Your business might be ready for investment, but is your brand?
Every business owner has a future goal in mind. That might be growing the business organically and eventually handing it over to enjoy retirement, strategically growing through investment, or mergers and acquisitions. For many people, we understand that marketing isn’t the first discipline to get a mention in the grand plan; in fact, many leaders underestimate the power of marketing to get their business noticed and to increase perceived value.
Often, the focus is on turnover, profitability, forecasts and growth plans (and rightly so). However, over the years we’ve noticed that businesses can spend decades building something brilliant, then present it with a brand, website and marketing that belong to a much smaller company.
It’s a bit like decorating a room in your house but only painting the walls – the furniture and finishing touches might need a refresh (or in some cases, a complete overhaul). When meeting potential investors, you know what you’re capable of, but the first impression might not quite match.
Does your business look like a good business?
A challenge we often see is businesses that have outgrown themselves. They might have invested in new facilities, recruited new talent, expanded into new markets or stumbled upon a larger-than-usual project.
Despite all of this, their website is still a side-project that the IT person updates once a year; the branding is just a logo that was designed by a freelancer when they were getting started; the brochures feature old products, services and pricing; the exhibition design that was once okay for a tabletop event is lost in the space-only stand they recently splurged on in an effort to gain more leads.
None of these things stop them from being good at what they do, but they can stop people from seeing it. Whether it’s an investor, a potential buyer or simply someone searching your business before making a telephone enquiry, people make assumptions surprisingly quickly.
Client growth is our focus
Over the last 26 years, we’ve worked with several businesses that have gone on to secure major investment or be acquired by much larger organisations. We wouldn’t be so bold as to suggest that marketing made those deals happen – our clients build their own success through years of hard work and dedication; we simply helped them to present themselves in a way that reflected the businesses they wanted to become (and grow their market presence in the meantime).
What are investors actually looking at?
There’s no magic formula that guarantees investment or an acquisition. If there was, everyone would be doing it! But we know that investors do their homework.
Whether it’s private equity, a potential buyer or even a prospective client, they’ll almost certainly look you up before they speak to you. Your website, your LinkedIn page, your latest news, your case studies, maybe even your exhibition stand if they’ve seen you at an event. Every one of those things helps form an opinion.
They’re not just asking whether you’re good at what you do. They’re asking themselves things like:
- Does this business feel established?
- Do they understand their market?
- Would I trust these people?
- Does everything feel joined up?
- Can I see where this business is heading?
Marketing won’t answer all of those questions on its own, but it certainly helps. A clear message, a professional brand and a website that reflects the business you’ve become, all help build confidence before a conversation has even started.
Is your business investment-ready?
Consider these questions to guide your thinking:
- Does our brand reflect the size of the business we’ve become?
- Would a potential investor understand what we do in under a minute?
- Is our website and marketing consistent across every touchpoint?
- Do we appear when people search for our services?
- Are we happy to send someone to our website?
- Would our exhibition stand, sales literature and presentations impress someone seeing us for the first time?
- If we acquired another business tomorrow, could we integrate it into our brand?
If you’ve answered “not quite” to a few of those, you’ve probably got some work to do. We often work with businesses in exactly that position.
So, the question is, how do you get noticed by investors?
At Browndog, we help businesses to achieve growth, starting by presenting them in a way that reflects their ambitions. Sometimes that involves a complete rebrand, sometimes it’s a fresh new website that’s been overdue for years; sometimes it’s with a bit of digital signposting to get the right people to the website, through SEO/GEO and PPC. Often, it’s a combination of the three.
Brand & Design
Brands naturally evolve as businesses grow. When you’re considering mergers and acquisitions or investment opportunities, you want to look the part as well as feel it. We make sure your brand identity represents your growth ambitions. We specialise in creating brands that feel established, confident and consistent across every touchpoint. See our brand identity work here.
Website Design & Development
Your website should work as hard as you do – think of it as your initial salesperson, and invest in it accordingly. Particularly because the first place investors (and potential clients) will often look for you is in search engines. We design and build websites that help you stand out, explain what makes your business different, give visitors confidence, and turn interest into enquiries. This is also your recipe for success in search engines – if they can’t find you, they can’t invest in you. See websites we’ve built here.
Search Prominence (SEO/GEO & PPC)
Even the best website won’t help if nobody sees it. Through content creation and search engine optimisation, and paid advertising, we make sure the right people can find your business when they’re actively looking for the products or services you offer.
