about brands and ecommerce stores and will look to see how other customers engage with your brand before they buy from you.

Poppin Candy uses marknadsföring i sociala medier to sell ecommerce products with catchy videos about its candies.

Pros

Cons

• Takes time to build a presence and stay active.
• You do not have complete control over the content you create, since people can comment, share, and generate their own content.
• You need to have the time to engage back with your audience.

Be sure to engage back with your followers!

Tips

For more help with social media marketing, check out our resources:

3. SMS marketing

SMS marketing remains one of the OG means of telecommunication, and people trust marketing content delivered via emails and SMS more than generic online content or ads.

Enligt SMS Comparison, it has an open rate of 98%.

Bildkälla

Pros

• Easy to set up and deploy.
• High delivery, open, response, and conversion rate.
• Easy to integrate into a sales funnel.
• Great follow-up channel to engage prospects on your list.

Cons

• Can be costly.
• Becomes intrusive if not done properly.
• There are regulations against it in some countries.
• Can be subject to spam filters.
• Difficult to measure and track.

Tips

For tips on getting started with SMS, head to our guide to SMS marketing.

4. Email marketing

Email is one of the most effective marketing strategies available today and a great way to communicate with potential, current, dormant, and even churned customers.

Below are a few steps you can take right now to start getting results.

• Define your target market.
• Collect emails to build a list.
• Nurture the contact.
• Use a clear call to action.

Pros

• High response and conversion rate.
• Easy to track and tweak.
• Great for nurturing prospects through any stage of your funnel.
• Easy to personalize.

Cons

• Requires list maintenance and efforts to stay out of spam filters.
• Like SMS, requires list building and maintenance.
• Need good copywriting skills.

Tips

For tips on email marketing, we’ve got plenty of resources:

5. Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is the science of optimizing a website so that it ranks high in search engine results for terms relevant to your business and services. The more relevant traffic you get, the more you can convert that traffic into leads and sales.

The key to the blog is to write articles that target informational intent keywords. For example, Quip is an ecommerce site for oral care, and it’s got a blog on topics like how to use an electric toothbrush, how to clean an electric toothbrush, and more.

Bildkälla

Pros

• SEO is free! And keyword-targeted evergreen content produces long-term traffic growth.
• SEO is scalable so you can maintain performance as your traffic increases.
• When combined with conversion rate optimization, your SEO can boost sales.

Cons

• Long-term strategy. It takes time to see results.
• The SERP for evergreen topics is more competitive than the local SERP, so it can be difficult for new stores to gain visibility.
• SEO may be free, but it does require time to write articles, do keyword research, and maintain pages.

Tips

To get going on your SEO strategy, here are some helpful posts:

6. Pay per click advertising

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is a great choice for new ecommerce store owners with some marketing budget. It simply means paying ad networks to show your marketing messages or banners across search engines or other online media.

Pros

• While SEO takes time to gain traction, PPC yields immediate results.
• Because you can target highly specific audiences with PPC, and because you’re only paying when someone clicks on your ad, this method is cost-effective.
• Data! With clear visibility into which campaigns are working and which ones aren’t, you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your campaigns and maximize your ROI.

Cons

• Running effective Google Ads and other PPC campaigns requires regular maintenance, audits, and reporting.
• You need to pay to play. If you underfund your campaigns, they won’t generate enough volume and data needed for machine learning to take place and optimize your campaigns for profitability.
• The online advertising landscape is always changing, so it’s important to stay on top of platform updates.

Tips

Here are our best resources for PPC:

7. Video marketing

It’s impossible to overlook the power of video marketing. Most social media platforms now favor video content over any other form of content. You can use video to create educational tutorials, ads, educational ads, product demonstrations, explainer videos, and more.

Pros

• Video gives you a competitive edge because it allows you to not only tell but show your value and demonstrate how your product provides benefits.
• While it can be hard to take creative freedom with SEO and PPC content, video affords plenty of room for ideas and creativity to help you distinguish your brand.
• Live shopping streams are becoming more popular and accessible.

