Since joining Microwave Journal, I've had the opportunity to see how many companies market their capabilities and products. Watching these various approaches, I've been keeping a list of best practices. Surprisingly, I've observed that while having more budget for marketing certainly helps, companies are missing basic marketing steps that cost little and just take a bit of time.

So to help make your marketing program as strong as it can be, here are five suggestions from my list of best practices:

1. What's your message and why should I care?

Begin by crisply defining your message and make sure it is meaningful to your intended audience.

Larger companies are often awash in messages, from corporate narratives for investors to specific product announcements. Somewhere in this mix is where you are playing, so your first step is defining your universe within the company, your intended audience and the message that they will find compelling.

For a product or product family, the story may well be a single performance parameter (e.g., output power, efficiency, frequency of operation). The higher in the organization, the more abstract the message. Yet it should reflect themes that tie to the company's strategy and will resonate with the audience, over time if not already.

Here's an example of crisp messaging: MACOM is developing GaN on silicon (Si) and introducing it to a market crowded with GaN on silicon carbide (SiC) players and LDMOS incumbents. Their message? GaN on Si has the performance of GaN on SiC and will be cheaper than LDMOS. Clear and intriguing, if not compelling, to a potential user.

2. Think big

Once you've defined your message, think of all the possible ways to tell it:

• Advertising (print and/or digital)
• Trade show
• Technical article
• Product feature article
• White paper
• Webinar
• Blog post or dedicated website
• Workshop (e.g., at a trade show)
• Press release
• Video demonstration
• Interview (print, audio or video)
• Social media (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter)

Select several of these that are appropriate for your message and audience. Then determine how they can complement each other, both in content and timing.

As an example of an integrated plan, you might announce a new product at the International Microwave Symposium (press release and video interview/demo at your booth) and follow that with a webinar, white paper, technical article and advertising during subsequent months. To address the Chinese market, you might develop a product feature article (in Chinese) and present a workshop at a trade show in China, such as EDI CON.

The timing of your plan should be developed considering two perspectives: not only when but how often. We're all overloaded with information and have increasingly short attention spans, so your messaging needs to be repeated — seemingly ad nauseum — and arrive through different channels.

3. Build a "long term" plan

Most companies operate on a 12 month operating budget (with quarterly adjustments), three years for product roadmaps, and perhaps five years for technology roadmaps. For marketing programs, 12 months is a good planning horizon. Even though some new products in the plan will slip, 12 months usually aligns with the annual budget for market communications.

Having defined the message (step 1) and identified possible channels for telling the story (step 2), the next step is formalizing a 12-month marketing calendar. Dates will be determined by the timing of product launches and external events, such as trade shows or magazine editorial calendars.

Once a draft plan is agreed upon internally, you should engage the media to place technical articles or feature stories. Publications finalize the content of an issue at least two to three months in advance, usually earlier for cover articles and features that are central to the issue's theme.

As a best practice, maintain a rolling 12-month editorial calendar and coordinate and confirm schedules with publications every quarter — more frequently if a product release slides or completely drops out of the plan.

4. Engage and develop relationships

Consider media editorial teams (and market analysts) your partners. As editors, we want to help companies tell their stories, particularly those that the industry will find important and informative. That helps us keep readers.

So reach out to keep us apprised of your strategies and new products and services. Companies with the best practices develop and maintain relationships with the editorial teams and analysts most important to their targeted markets. They usually brief us on new products prior to launch, provide us with periodic access to their executives, and may even invite us to visit their facilities to better understand their capabilities.

Such relationships are based on trust. We strive to live up to the highest standards of integrity; we don't favor one company over another nor share sensitive or embargoed information.

5. Don't be too conservative!

Yes, we do work in a competitive world, and you certainly don't want to disclose your trade secrets to the competition in a technical article. However, I've observed the concern about protecting IP is often taken too far, with a company becoming a "black hole," unwilling to say anything and losing the opportunity to be a thought leader.

This often seems to occur with market adoption of new technologies. Potential users want information about the performance, reliability and cost of a new technology. They are assessing whether it will meet system performance requirements, what risk it poses to their business (e.g., reliability or supply) and whether it offers sufficient value. The developers are reluctant to share information, fearful of disclosing problems or providing sensitive information to the competition.

The result is an information vacuum. Vacuums are usually filled, either by an aggressive entrant or the incumbent supplying the "old" technology. If that happens, you'll find yourself defending your technology or product against negative claims. Don't let your competitors fill a vacuum that you unintentionally create by your reticence to share information and tell your story.

As engineers, we would like to think that customers choose products and suppliers based on purely rational criteria — trade-off matrices of dB and dollars. However, particularly when faced with uncertainty, subjective impressions influence decisions, and these are often unconscious. Have you read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink?

While a company's marketing program won't increase the reliability of a technology or improve the performance of a design, it will help to shape the impression of the company in the market. Ads, technical publications, webinars and social media all play an important, if sometimes subtle, role. If increasing your marketing budget is not likely, make sure you're taking advantage of these best practices that don't cost much and can multiply the effectiveness of the funding you do have.