Don’t just take our word for it…
Over the years, we’ve been fortunate to work with numerous companies from a variety of sectors that have gone on to secure investment or be acquired by well-known businesses in their sector.
That’s exactly how we like to work – with businesses that see marketing as something that grows alongside them, not something they only consider when they need more leads. Of course, marketing should help generate enquiries, but it’s not just about winning business. Marketing helps people feel confident about your business before they’ve even spoken to you.
If someone is considering investing in your company, buying your business or partnering with you, they’ll certainly look you up online first. If what they find feels dated or inconsistent, that first impression could stick.
Transformation for transformer manufacturing
One client designs, manufactures and installs power and grid transformers. They were extremely successful at this, but visually, they no longer looked like the business they were becoming.
We worked with them on a complete brand refresh – a total overhaul of how the company presented itself. That included new websites, a refined identity, a new strapline, exhibition graphics, signage, literature, stationery and everything in between.
The result wasn’t just that everything looked nicer (even though it definitely did!), it finally felt like one business instead of a few disconnected pieces made up of old and new branding. Since then, they’ve grown significantly and secured millions of pounds of investment to help drive the next stage of the business. They found true value in marketing, so much so that they needed a new person to join the team to help manage it all – we helped with that too!
Standing out in the packaging industry
Another client came to us from the packaging sector (an area we have deep expertise). They’d built a strong business and reputation, but their marketing hadn’t progressed with them. We worked together, completely refreshing the brand, building a brand new ecommerce website, developing ongoing SEO support, earning high-quality backlinks and supporting them with everything offline too – from exhibitions to brochures and branded packaging designs.
Over time, they became far more visible in their industry – the marketing team grew and so did their budget. We supported them more and more, focusing specifically on landing pages for the digital visitors, and stand design and literature for the physical exhibition visitors.
Eventually, they attracted the attention of a large company in their sector and recently announced their acquisition. Would this have happened anyway? Very possibly. But if you’re hoping the right people notice your business, you need to give them something worth noticing.
A small NHS software company achieves global acquisition
A few years ago we started working with a SaaS business that provides services to the NHS and Local Authorities. Their old website was attracting very little traffic and didn’t clearly explain what they did. Together, we started from scratch, laying out the different audience groups and identifying the kind of messaging they needed, and the ways in which they’d procure services.
They had a very small brand identity to work with, so we expanded it out, introducing new colours and styles to translate what they had into a fuller digital experience. The new website told a much clearer story, explaining the pain points of each client profile and speaking directly to the audience whose attention they needed to gain.
Traffic steadily grew, enquiries improved, and digital visitor identification software told us that all the right organisations were landing on the carefully curated pages. The business gained momentum, grew their team and their client base, and was acquired by one of the largest healthcare companies in the world.
Again, we by no means claim that marketing made the acquisition happen; still, it certainly didn’t hurt that the business looked as professional as the software they’d built to power transport for hundreds of councils and NHS Trusts.
Investing in future technology
Not every success story ends with a sale. Another of our SaaS clients has worked with us for several years across a variety of projects. We began with strategy advice, leading to a complete website overhaul and a comprehensive SEO plan. Our support didn’t end with the launch of the new website; we have continued to work together on campaigns and exhibitions, email marketing and paid search.
This continued investment in marketing helped them maintain an excellent level of growth whilst building a customer base of more than 30% of local authorities, which was recently recognised when they secured private investment to boost their success further.
You’ve secured investment or been acquired. What next?
Winning investment or acquiring another business is a huge milestone, but anyone who’s been through it will tell you that the hard work begins now!
You’ve got new teams coming together, existing customers who need reassuring, new customers who need introducing to a bigger business, and employees who are naturally wondering what happens next.
Good communication makes all the difference. We’ve recently started working with a business that has ambitious acquisition plans, with the aim of bringing two or three companies into the group every year, so they needed a partner who could support their transition and communications from a marketing perspective.
That means planning how each new business is introduced into the group, updating brands where needed, producing onboarding packs, creating customer communications, developing simple guides that explain what happens next, and making sure every message is consistent from start to finish.
It allows their leadership team to focus on integrating the business, while we focus on making sure employees, customers and prospects all experience a smooth transition. Because the best acquisitions shouldn’t feel clunky or confusing. Ideally, they should just feel like the natural next step.