Businesses are often confined by their roots. While owners and managers may have a longer term vision for their organization, in many cases their horizons can be too  limited by the realities of the past and present for them to boldly envision a vastly different future. At Verticalwerks, we take a pragmatic approach to helping Clients systematically plan and implement their communications strategy in well-defined, achievable steps. We’ll help you crawl, then walk, then run …. ensuring that each step meets expectations before the next steps are taken.

Plan For Growth, Work in Reality

When it comes to communications, Verticalwerks takes a very pragmatic approach to decision-making. We won’t recommend a solution until we understand the problem and we don’t recommend anything unless we believe it’s the right solution at the right time.

If your brand alignment is off, then jumping into building a new website may be putting the cart before the horse. If your website looks great but isn’t getting any traffic, then you need a strategy to connect with the outside world before investing further in your website. If you can’t deliver on the promise your brand story tells, then it doesn’t make any sense to just develop a new logo and tagline; first you need to have a great story to tell.

It’s All About Alignment

Finally, we believe in what we do. We understand the power of words, imagery, interactive media and having a great story to tell. But we also know that it can only help your business if everything aligns with your brand promise, your target audience and your business vision. We strive to help you align all of these elements and more to expand your horizons and achieve the results you believe are possible.

Often in the midst of daily operation and business tactics, it’s difficult to just step back from your organization and take a fresh view. With our deep business and communications expertise, Verticalwerks can bring an outside viewpoint to the table and help you redefine things. We’ll examine your company from the inside out, exploring points of differentiation, brand alignment and customer affinity to help you get clarity, seek new growth opportunities and define your brand story.

Identify Hidden Assets and Liabilities

Every organization has hidden assets … and liabilities. Verticalwerks’ business consulting process helps you identify them and determine the best strategy to leverage the assets that may not be fully obvious and how to transform your hidden liabilities into strengths and new opportunities. By employing methodologies, processes and templates such as SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis, business and marketing planning and our Brand Alignment Process, we will help you identify the right strategy and the requisite tactics designed to bring your organizational vision to life!

Continuous and Sustainable Improvement

Verticalwerks will help you identify in-house capabilities and embed best-practice approaches to measure, manage, and upgrade brand performance. Our expert-led training and support (ad hoc or scheduled), will help you build internal capabilities and position your organization for brand alignment and lasting success.

At Verticalwerks we are passionately driven by the philosophy that there are no limits when it comes to the power of ideas, vision and great creative to transform your business, brand and reputation.

We partner with clients to help them ideate, define their vision and put the right creative and technical elements in place to take their businesses to the next level. We also believe there are no limits to what we can help our clients achieve: print, web, mobile marketing, social media, direct marketing. We bring the right resources to the table.

Skill, Experience and Expertise

Our team brings a rare combination of  business consulting expertise, creative talent and technical know-how to the table. From strategic business planning to graphic and web design, videography and photography to copy writing and editing, our associates have the skills, experience and expertise required to help you plan and implement a world-class communications strategy.

Passion and Commitment

We’ve been in marketing communications for a long time and it’s our passion. We don’t take ourselves too seriously … just look at our acronym! All of our associates work “virtually” so that we can provide quality work at reasonable rates … ask for a quote! But we’re serious about business and creativity and we know how to deliver results for clients … just ask them!

We work with Fortune 500 clients, local businesses, non-profits and everything in between. The process is always the same. We ask the right questions and create the right solutions. We listen. We collaborate. You get results. And we believe there are no limits to what we can do together.

At the end of every successful business plan is a pot of gold. At Verticalwerks, we think of every client’s business strategy as a rainbow, bright and colorful, a thing of multi-dimensional beauty and full of inspiration, but ever-elusive and fleeting! It’s about the journey as much as the objective.

The trick every successful business seems to know is that you have to be remarkable … just the way every rainbow is completely unique and can never be exactly duplicated! Following the rainbow is about giving your business vision color and dimension, defining what it is that makes you irreplaceable to your audience and creating a story that is singularly unique.

We believe there is a pot of gold at the end of your rainbow and our purpose is to help you in your journey to realize your organizational vision and inspiration.

Basic Elements of Life and Success

You will notice at the top of every page on our website there are five colored boxes. By clicking on these boxes you can change the theme you see on our website. Four of these themes represent the four basic elements are water, fire air, earth and Air. Understanding what each element represents helps us evaluate where our individual strengths and weaknesses are. Healers have found that focusing on the elements can often be helpful when seeking what course of treatments would best address our problems:

• Air (Cyan) represents intellect, mental intention, and connection to universal life force.
• Earth (Gold) represents grounding, foundation of life, substance, connection to life path, and family roots.
• Fire (Orange) represents energy, tool for transformation, connection to personal power, and inner strength.
• Water (Blue) represents emotional release, intuition, and inner reflection.

