Silverback Data Center Solutions
IT Services
Silverback Data Center Solutions has been expanding, migrating, and consolidating data centers for a range of customers since 2003. They count among their customers Fortune 1000 enterprises, small business, and government agencies.
Challenge
In 2018, the company founder sold Silverback to a new CEO and a team of investors. While the company was profitable and well-regarded in its niche, its marketing foundation was weak. Written, structured product definitions did not exist. The website lacked even rudimentary calls to action, and its technology was out-of-date. Visual identity was inconsistent.
The challenge: to build messaging, brand, and promotion that defined, captured, and communicated the company’s value. Specifically, the new CEO wanted the company to project new vigor and professionalism to attract new sales staff who would grow revenues.
Solution
To start my work as part-time marketing staff, I audited the company’s website, collateral, brand, and social media presence.
The issues and opportunities that I identified in the audit became my backlog list for agile marketing project management.
With the agile methodology, I structured my time in two-week sprints. I organized work items into a handful of themes or stories: messaging, brand, website, marketing automation, promotion. Every two weeks, I would report out to the CEO on recent accomplishments and set priorities for the next sprint.
I used Trello to track my agile marketing tasks in relaunching the company's marketing.
For each sprint I reprioritized the stories and the tasks within each story, based on current needs and status and input from the CEO. The priority of stories ran from left to right across each sprint's Trello board. Tasks I ranked from top to bottom on lists within the board.
Along the way, I had the help of a marketing automation implementation consultant (~15 hours) and a graphic designer (~40 hours).
Results
Over the course of 9, two-week sprints of half-time work, I built a new, more solid marketing foundation including:
- Messaging: Brand and product positioning
- Visual identity: typography, colors, creative brief for new logo
- Content strategy: key themes, blog categories and tags, three content initiatives for the coming year
- Website: Staging site configuration, WordPress 5.0 update, major theme update
- SEO optimization: On-page and off-page, based on keyword research and competitive analysis
- Marketing automation: Pardot web tracking, landing pages, and custom redirects
- Sales Enablement: Company and sales presentation, product flyer, Pardot email template
- Market intelligence: Competitor, analyst, and media landscape
You can see the new marketing foundation in the website's message, visuals, and marketing automation.
Ninety days after I started my sprints, the new CEO had me post openings on the website’s new Careers page for sales staff in Chicago and Ashburn, Virginia. Hires in those key data center markets would take the company’s sales effort to a new, national scale.
Want results?
Contact me to discuss building or expanding your marketing to define, communicate, and capture the value of your business.