Cons

• Video marketing can be resource heavy—it takes time to edit, and you need to have the right equipment so that you’re working with quality footage from the start.
• Requires consistency. To gain traction with your YouTube Channel, you need to be consistently posting content and monitoring your YouTube analytics.
• Lots of influencers use video, so your business can be up against some heavy competition with large audiences.

Tips

Here are our best tips and resources for a successful video marketing strategy:

Final tips for choosing the best ecommerce marketing channels

Not sure which marketing channel to start with for your new ecommerce store, or which one will be best for you? Here are some final tips:

• A multi-channel strategy is the way to go. Each channel has its strengths and weaknesses, but employing multiple channels in concert with one another will bring you the best results.
• Research your target audience. Find out the platforms your target audience uses most. For example, Tik Tok works more with Gen Z than the baby boomer generation. And emails work better with the baby boomer generation than with Gen Z.
• You’ll only know how each channel works with your niche if you pay attention to your metrics. Use tools like Google Analytics, Data (Looker) Studio, a CRM, and the native analytics tools within each channel to monitor and measure your results. This will allow you to see which channels bring in the highest ROI as well as to A/B test different approaches within each channel.

The best ecommerce marketing strategies (recap)

Using these ecommerce marketing strategies can help your new store flourish and get customers.

1. Influencer marketing
2. Marknadsföring i sociala medier
3. SMS marketing
4. E-post marknadsföring
5. SEO
6. PPC
7. Video marketing

Om författaren

Bhujal Patel is a marketer and SEO, passionate about helping businesses get more revenue and profit through customized strategies. He lives in Toronto and writes about business ideas and scaling organic growth at mydigitalkube.com. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

There are certain facets of marketing that have always seemed to capture more attention than others in regards to growing your business online. One of these is testing.

This adherence (and some might conclude, obsession) with data is not confined solely to the marketing world, as it seems most aspects of society have transformed into “data-driven” models.

Data-driven decision-making in marketing is incredibly valuable, but there is a time and place for everything, and marketing itself is a lot more than just numbers.

Bildkälla

The data that drives successful marketing campaigns can’t materialize prior to creating said campaigns. The chicken that lays the egg that makes testing possible is the creativity that drives results fuels the data that informs decisions.

In this post I’ll walk you through what A/B testing is from a paid media perspective, when it’s necessary, and when human abilities like creativity, intuition, and common sense lay the groundwork.

What exactly do we mean by “testing”?

There are many forms of testing within marketing including multivariate testing, usability testing, and content testing, but for the sake of simplicity within paid advertising we will mostly be referring to A/B testing.

With an A/B test, you create two variants of an ad or landing page, and everything is identical except for one element so you can see which variation leads to more conversions. You can test ad copy, button colors, creative elements, the length of the landing page, and more.

The variant that performs better needs to reach statistical significance, which Investopedia defines as “the claim that a result from data generated by testing or experimentation is likely to be attributable to a specific cause. A high degree of statistical significance indicates that an observed relationship is unlikely to be due to chance.”

You generally want a confidence of 95% to consider that a change or variant is statistically significant.

Bildkälla

When is it appropriate to begin testing?

Many folks take an extremely “scientific” approach right out of the gate, analyzing every impression and click with a magnifying glass and conducting micro experiment upon micro experiment with slight alterations in ad copy and creative.

The problem with this is that they are limiting themselves by hyper-focusing on small details too early on. Successful paid media is not always an immediate victory in regards to the quality of feedback or results that you may experience when you get started.

With a channel like Google Ads, for example, patience and observation is key to learning which levers to pull and where to make strategic adjustments. You may create an ad or make and adjustment and wait a week or two to observe the impact. Plus, there’s the algorithmic learning period to consider.

So the question is, when should you begin testing?

Every business is different—their stage of growth, the number of creative resources available, and the industry they are competing in. When it comes to paid media channels, everyone starts with a blank slate at some point. The promotions and strategy that you choose from the start often influence the evolution of your paid advertising accounts for better or worse.