The fifth theme represents Life (Green), which is both enabled and sustained by the four basic elements. We believe this metaphor can also be applied to your business: if the basic elements are not in place, the life and success of your business are not sustainable.

Do you understand the message in that sentence? Perhaps, but you really have to work at it. We know that in business, you don’t want people ignoring your message. Or worse … annoyed customers. It’s easier than ever for customers to miss your message. Consumers receive about 3,000 marketing messages per day and your message is competing with all those other messages.

Getting your message noticed boils down to three simple concepts:

1. Know your audience and offer them something relevant and compelling.
2. Deliver your message multiple times in different ways.
3. Ensure your message is consistent and that you can stand behind your offer.

A great marketing message is one that your target audience hears, understands, and acts upon:

• Deliver one message at a time. Your audience will tune out if you hit them with too many things at once. Look at these examples. What is FedEx known for? Overnight delivery. Wal-Mart? Low prices. Being well-known for one thing is better than not being remembered for anything.
• Position your message as the solution to your audience’s problem. People are most receptive to messages about them and their problems. Tell them you have the solution to their problem and they will listen.
• Promise only what you know you can deliver. The old adage is still true: under promise and over-deliver. Don’t make claims you can’t back up. Failing to deliver on your promises is a sure way to lose credibility and repeat business.
• Set yourself apart from your competition. Why should the potential customer do business with your company? Is your product made better? Is it lower priced? Do you have faster delivery, or a better warranty? Let your audience know why you have the superior product.
• Get your message out repeatedly. Your target audience needs to see your message different times in different ways. The goal here is not to annoy your target audience, but simply to remind people you are there, so when they’re ready to buy, they buy from you.

Are you getting the value you expect from your marketing budget? Or do you have limited visibility to ROI? Is your website delivering new customers and building a lasting bond with existing customers? Or do you know that your website is several years old and needs a refresh? Are you working continuously to improve and extend your online presence? Or is your current website out of date, static and stale?

Verticalwerks Will Help you Start a New Day

If you know your marketing, branding and online presence could be doing more for you, then you’ve come to the right place. Verticalwerks doesn’t believe in just developing a new logo, word mark and tagline or designing a new website and then walking away hoping it will take you 6 – 12 months to realize it didn’t help your business materially.

In fact, we advise every client to allocate part of their marketing budget to refreshing their brand and website but also leave enough to invest in ongoing services such as brand development, social media training, online advertising and SEO (search engine optimization).

The bottom line is that unless you invest continuously in these efforts, that shiny new logo and website won’t do you any good at all!

It All Begins with a Plan

Before we get started creating a brand identity or designing your new website, we will take the time to really understand your business from the inside out. Then we’ll work with you to define a plan of action, with clear deliverables, milestones and metrics for success. And together we’ll work that plan to assure a successful outcome that delivers the ROI you expect.

It’s such a basic question, but one that most organizations struggle to answer … much less communicate clearly. But in today’s age of endless marketing messages competing for a very short attention span, clearly communicating your “story” is an absolute imperative. Articulating and embracing your brand story from within is what makes it happen.

The values and ideas your organization stands for must be understood, accepted, championed and even bragged about from the inside out. Far more than any ad campaign, website or tagline can ever be, your brand story is the core truth of who you are and shapes everything your customers come to expect and value about you. Your story must be agreed to by everybody in your organization and consistently told to open meaningful conversations with everybody outside … those who need your products and services.

So often this vital step is skipped, resulting in brand confusion. People from within your own walls move in different directions, each telling their own version of your story. Customers get mixed messages and your brand story becomes diluted, failing to hit the connect.

So What?

As a business strategy, brand alignment helps you ensure that everybody inside your organization fully understands and embraces your unique truths, that everyone from CEO to receptionist can answer the most basic of questions: Why do we do what we do? And, more important, so what? Why should anybody really care? How are we relevant?

In a world where most people’s basic needs are more than met and competition in most markets moves at light speed, how do you ensure that what you promise is relevant to customers, employees and partners? Even more important, how do you ensure your entire organization can live up fully to those promises?

Telling Your Story

Typically, brand perception is much easier to correct than your brand itself. Our proprietary Brand Alignment Process analyzes your organizational vision, objectives and operational reality to make recommendations and help you adjust what we call the “Six Points of Your Brand Story:”

1. Focus – Is your message focused and consistent with your ideas and values or do you send mixed messages?
2. Relevance – Does your message make a real difference to your target customers and do they care?
3. Core Values – Are you clearly communicating the core values and differentiators of your company such as integrity, disruptive technology, highest quality of service, etc.?
4. Personality – Do your customers and prospects see your company as it truly is (fun, conservative, professional, etc.)?
5. Affinity – Does your brand attract your target customers and keep them coming back?
6. Experience – Does the experience you promise match the reality of what and how you deliver value?