With international expansion an attractive prospect for many companies at the moment, Tristan Rogers, CEO of ConcretePlatform.com, explains how to keep control of your brand when operating in multiple markets
With the UK economy still struggling, international expansion is becoming an increasingly desirable option for many businesses. The benefit of this approach is clear: if a popular UK brand can be extended to customers overseas, the company can enjoy additional revenues and healthier margins by broadening its business beyond the weak domestic market.
However, as you can imagine, international expansion can often be a long, complicated and drawn out process that needs to be monitored very carefully in order to reap the maximum benefits of this strategy.
Modern cloud based software can play a huge role in this process and, if used properly, can ensure smooth operations across multiple markets. For example, the rising popularity of enterprise collaboration platforms (ECP), delivered via ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) now makes it possible to share a wide variety of business-critical information quickly, efficiently and securely to anyone in your business network without the challenges of the corporate firewall and bandwidth.
As a result, this kind of technology can transform the way in which business collateral and information is distributed across any number of regional and/or international locations, in order to increase financial performance and brand consistency. In order to understand how enterprise collaboration platforms can be used to support these objectives, it may be useful to break the process into four easy steps:
1. Use your enterprise collaboration platform to facilitate brand deployment across different regions
Without a doubt, brand consistency is the key to success in multiple markets. To guarantee that this consistency is maintained, however, it will be essential for you to have an effective channel of communication between each of your different regional outlets and your head office.
You can achieve this goal by providing all of your employees with access to the same brand tools via your ECP, so that you can be sure that they are all seeing, downloading and using the same information, regardless of where they are based. By creating a central repository in this way, employees from any of your regional and/or international locations will be able to access a wide range of pre-approved marketing materials, brand guides, approved supplier lists, approved materials and more, and should also have the means to procure any materials or equipment that they need from these approved international suppliers.
In addition to ensuring quality and consistency on an international scale, this model will also allow individual offices to gain access to the same volume discounts already negotiated by the parent company. As a result, once in place, online portals like these can provide a shared access point for all of your international outlets, providing them with a ‘one stop shop’ that is capable of meeting all of their needs, according to your specific pre-set rules.
2. Use your enterprise collaboration platform to facilitate project management
As companies expand into new regions, important business assets – and employees – often become spread across different teams, departments and locations. This presents a need to create a single ‘point of truth’ for projects happening across multiple markets, so that different teams and team members can all be sure that they are accessing the same (and most up-to-date) materials and version of the project plan.
Using your ECP as your project hub, you can then use the latest communications technology – including channels like Skype, conference calls and webinars – to encourage collaborative working among colleagues based in different geographic locations. This will help bond the team, regardless of location, and help them operate as if they were in the same room, looking at the same project plan and materials. This will improve decision making, reduce time and cost to market, and deliver a better brand to market as a result.
3. Use your enterprise collaboration platform for digital asset management
Your ‘digital assets’ can be any kind of digital content that you own, including print-ready marketing, ecommerce imagery and product information, or corporate documentation such as legal and HR documents. ECPs can help you to manage these assets by providing a secure, centralised location to store and access them. Having all your important assets digitally stored in one central location in this way can prevent important and/or confidential documents from being lost or misplaced.
An enterprise collaboration platform can be used to support this model on a large (and even global) scale. By using this cloud computing solution, you’ll not only benefit from easy access to powerful back-up and security software, but you’ll also be able to protect all of your most important digital assets in the event that your in-house IT systems are damaged and/or inaccessible for any reason.
4. Use your enterprise collaboration platform to ensure consistent training
Highly intuitive software can now be used to create a step-by-step, visually rich learning environment that can teach employees and any other stakeholders about your business and its brand, regardless of where they happen to be based. By hosting these courses online, you can easily integrate them with existing systems, and also ensure complete visibility, since detailed records of any staff training can be stored and updated on the system. As a result, your corporate training can remain 100 per cent consistent across any number of countries or regions.
Of course, along with software-related considerations like these, there will be many other aspects of the business that will need to be reshaped in order to align with other markets effectively – the choice of the business’ new premises, its fixtures and fittings, local marketing, staffing requirements – and anything else about your brand that will touch local customers in that market. However, unless you follow the four steps outlined here, your company may find that its operations across multiple networks are fragmented and difficult to manage, which could risk causing irreparable damage to your valuable brand.
