A few posts back I talked about how we started the process of presenting ourselves to the market more effectively, focusing on the refinement of our PowerPoint. We boiled our executive intro deck down to a tight, 6-bullet story that everyone could follow; translated that into 10 crisply designed visual slides that supported a speaker telling that story, and released it into the wild for further feedback and refinement. After that we told that story, again and again to prospects at every level, honing it down like a comedian works a set, into a road-tested elevator pitch we knew worked in getting someone with the problem we solve to want to learn more what we did.

From there began the process of telling that same story everywhere we touch the marketplace. It’s not sexy work, being more about consistently good tactical execution than it is about some grand strategic insight. But it is important, and I thought I’d share it.

The reason it’s important to align every external point of contact with a single brand message is that we’ve all become cynical about the marketing we encounter in the world. Think about yourself. How much of the marketing you run into elicits more of a “yeah, right,” than a “hell, yeah?” I bet most of it. And the reason for this is that we know it’s a lot easier to make a claim than it is to back one up.

When we encounter a marketing claim we find compelling we tend to look for holes in it, to seek out inconsistent data points to validate our cynical predisposition. The first place we look for those data points is usually among friends and colleagues, highlighting the importance both of active participation in social media, and of creating products worth talking about. But setting those two longer-term priorities aside for a moment, we also look for the truth of brands in places they have their guard down, in the thousand trivial touchpoints the Marketing People don’t care about enough to remake.

Think e-mail sigs. The hold message on your corporate voicemail. Your trade-show tchotchkes, logo sportswear, and even your blog. Each of these things provides a window into the truth of what’s behind the work a typical agency paints and powders on your behalf. We all know this as consumers, and yet we seem to forget it as marketers.

One example… in a small company, there are few easier ways to get your message out than to attach it to the tail of every single e-mail message created by every single person in your company. E-mail is ubiquitous, and even though 80% of your outbound volume probably comes from 20% of your market-facing people, standardizing on an e-mail sig provides a little reminder to every single person in your company, multiple times a day, of what your story is.

For us we wanted to get the logo and tagline lockup right, deliver our value prop in a way that had the best chance to provoke interest on the part of our target audience, and provide a set of social links for them to plug into more information without needing to expose themselves. The result was this:

No big shakes, nothing earth shattering, or particularly creative. Just good design that delivers an idea we want to build support for over time.

Next we tackled a laundry list of the promotional paraphernalia every B2B company seems to produce. We upgraded the trade show wear from a lower end black polo to a high-end Nike dry-fit in Actifio orange. We abandoned the low-end t-shirts we’d written before the positioning effort, and re-designed our go-to booth premium – a neat little screen cleaner that sticks to the back of your smartphone no matter how many times you use it – from this:

To this:

Next we turned to the web. The truth is it’s going to take a while to build out the online infrastructure to support a content-driven, 21st century marketing program. But while that’s under development we were dealing with a web site that nobody externally understood, and nobody internally really felt good about:

Switching out a few banner and cleaning up some titles got us to this:

The first of 4 vignettes you see here in the main slider drives people down to a single new page of copy that highlights to core of our new message – connecting the enterprise storage explosion everyone understands with the copy data management problem we uniquely solve. The second slider vignette establishes our credibility by highlighting Gartner’s awarding us a Cool Vendor award recently. The third reinforces the core value prop in our e-mail sigs (“Recover anything instantly for up to 90% less”) and the final one brings in the voice of the customer in the form of a video we produced recently featuring the President of Time Warner Cable’s NaviSite division, extolling the transformational impact our technology had on the underlying economic of his business.

None of this award-winning work. With more time, money, and talent all of it could be better… but the point here is that we’re moving quickly to align every external touchpoint with the story we know works. It’s going to take many months to get it all singing from the same hymn book, and there’s more strategic work ahead to keep delivering leads to the sales team and be more proactive in focusing our efforts. That’s all to come.

But the little things really do matter when it comes to building a brand, and a little focus on them from a small internal team and a really good designer can make a big difference in a short time.