Robin Campbell-Burt – Director at Spreckley
Whether you’re a completely new British company or a start-up from abroad, the rules for breaking into the UK market apply in the same way. Each company will face its own unique challenges but it’s crucial that a solid marketing plan is drawn up in order to achieve success.
Before implementing any strategy, ensure you’ve considered these points:
Be tough on yourself. How unique are you?
If you’re launching a new product or service, chances are you’re already all in — emotionally, physically, financially. That commitment is essential. But it also breeds tunnel vision. By the time founders or teams come to us to enter the UK market, they’ve usually decided that what they offer is genuinely unique. Often, it isn’t.
You have to ask yourself: what actually makes this different? Not what you believe is special, but what can be demonstrated as distinct in the eyes of your market. Who are your competitors, and how does your offer stand up against theirs? Strategic communications begins with clarity, not wishful thinking.
Content writing for marketing and PR demands the same level of scrutiny. It’s not enough to sound good. You need messaging that reflects positioning, strategy, and differentiation. Writing for attention is easy; writing for credibility, traction and retention takes discipline.
In international PR, that pressure multiplies. You’re not just speaking another language — you’re entering a different frame of reference. What resonates in one region may fall flat or backfire in another. Knowing how to adapt your story across borders without losing coherence is the difference between global ambition and local confusion.
Effective strategy is rooted in realism. If you can’t define what sets you apart with precision, your audience won’t do it for you. Get honest. Get specific. Or be ignored.
Match your campaign to the customer’s journey
Know your customer’s journey from where they will first hear about you, to coming to your website for the first time, and ending with them buying your services. Think about the information they want to consume at different stages of the buying process. For example, they may want to start with an insightful video into the future of the market you’re operating in. This can then follow on to a piece of expert opinion or practical guidance to challenges they’re facing. You can then link to a customer case study and so on.
Each touchpoint must be intentional. Awareness content should offer perspective, not just promotion. At the consideration stage, your materials need to show credibility, not just claims — analyst commentary, white papers, benchmarking data, or grounded opinion pieces that help the buyer frame the problem. Once they’re engaged, social proof becomes critical: real-world case studies, client endorsements, technical walkthroughs. Not fluff, not vague outcomes: clear value, demonstrated results.
Strategic content planning means mapping every asset to a specific stage in the buyer’s decision-making process. If your funnel relies on generic blog posts and a single call-to-action, you’re not guiding a journey—you’re hoping for a coincidence.
In B2B, especially in international markets, the path to purchase is rarely linear. Buying committees, regulatory concerns, cultural nuance — these all affect the sequence. But what stays constant is the need to earn trust. You do that by anticipating what your audience needs before they ask for it, and delivering substance every step of the way.
Ensure they can access what they want, when they want it and on which platform they want to consume it on.
It is not about shouting about your features and benefits
The early stage of communication is not about shouting the benefits of your products. Marketing communications through news publications and on social media platforms is based on talking about the problems your target audiences are facing and showing that you understand their concerns. When they are engaged and can see that you understand them, you can then have more detail available on the products and services that you provide.
This matters even more in sectors like cloud services, fintech, and healthtech, where the market is saturated with similar promises. Startups in these spaces often default to technical claims or feature-heavy messaging, assuming that performance specs or compliance checklists are enough to persuade. They’re not.
What your audience wants is evidence that you understand their environment. A fintech decision-maker isn’t looking for another payments platform; they’re looking for reduced risk, easier integrations, and fewer regulatory headaches. A hospital CIO doesn’t care how elegant your code is if it disrupts clinical workflows or complicates procurement.
Begin with their challenges. Reflect their priorities. Then, once you’ve earned their attention, provide the details that show how your solution fits. Lead with relevance, not with a product sheet.
Everyone will look for you online so make sure that you can be found
It goes without saying that a strong digital presence is vital in today’s market. Not only do you need a user friendly website, designed with your customer in mind, but you also need to think about SEO and have a presence on social media too. These elements cannot be ignored, regardless of who your potential customer is.
Be diverse in the content that you produce and integrate everything
It’s important that you are offering your customers up-to-date insights. This means consistently creating varied content. You should deliver this through video, media relations, social media, your website, and integrate everything so it’s seamless for customers to take a journey around your company.
Match expectations to your budget
This is crucial! For many startups, there is a constant battle of wanting the world to know about you but only juggling a small budget. You therefore need to match your expectations to the budget you have available and ensure you’re optimising the ways that will give you the most bang for your buck.
To see how we helped launch a B2B brand in the UK, take a look at our case study of the work we completed with TelcoSwitch: Click here for the link
To discuss how we can help you further, contact [email protected]