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.
(more…)