Major Considerations for Market Expansion

Reevaluate Your Brand

Expansion presents an excellent opportunity to reevaluate your brand. Ask yourself: Is your messaging and imagery aligned with your business and your audience? Do customers feel connected to not only what you do, but why you do it? If your brand is beginning to stagnate, then it’s worth investing time and energy toward refining it before rolling out any major initiatives. 

Our work for Sunnen is a great example of how even the most tenured brands can evolve over time. While preparing to launch its global e-commerce platform, Sunnen opted to take a step back and update its brand identity for a new era. We delivered a complete brand package — logo, tagline, messaging and more — that aligns Sunnen with the idea of bringing precision to the world. With that in place, Sunnen was able to expand with total confidence and bring an original, consistent message to its customers around the world. 

Explore Your Channels

Another pre-expansion consideration is to review your primary marketing channels. Not all channels are created equal, and it’s easy to find yourself investing in a channel that doesn’t provide the right ROI. 

Take our client, Circle. Circle is a fiber-optic internet provider serving rural Missouri. We built Circle from the ground up to focus on simple, neighborly communication. So when the time came to roll out the service, we didn’t look to mass market advertising. Instead, we created door hangers, direct mail postcards, email blasts and web landing pages to make a friendly first impression with Circle audiences. This small decision made a tremendous difference in how audiences saw the brand and maximized the client’s ad spend. 

Maintain Consistency Across Platforms

In today’s digital era, your brand must focus on consistency as much as clarity. All your communication — including social media, website, mailers and more — need to have the same look and feel. Every instance of inconsistency diminishes your brand’s credibility in the market. 

Consistency was especially key to Circle’s rollout. As a new brand entering the market, Circle didn’t have a reputation to fall back on. We needed to ensure every piece of collateral was clear and consistent. For its website, we followed an agile approach that began with the launch of a landing page. Over time, that landing page evolved into a fully featured website, so there was never a disconnect in visual identity. 

Just as important as visual consistency is verbal consistency. Circle’s brand voice is distinguished by casual, friendly language that sets it apart from its national competitors. And at every touchpoint, from web to email to social, Circle maintains that brand voice in order to build trust with its customers and authority in the market. 

Never Stop Researching

Expansion isn’t a one-off task— it’s a continuous process of research and implementation. Today’s audiences are constantly changing habits, so what worked for one market may not work for the next. Make a habit of surveying your community, analyzing what makes your competitors succeed and stepping out of the box every once in a while. 

Let’s Talk

With so many things to consider before an expansion, it can be difficult to know where to start. Schedule a meeting with our team and we’ll help you find the best way to maximize your impact. Together, we’ll make sure you have the right insights and strategy to sustain your company’s growth.