Implementing an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

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.

One of the answers to this conundrum may be found by considering our own buying patterns these days. If we make a significant purchase, it has become commonplace to do a lot of research online before ever setting foot in a store or talking to a sales person. Consumers have never been as well educated, and it is this trend that suggests our solution.

Push tactics simply do not work anymore. Our prospects educate themselves before they come to us, and if they are purchasing licenses for potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars, they are really going to self-educate. Pull strategies are essential to tap into this online education trend, and this is at the heart of modern, inbound-marketing strategies. We have to become the great educators, and turning that educational experience into a nurturing path toward consideration of our own solutions.

How do we do this effectively, making use of online tools and channels available to us?

When Nicolas Athanasopoulos, OneSpin Solutions’ head of digital strategy, and I started working together a year or so ago, we exploited and developed these channels to great effect, with lead generation like I have never seen from traditional channels.

Nicolas came from outside the semiconductor industry with a fresh perspective and a new approach that obsoleted all the traditional tried-and-true efforts we knew. No one, and certainly not a decision maker, answers a sales call or responds to email any longer, and interest in conferences and mainstream media has waned. Compounding a tough situation is competitive activity and industry consolidation that puts more pressure on small and medium-sized semiconductor enterprises.

Observing Nicolas’ experience and sizable skillset, I became a believer. Marketing technology is evolving as fast as users and prospects are changing their behavior. Targeted solutions can actually tackle today’s marketing needs. Better yet, I found digital, content-based, inbound marketing isn’t difficult to implement or expensive and can lead to significant results, well within the limited marketing resources of a startup.

With this backdrop, I invite you to join Nicolas, who’s flying in from Germany, and me for an ESD Alliance-hosted Digital Marketing Workshop Thursday, April 26, at SEMI in Milpitas, Calif.

We will share with you best marketing practices for an effective digital marketing strategy based on proven, effective techniques borrowed from other industries that can be applied to electronic system design ecosystem marketing. We’ll outline environmental challenges to modern tech marketing and clear up myths of online, content-based, social media marketing. We’ll show you how to get qualified prospects to seek out your company instead of searching for them. Rather than blast out your message and hope an engineer or designer sees it, bring them to your company’s solutions using a few proven Inbound Digital Marketing techniques we’ll teach you. At the conclusion of the workshop, you will have a toolbox to implement a web-based content and lead-nurturing plan using cost-effective and proven digital marketing techniques.

Our 3.5-hour workshop will start with breakfast at 7:30 a.m. and run from 8:30 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. It will consist of four sections:

1. Intro –– Tech marketing in the digital age
2. Inbound –– A strategic model for digital marketing
3. Digital marketing –– Tactics that fit for EDA
4. Case study –– Digital marketing at OneSpin

We designed the workshop for CEOs, marketing executives, content creators or anyone else from within the semiconductor industry interested in implementing or improving their company’s content marketing strategy. The cost for the workshop is $30 per person for ESD Alliance member companies, $75 per person for non-members and includes breakfast. I understand seating is limited, so please register today. Registration information can be found at: http://bit.ly/2pvDqlL

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