Note from the ESD Alliance’s Bob Smith: Nicolas Athanasopoulos, OneSpin’s head of digital strategy, gave us an overview about what he plans to present next week at the ESD Alliance-hosted Digital Marketing Workshop. Now, we’ll hear from Dave Kelf, chief marketing officer at Breker, about why he’s so bullish on developing and implementing a content marketing strategy. We look forward to seeing Nicolas and Dave Thursday, April 26, at SEMI in Milpitas, Calif. We hope you’ll join us.

Engaging with prospective customers is one of the most increasingly difficult challenges all companies in the semiconductor industry face today. It’s even more challenging for small companies like those I’ve worked for over the years. And, it’s not getting easier using our traditional marketing and sales techniques.

Sure, most startups can attract a few early adopters, those guys who are the lifeblood of the fledgling organization that help drive early development. But getting key people at mainstream accounts to return emails or a phone call has become increasingly difficult. This is now a major problem for sales managers in general. Scaling a business has never been tougher.
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The big news this week is from the ESD Alliance and SEMI. We announced a memorandum of understanding where the ESD Alliance will become a SEMI Strategic Association Partner.

Jointly, the ESD Alliance and SEMI will provide great value to our collective membership. Under the SEMI global infrastructure, our geographic reach will expand considerably, a goal I set when I became executive director three years ago. As a global organization and platform that’s been around since 1970, SEMI will provide us with the opportunity to further expand our reach and activities beyond North America. Our members will have access to SEMI’s global platform with offices and forums all over the world. 

Otherwise, nothing else will change and working together will expand the charters of both, representing our member companies as we’ve been doing and promoting their value as vital components of the global electronics ecosystem. Our board of directors will continue to govern the ESD Alliance’s distinct community, setting the organization’s direction and will function as an Executive Advisory Council of SEMI.

In the past, SEMI’s focus had been on electronics manufacturing and largely on the semiconductor supply chain. Its mission now encompasses the entire electronic product design and manufacturing chain. With the ESD Alliance, SEMI strengthens its ability to serve the entire electronic product manufacturing chain and benefits with direct engagement from our design ecosystem expertise. The charter of our technical programs, initiatives and events complement SEMI’s technology communities and activities that include advocacy, standards and environment, health and safety.
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Note from Bob Smith, executive director of the ESD Alliance: I’m traveling this week and turned over my EDACafe blog post to OneSpin’s Nicolas Athanasopoulos. Nicolas and Breker’s CMO Dave Kelf graciously agreed to do a Digital Market Workshop for ESD Alliance members and anyone else interested in learning best practices for inbound-driven digital marketing. We hope you will join us Thursday, April 26!

Digital transformation is a frequently used buzz-phrase for all kinds of digitization processes. While talking about the potential challenges and opportunities for this mighty “digital age,” a lot of people forget that for marketing in particular, it arrived a long time ago. Almost all target groups that you may want to address today are affected by smartphones, using online research, and probably active social media users. And, for sure, this development applies to the electronic design ecosystem.  For this reason, it’s mission critical for the marketing, sales, operations and communications groups of companies offering goods or services to the electronic design community to adopt the recent changes as fast as possible.

Back in late 2016, when OneSpin’s CEO Raik Brinkmann offered the opportunity to build up a digital strategy for OneSpin from scratch, I already had a clear impression about the products around formal verification. I knew how we could target prospects in the digital environment using search engines, social media or newsletters. However, the EDA industry was fairly new to me. Coming from 3M where I successfully established a customer-centric approach to its corporate digital marketing, I was used to technically driven marketing with strong unique selling propositions that grant you by definition a competitive advantage and low emotional engagement.
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