Planting your corporate flag in America for the first time is a big opportunity for your business. You now have a foothold in one of the world’s largest and most diversified markets. You have access to an even larger customer base. But there are challenges. Your company and products are not known in America. And although you need to hire and ramp-up quickly, your lean headquarters in Europe cannot afford to send more than a handful of experts to help build your plant abroad.

A good market entry plan will always include detailed communications activities and deliverables for each one of the four main phases of your Greenfield investment. These are site selection, start of construction, hiring, and start of production. Let’s look at how communications can support your hiring process, help grow your customer base and protect your brand in a meaningful manner.

Hiring the right employees: One of the first priorities is hiring the right people for your plant and building an effective team. For a company entering the U.S. market for the first time, this can be challenging for any number of reasons. Its brand is not known stateside. There is little information on the web about the firm and its products. The design of its website is outdated, and the wording of the English version is awkward. To complicate matters, the new U.S. plant is in a rural setting that lacks the amenities qualified candidates, and their families are used to in more urban areas. A good communications plan will address these challenges and define activities to support your HR team. This will include key messages about your company, its history, products, advanced workforce training initiatives and other value propositions. It will include ready-to-use materials, prepared by seasoned communicators and native speakers, not the main office in Europe, for U.S. career web sites, job fairs, and recruiting firms. Finally, a good communications plan will always identify ways to engage local and state media during the hiring process, in addition to any recruiting support the host state may offer.

Growing your customer base: Companies opening production facilities in the United States typically already have customers stateside. Building a plant is a long term investment. Most market entry plans include targets on growing the customer base and increasing market share. A good communications strategy should specify activities that advance your business the moment you arrive in America. Exhibits and meetings at trade shows are one good way to engage prospective customers. Interviews with trade media covering your industry on, for example, technology trends are another effective, low-cost method of catching the attention of prospects. Develop a compelling story. Tap your considerable in-house expertise and involve your plant manager, product development and sales heads. Ever wondered why most American company executives are so “on message” in interviews? They have been media-trained and know exactly what to say about their products, whether in front of a camera or a microphone, in 5- or 10-seconds sound bites. And their messages are designed to appeal to the specific needs and concerns of American customers and prospects. You have a great product, but make sure everyone knows about it.

Protecting your brand and reputation: Sooner or later, companies will experience problems. It could be a faulty product, a plant fire, or a labor issue. These events put you immediately under the public microscope with potentially negative media coverage around the clock. The good news is, with a bit of preparation, you can weather the storm. When you build your new facility, be sure to adopt effective crisis management policies and procedures and make them part of your Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) culture from day one. And a comprehensive crisis communication plan is essential for success. In the U.S. most companies have crisis plans in place and practice crisis scenarios on a regular basis. After all, practice makes perfect and emergency preparedness is a management responsibility. Better to be ready, than sorry.

Building relationships: Moving into a new market means you should take advantage of every opportunity to build relationships, not just with customers, but also with your new community, and with the media that covers your location and industry. A good communications plan will incorporate a means of building relationships with these and other key groups that are relevant for your business. The sooner you open the lines of communication with them, the better. Think of the process as you would think of moving into a new community where you’re not known – you need to get to know your neighbors. You will need them at some point. The time to make friends is early on, not when you need their help.

-Christian Koenig