February – June 2025
The initial request was simple: more leads and more clients, now. The assumption was that publishing content — generic, even automated — would be enough to get them. But what was missing was the ground content needs in order to work: a strategy and an identity to communicate. For four months I effectively led marketing and communication: proposing, directing and managing everything that follows.
The real challenge was not producing, but earning the time for strategy. Anyone running a company wants fast results, and that is understandable; my job was to show that content generates demand only when there is a brand behind it that makes it credible. Before you ask a post for leads, you need a positioning.
A Milan-based ICT SME with a solid product: KonsoleX, a unified cloud management platform for web agencies and software houses. Trend and competitor analysis showed the problem immediately: they all sounded the same, interchangeable messages, zero personality. The offer was rich but scattered — plenty of technical features, no hierarchy — and the hardest part was exactly that: pulling out of all that complexity the thread that matters. The only visible touchpoint was a generic, dated website. Values, promises, tone of voice: absent.
The company's most distinctive asset was not in the product and had never been used: it was the founder's personality — real expertise that does not hide behind corporate language, enthusiasm, a direct and unfiltered confidence. The brand had to speak with that voice: it says things as they are, it knows it does them well and does not fake modesty. In a market where everyone introduces themselves the same way, personality is the hardest difference to copy.
Build the system in the right order, resisting the pressure to publish straight away: strategy first — values, promise, tone of voice, positioning — then the visual identity and the website, then the content, and only at the end measurable distribution. The positioning had a clear pivot: OnTheCloud as an enabler for ICT companies, autonomy and centralisation as the promise. In parallel, narrowing the target to web agencies and software houses, the clusters with the most concrete pain points, and turning communication from episodic publishing into a complete user journey, from the ad to the call.
Everything else derived from the strategy. First the brand document — values, promise, tone of voice, positioning — then the design system from scratch: a modernised logo, bold typographic choices, deep blue and bright orange, hand-drawn circles and underlines as a recurring motif. On that system I supported the build of the new website and of the KonsoleX interface; from there came the social content and several campaign iterations on Meta and LinkedIn, up to the complete user journey with the lead magnet: guide, creatives, landing page, email sequence, retargeting, call booking.
The first campaigns worked as a test. At the start the messages were spread across too many themes and the audience was too broad; every iteration taught us something, and from there came the focus on web agencies and software houses and on what actually moved them. LinkedIn turned out to be too expensive, so the push concentrated on Meta. The final pivot was the guide "5 serious mistakes in managing your cloud", designed to be genuinely useful to whoever downloads it. In parallel, I co-designed the KonsoleX demo video, now on the client's homepage.
In four months OnTheCloud went from no identity to a brand live across every channel: strategy, visual identity, website, tone of voice, content and an active acquisition funnel. The value is not in the individual pieces but in the derivation: every creative, every email, every page descends from the same strategic document. That is the difference between publishing and building a strategy.
First the brand,
then we talk leads.