How Adobe Helped Silicon Labs Make the Transition to Digital-First Marketing

Silicon Labs is a global, “fab-less” semiconductor company. Historically, it focused on niche markets such as chips for TV tuners. Its customer base was small and tightly focused, so the company had little need for digital marketing. But when it undertook a strategic product shift to chips for the Internet of Things (IoT), industrial automation, consumer automation, and broader markets, the number of customers and prospects grew dramatically.

As Deirdre Walsh, director of marketing and communications for Silicon Labs, observed, “We went from a few hundred customers to more than 35,000 in a very short period. Many business processes changed. Perhaps the most important was implementing a digital-first marketing approach. We had to rethink marketing to support the entire customer journey and move our metrics and management from a high-level view to a more detailed and comprehensive view of our entire process.”

As a result, Silicon Labs undertook a three-step process to make the transition: develop a digital strategy, deliver basic web metrics, and then optimize the technology platforms to grow and scale. The company is currently at the third step—optimizing its digital-first marketing activities with a higher degree of personalization and improved customer experience.

For Silicon Labs, Adobe has become a critical partner supporting the transition to digital-first marketing and marketing optimization strategies. Silicon Labs now uses the following Adobe products: Adobe Analytics, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Target, and Marketo Engage. These solutions deliver many benefits, two of which especially stand out. The first is increased publishing speed. Before Adobe, marketing campaigns were hard-coded, and any changes had to be done by IT, a process that took days or weeks. Now it takes minutes, with the marketing team able to simply drag and drop content components into different campaigns. The second key benefit is on the brand side. With Adobe solutions, Silicon Labs can now tell much better visual stories. Its website used to be relatively bland; now it is visually engaging and a destination site for engineers.

Walsh elaborated on several other ways that Adobe has enabled Silicon Labs to enhance its marketing activities.

“With Experience Manager, we can now reuse content much more effectively, and any changes to one content piece ripple through to all instances of it,” she said. “We are using video more effectively by moving it from YouTube to our own site. And managing data is dramatically better. We used to live in ‘spreadsheet hell,’ but now we have one data platform that gives us everything we need.”

As a result, Silicon Labs’ marketers can offer more than just data; the team can now offer insights that support key initiatives. In one of these initiatives, marketing provides detailed segmentation to better engage the company’s diverse customer set. A good example: The company found that 89% of its low-value account segment was bypassing digital support and filing tickets directly. By improving site and support documentation, that percentage has been reduced to 9%.

Walsh offers the following tips for brands that want to succeed at digital-first marketing:

“First, make sure you are working closely with the C-suite and key players to showcase the benefits you are providing,” she said. “Marketing should market themselves! And keep a focus on the four Rs: reputation, revenue, relationships, and reach. Everyone understands those key issues.”

Adobe has enabled Silicon Labs’ marketing team to align with the major strategic change in its product line with successful digital-first marketing. With Adobe’s help, the team has moved from just providing services to becoming a strategic partner in optimizing the business.