TechMark Global

 

When times are rough, the first budget to get cut is the marketing budget. That's when you need to get the recession playbook out.

There are several ways to promote your techie image. One of my favorites is getting some papers published. The good part is that you can get the engineers to write the paper. OK, they may need help putting a well-balanced publication together but that's where you come in as the marketing guy (or girl). In many cases, there are a bunch of papers already published that can be respun with marketing in mind.

In general, trade magazines will not publish overt marketing pieces so one needs to balance some real technology content (which is hopefully in that techie paper your engineer wrote last year) and your key marketing message. I usually follow the following guidelines: 

• Start with a market positioning section (trends).
• Identify a key challenge or problem associated with the market trend (one that your customers have). I show as much technical content as possible in the description of the challenge.
• Describe the solution to the problem that your company came up with, and focus on the benefits to the customer. The solution is technical but linked to key benefits that make potential customers say "Gee, I wish I had that".
• Close with future work being done on the topic.

Here is an example of a technical paper written with this approach in mind:

http://ap.pennnet.com/display_article/260444/36/ARTCL/none/none/1/Flip-Chip-Technology/