Behind the Brand: What Marketing Bare Metal Has Taught Me

I market servers for a living.

Bare metal servers, specifically.

It's not exactly the category most marketers dream about when they're sitting in Marketing 101 imagining their future careers. There are no pretty product shoots. Nobody is unboxing a server on TikTok and crying because it's beautiful. And most of our customers know more about infrastructure than I ever will, so they can tell immediately when marketing is trying too hard.

Turns out, trying to give bare metal servers a personality is actually pretty fun.

Over the last few years, I've had the chance to help shape how Limestone Networks shows up in the world. We've rebranded (more than once), rebuilt our website, launched infrastructure around the world, started a Roadshow, changed how we talk on social, and tried some ideas that probably had people internally wondering what exactly I was doing.

Some worked. Some didn't. That's marketing.

We've Rebranded a Few Times

Limestone Networks isn't a new company trying to invent an identity. We've been doing this for a long time.

The challenge was taking what was already good about LSN and making the outside of the company actually reflect it.

For a while, our tagline was:

Simple. Solid. Superior.

Very infrastructure company. Very safe. Very three S's.

Then we moved to:

The Bare Metal Company.

I loved this era because it was ridiculously straightforward.

What do we do? Bare metal.

What do we want to be known for? Bare metal.

Great. Put it on everything.

Then the industry started changing. AI became part of basically every infrastructure conversation. GPUs were everywhere. Customers were thinking differently about compute, and infrastructure that traditionally lived quietly behind the scenes was suddenly part of much bigger conversations.

So we evolved again:

AI Infrastructure. Bare Metal Core.

I don't really see those as three separate LSN identities. They're snapshots of the same company at different stages.

That's probably the biggest thing I've learned about branding: you don't need to burn everything down every time the market changes. Sometimes the bones are good. You just need to figure out what you're trying to say now.

Then I Somehow Got Into the Event Business

At some point, we decided LSN should have its own Roadshow. Fantastic idea.

Also approximately 9,472 tiny tasks disguised as one event.

People see the finished version: the venue, presentations, food, signs, partners, and a room full of people.

I see the landing page, emails, attendee lists, partner coordination, presentations, graphics I changed for the 400th time because something looked slightly off, and me refreshing registrations even though I checked eleven minutes ago.

Then you finally get to the event and watch this thing that existed in your head become a real room full of people.

A partner meets someone they end up working with. A customer finally puts a face to the person they've been emailing. Someone stays after a presentation because they want to keep talking.

Turns out, people still like talking to people.

Good news for all of us.

AI Has Changed How I Work

I work for an AI infrastructure company, so saying AI has changed the way I work isn't exactly groundbreaking.

But what interests me isn't using AI to generate 30 LinkedIn posts.

I've started using it to build things.

I used AI to help build the landing page for our Roadshow. I use it to research, work through positioning, organize information, troubleshoot, prototype ideas and get from I have an idea to I have something I can actually use much faster.

For a lean marketing team, that's huge.

A few years ago, when I had an idea for a tool, page or process, my first thought was:

Who do I need to build this?

Now it's increasingly:

Can I build this? That's a pretty wild shift.

The Internet Does Not Need 400 More AI-Generated Blog Posts

There is SO. MUCH. CONTENT.

Need 30 social posts? Done. A six-email nurture sequence? Done. Ten blogs about AI infrastructure? Please don't, but done. A 2,000-word thought leadership article from your CEO that your CEO definitely did not write and would never actually say out loud?

We've all seen it.

AI has made creating marketing incredibly easy. It has not made creating good marketing incredibly easy.

If anything, I think the explosion of perfectly acceptable content makes having an actual personality more important.

I don't want Limestone Networks to sound like every other infrastructure company. And I definitely don't want it to sound like a robot just because robots are helping us make things.

We've gotten weirder on social. We've put more personality into campaigns. We've made presentations that don't feel like 47 slides of infrastructure diagrams slowly stealing your will to live.

We've tried to sound like ourselves.

Along the way, our social audience grew 50%, website traffic increased 30%, and partner signups increased. We've also marketed 20+ global infrastructure launches, which still sounds slightly insane when I write it out.

None of that came from one magical campaign. It's been years of trying things, paying attention, changing things and occasionally killing ideas I was emotionally attached to.

So What Happens Next?

I genuinely don't know.

AI is going to get better. We'll automate more. Small teams will build things that used to require entire departments. The lines between marketer, designer, developer, analyst and content creator are already getting blurry.

Eventually, we're all going to have access to roughly the same tools.

And when the tool isn't the advantage anymore, the person using it becomes the advantage.

Knowing your customer. Having good ideas. Recognizing a bad one. Understanding your brand well enough to know when something doesn't sound like you. Being willing to try something a little weird.

That's the part of marketing I'm most excited about.

I started out marketing bare metal servers. Somewhere along the way, I got to help build a brand.

And we're definitely not done messing with it yet.

— Keren Marquez Head of Marketing, Limestone Networks