Much has been written about admonishing leadership teams of the need and steps for creating vision and mission statements. There are volumes, even books on the subject. This article won’t duplicate or match the conventional wisdom found on the web or in print. But it will endeavor to highlight the best thinking on B2B vision and mission statements. It will also serve to assist company founders, CEOs, and leaders in sound ways to think about them and inspire meaningful creation and use of them in the B2B space.

Are you in the process of updating your B2B digital marketing plan for the upcoming year? Now’s a good time to perform a checkup of your company’s vision and mission statements. Even if you’re not in the budgeting and planning season, gaining more clarity on long-term company direction and near-term focus will pay big dividends towards achieving more significant results.

Or maybe you haven’t created them yet because you’ve been too busy running the business; you’re not sure how they differ; you don’t know how to get started, and you’re not too sure what to do with a vision and mission statement once you have them nailed down.

No worries. This article will help serve as a practical guide for setting or touching up your B2B vision and mission statements. It will cover the following:

• The big picture of B2B vision and mission statements
• Working definitions of each and how they differ
• Characteristics of great vision and mission statements
• Examples of B2B vision and mission statements
• A proven approach for creating them without any brainstorming
• Putting your vision and mission statements to work 

Chances are your organization’s sales and marketing strategy changed dramatically in 2020. COVID-19 forced many non-essential B2B companies to work-from-home, and nearly all business trips got grounded and in-person events like trade shows and business seminars came to a screeching halt.

[Updated for 2021]

SEO remains top-of-mind as marketers plan their content marketing strategy for 2021. For advanced marketers it looks something like this: you have an SEO plan and best practices in place, you have your list of keywords, you’re actively blogging and your website is optimized. You have an on-page and off-page SEO plan. Your monitors are covered with dashboards from Google Analytics, an SEO ranking tool like ahrefs, Moz or SEMrush, reports from your CMS or marketing automation tool, and a few Google sheets or an advanced Databox analytics dashboard to keep your results organized to monitor your search engine rank positions.

Industry research studies can serve as a barometer to measure the change in key metrics over time. They are useful for pointing out trends, progress, and challenges among similarly situated companies. They help you compare your own experience and performance to others.

Guest Blog by Todd Hockenberry, of Top Line Results and co-author of Inbound Organization

Guest Blog by Todd Hockenberry, of Top Line Results and co-author of Inbound Organization

Guest Blog by Todd Hockenberry, of Top Line Results and co-author of Inbound Organization

Guest Blog by Todd Hockenberry, of Top Line Results and co-author of Inbound Organization

People are consuming more content than ever before. In today's fast paced world the easiest way to stay up to date with the constant stream of information is with social media's top channels including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and more. And this is true for both B2B and B2C audiences.

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of it all. With so many other brands putting out nonstop content through multiple different platforms, how is your audience supposed to notice you?

Guest Blog by Todd Hockenberry, of Top Line Results and co-author of Inbound Organization

To create predictable revenue growth, manufacturing companies need to change their thinking about how they view buyers. The old formula of hiring a salesperson, going to the same trade shows, knocking on prospects doors, and cold calling no longer works to build a predictable revenue stream. Buyers, and the way they find information, evaluate options, consider vendor choices, and make decisions have changed. Has your thinking about buyers changed accordingly? We hear a lot of talk about buyers changing but we have seen little evidence that manufacturing companies have changed to meet buyers where they are today.