How can PR help scaleup businesses continue growth?

Thanks to Ambitious PR for this guest blog outlining PR’s role in enabling scaleup growth.

So, you’ve taken your small business from a startup to a scale–up. Congratulations! You’ve joined over 34,000 other businesses in the UK that have achieved growth, contribute more than £1.2 trillion in turnover, and create more than 3 million jobs, according to the Scale Up Institute. 

Your business model is a viable one, and your young company has begun to experience exponential growth. In fact, the OECD defines scale-ups as ‘growing over three consecutive financial years at an annual rate above 20% turnover or employees’. 

It’s an exciting time for your company and confidence is sky-high. But your success means the stakes are now far higher. Scaleup companies are more visible to stakeholders, including investors, and are now more accountable for their actions. 

That’s why it is crucial for scaleup businesses to behave and communicate in a professional and consistent way. That’s where PR comes in. 

Here’s how PR can help play a key role in a repeatable scalable business model and help scaleup companies to continue to achieve their rapid growth and impressive success. 

As a scaleup grows, so does the market and economic ecosystem it operates in. Businesses will have built up their contacts throughout the startup phase, but in the scaleup phase, they need to keep identifying opportunities to expand their network. Market research is key to continued growth.

Scaleup companies will have different audiences they wish to target, depending on their sectors and which areas they want to develop in. 

For example, they may be moving into Series A funding. Which investors should they be talking to? A business wants to improve its market share within a three-year period. Who are its main new competitors? Or they want to expand their operations and increase their number of employees. Where should they go to attract new talent? 

A key step in this strategy is to undertake a stakeholder mapping exercise. Once you have your business goals outlined, you should list as many key stakeholders as possible. Measuring their importance by a traffic light system can help you to prioritise your ultimate communications strategy. 

Before you can make contact though, you need to understand the best way to communicate with each stakeholder. The processes for effectively speaking with a local councillor will be vastly different from how a tech company looking for growth funding may approach a VC. 

You must also ask why this audience wants to hear from you. Will they benefit from your services or expertise? Why should they invest their resources into your business? It’s important to identify and understand the different motivators and drivers behind each stakeholder. 

Once you have these elements, you have the beginnings of a very targeted communications plan. 

As your scalable business model evolves, so should the way you speak about your business. 

It’s important that your communications reflect the business you are aiming to be, and not what you currently are. Whilst you will likely have a bank of pre-approved messaging, this now needs to be updated to match and inspire confidence in your larger pool of stakeholders. Essentially, lose the startup culture. 

The best way to articulate your business narrative is through developing a messaging matrix. This will become your business bible, used across all of your communications, which clearly represents your company DNA consistently and precisely.

Breaking this up into different stages can help you to cover all basises within your messaging. For example: 

• Product and Services 
• Company Vision 
• Ethos and Culture 
• Customers and Partners 

Back up each message with proof points to create strong, airtight, and liveable messaging.  

A strong brand is important, but the difference between a startup and a larger company is its reputation. According to the World Economic Forum, a quarter of a company’s market value can be directly related to its reputation and as a scaleup your online reputation is how most people will know your business – you need to be always on top of this. 

Business ethics have become increasingly important over the years. How your business communicates and the values it stands for can have a huge impact on your reputation. The younger generation often now select their jobs or services based on a company’s ethics and have less focus solely on revenue or innovation. 

To ensure your business continues its growth whilst building a positive reputation, develop an engagement programme around industry issues and get your experts on the podium speaking on these topics. Talk about them on social media and in media articles as thought leaders. Don’t forget to include your local community in your engagement programme – be visible in your local community on local issues and talk about it across your channels. 

In this online world, scaling companies need a large digital footprint to help them continue their development. No matter the sector you operate in, digital and social channels play a key role in customer acquisition. 

Picture a search engine results page as a window into your business for potential customers. This should be the best possible representation of your company’s proposition, values and objectives. 

It’s also important to show the excellent things about your business, such as culture and expertise across all digital channels, including: 

• Social media 
• Your website 
• Your blog 
• Google My Business profile 
• Glassdoor 
• Company review sites 

Search engine optimisation plays a vital role in ensuring to ensure strong Google rankings and to populate these channels with favourable, engaging and informative content about your business. 

But as you develop, your communications and employer brand must evolve with you. Whilst this isn’t an easy process, a conscious and robust PR strategy can help any scaling business to capitalise on each opportunity and continue to grow rapidly.