From my experience, testing should begin after you start to get some traction with the results you are looking for. So for example, if you are looking to generate conversions from a lead form submit, then you should begin testing after you begin to see some results. So you might now be thinking, “What if I’m not driving any results and therefore need to test in order to do so?” My answer to that question is to separate testing from experimenterande.

Testing vs experimentation

From a paid marketing perspective, testing is comparing a control to an alteration. You are “testing” a new variant against a pre-existing one to see if the changes you have made are statistically significant or not.

Experimentation, on the other hand, is pushing your creative juices to produce a variety of different ads or promotions against your target audience to see what appears to gain the most traction.

Experimentation is not to be confused with Google Ads experiments, a feature within the platform.

Some may call this testing but in my opinion, it is less scientific and restrictive. Once you begin to accumulate meaningful data and feedback you can then identify and zero in on what works and test within that framework.

How to do experimentation the right way

When you are in the experimentation and exploration phase, there is a strategy to apply as well. On paid social networks, I like to create the target persona as best as I can manually, then create 3-4 ads targeting that persona.

Given the objective of the client, these ads will be in alignment from a conversion or web traffic perspective. I will also typically create a retargeting audience to test against visitors who are already familiar with the brand. From there, we may incorporate more variations of ads, play around with copy or creative, and allow the campaign to run and collect data.

This stage allows us to gauge the audience’s receptiveness to different messages and ultimately the data will inform us on a direction to explore further. For one client of mine, we were able to increase lead-to-sales opportunity ratios by over 15% by simply identifying that certain language and creative elements resonated much better with our audiences than others. We arrived at that conclusion, however by not being too stringent on testing early on, rather, letting the ads play out then assessing the findings.

Bottom line? The purpose of the experimentation or exploration phase is to create baselines—which allow you to set expectations as well as goals for improvement. This will move you beyond the experimental phase into the testing phase. From there on you can create a model for testing that allows marginal improvements to performance without all the risk of trying an entirely new promotional set.

How (and when) to move from experimentation to testing

To simplify my process for experimentation and testing I will outline from my experience, the stages of growth within a paid advertising account and what you should be doing:

Early stage: Experimentation only

If you’re starting your Google Ads campaign or account from scratch, you should be focused primarily on setting up proper tracking, pixel implementation, etc. first. The most important part of this early phase is that you know your general goal for advertising and ensuring your website and CRM are tracking these results properly, whether they are website visits or conversions.

From there you should take that overall goal and begin to construct campaigns in which to enter the experimentation phase.

If it is paid search, create campaigns for your branded search terms and through sökordsforskning, some of your most relevant terms. Try to start with something that has the highest probability of producing the result that you want, then expand from there once baselines are established. You can learn how to set up conversion tracking in Google Ads here.

In paid social, you should do the same but with website remarketing and a carefully constructed target persona. In paid social you should establish the goal you are looking for and try numerous promotions that align with that goal.

You can learn how to set up your Facebook Pixel here.

You may also want to set up the Facebook Conversions API for the most complete tracking.

Middle stage: Start testing

What I refer to as the middle stage is where you have experimented with different offers and have figured out what appears to work. You have baseline costs for these promotions and are ready to start testing variations of this offer in a more scientific way. This is where you can begin to A/B test.

Growth stage: Refine your testing

This is where you are certain of what drives business within the account. When an account is in this stage you want to find ways to grow but do so within the framework that has proven to be successful. At this stage in the game, you want to test very stringently with fairly smaller changes to variations to mitigate risk of decreasing performance. Larger riskier experiments should be isolated to their own testing campaigns, separate from the ones that are currently driving business for you.

Patience is key with campaign testing

The main takeaways you should have from this advice is to treat new and early paid advertising much looser than what some others might tell you. Although everyone wants to score a touchdown right out of the gate, it is much more beneficial to your paid accounts and development as a marketer to be patient.

Not relying too heavily on data to make decisions early on allows you to be more creative and push the envelope with your marketing abilities. If you are more open to new ideas early on, it will inevitably reduce the amount of time you otherwise would have been testing micro changes to one idea. For long-term success in advertising, you need to take some risks to set a better baseline for the future.