Scalability refers to a company’s capacity to increase revenue without increasing costs significantly. Assume you’re the owner of Emma’s Pet Treats. Perhaps you bake dog cookies for a nearby pet store. It only takes you a few hours per day, but the end result is fantastic. As the demand grows, a pet store in a nearby town agrees to stock them. You can now bake twice as many cookies.
Despite the fact that this increases your time and ingredient costs, you won’t have to buy a new oven. You won’t have to pay for extra room, and any increases in energy expenditures will be minor. You’ve effectively increased your profits while incurring minimal additional costs. You’ve successfully scaled your company.
Many entrepreneurs fail to plan for a brand that grows in tandem with their business. Let’s pretend you’ve tripled your revenue. And just when you need to concentrate on increasing sales, supplies, shipping, and other aspects of your business, you’re caught up in brand modifications. That example, devoting time to tasks such as working with a graphic designer to create a more professional brand and defining standard communications language for a small sales and marketing team.
To prevent these problems, you should develop a scalable brand: a traditional and digital brand that can grow with your company while requiring low effort.
We’ve designed the 7 essential pillars of developing a scalable brand to help you out.
Related: How to Expand Your Business?
Plan Your Brand Design For the Long Term and Get It Correctly the First Time.
In the creation of a brand, graphic design is crucial. Your brand’s logos, colour palettes, and even font selections act as instant identifiers. When you’re establishing a new business, you don’t have much of a brand image because no one has heard of you yet. You must build visual identifiers that will evolve with your company and last for the duration of its existence.
First, don’t hurry into designing a logo because you think you’ll be able to change it afterwards. At the planning stage of your firm, work with a professional graphic designer to evaluate all of the possibilities for future growth. On a business card, that logo might look great up close. Will it, however, be instantly recognised on a tee shirt or a billboard from afar? And, although a colour palette may stand out on paper, how will it appear on a future car wrap or video? Is every component of your brand’s design, as you scale and evolve, conveying the heart of your brand?
Brand refreshes do occur. They are, however, time-consuming and costly. Avoid them by planning ahead of time and working with a qualified designer or design team. Take the time to build designs that will survive for the duration of your company’s existence.
Templates and Style Guides Will Help You Maintain Consistency.
Create graphic templates while your designer is on the job. Build them out for every form of media you might utilise in the future. This includes social media banners of various sizes, as well as templates for brochures, catalogues, and newsletters for your email marketing strategy—basically whatever you would need as your company expands.
Even if you have a dedicated staff member, learn how to bring in fresh content at the technological level. Cross-training is essential when employees leave.
Create uniform style guides in the same way. Consider using slogans and emotive buzzwords in everything from websites to blogs to press releases. Even salutations in commercial correspondence, for example, might be standardised. When it comes to growing your business brand, consistency is crucial.
Related: Reach More People While Maintaining Authenticity
Create Material With Long-Term “Values.”
Mission statements and boilerplates, for example, should be consistent and hence scalable.
That is, you can plug them in wherever without having to change them as your company grows.
To begin, think about your company’s deepest, most enduring ideals. They should strike a balance between being relevant to your niche audience and corporate values while also being wide enough to be useful at any level of development. This is where scalability is crucial. I’ve worked with clients who constantly altered and updated mission statements to reflect changing staff or ephemeral aims on numerous occasions. Create such “values media” in a way that expresses basic values throughout the company’s whole life cycle to be scalable.
Using Emma’s Dog Treats as an example, pet health and happiness should be prioritised in her values media. However, designating her specific supply region would be less scalable. Emma may expand into other locations or begin to focus on digital, direct-to-consumer areas in the future. Be regionally particular rather than situationally specific.
Related: You Get a Duty to Promote Your Small Business—How Here’s to Do It
Utilize Social Media to Increase Brand Scalability.
Remember how we talked about the scalability of a brand through the usage of templates? One of the most underappreciated aspects of social media is this.
The template has already been constructed for you. All you have to do now is add some text, images, videos, or graphics. For this reason, social media has a lot of scalabilities. Scalability is aided by automated solutions like Hootsuite, which allow you to post content to numerous sites at once.
Blogging and podcasting platforms are resources that are close to social media. These materials aid in the development of your brand’s reputation as an industry authority. Furthermore, regardless of the number of potential clients you reach, the time spent on a blog remains constant.
In other situations, the rise may even become parabolic—that is, viral—with individuals linking to your material and search engines recognising its worth.
Form Digital Collaborations.
You’re probably aware of a business that does not compete with yours but provides complimentary items or services. What a fantastic way to build a scalable brand partnership.
Consider Emma’s Dog Treats once again. Her company is now thriving, and she even has a fantastic e-commerce website where she can sell her biscuits directly to customers. Her brand also embodies principles such as pet love, health, and happiness.
Meanwhile, she employs a service that provides excellent training for unruly pets. In this case, talk to them about forming a collaboration! Simply retweeting and reposting each other’s content might be part of such a collaboration. However, it might also incorporate cross-links to relevant pet-care blogs. Invite each other as guests on your podcasts if you have them. Each of these methods expands your brand’s reach by reaching new people with no effort and no additional costs.
Just be cautious about who you choose as your partners. They should enhance rather than detract from your brand. They should, in other words, reflect your company’s core principles. Also, stay away from regions where there might be future competition.
Emma could want to avoid a pet food supplier, for example, if she plans to grow into pet foods in the future.
Systematize, Standardise, and Automate As Much As Possible.
Finally, plan for brand scalability by implementing methodical processes and, where possible, automation. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and automated procedures, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, are essential for organisational scalability in general. However, they also play a role in brand and marketing scalability.
Customer service and general attentiveness are crucial to your company’s brand. CRM software enables you to organise client information, track and forecast sales, implement personalised loyalty programmes, and much more. Simply said, the software allows you to automate operations to customise the customer journey. Similarly, most e-commerce platforms provide similar features. You’ll want to leverage features that generate automated responses based on customer activities, for example. These may include delivery notifications, e-newsletters, and purchase-related discounts.