CHALLENGE: raise the profile, drive sales

Formed in 1998, Micrium was a small, private embedded software company. The company had a solid base of customers but wanted to grow, meaning it needed to position itself effectively against competitors and broaden its visibility within the industry. After an initial short-term engagement, Micrium came to Impress Labs (now Kiterocket) in 2014 to engage on a long-term basis to raise its profile, drive sales and enter the Internet of Things (IoT) space with an eye on the potential for acquisition in an increasingly consolidated industry.

SERVICES

Brand Strategy
Public Relations
Digital Marketing and Content

Client

Strategy: Traditional PR + Digital Marketing

Our approach for Micrium was to plan and implement a wide-ranging communications plan, relying on tried-and-true tactics such as public relations, speaking opportunities, tradeshow exhibitions and pitching publications for coverage. In addition, we engaged a wide range of digital marketing activities, including direct marketing campaigns, search engine optimization, landing pages, blogs, AdWords campaigns and social media.

Important to our strategy was positioning key personnel within Micrium. Founder Jean Labrosse “wrote the book” on real-time operating systems (RTOS), making him a valued industry expert. By keeping him in the field offering training session and conference presentations, we were able to leverage his recognition to amplify our messages and product awareness. At the same time, Vice President Christian Légaré was quickly becoming recognizable in the IoT space.

We positioned him as the expert in embedded systems and protocols for IoT. For both, we leveraged their personal social media profiles in addition to the corporate one.

Finally, content, content, content! We consistently reached out to customers via newsletters and targeted mailings. To support that outreach, we developed a vast library of content and started a corporate blog. We published contributed articles on a consistent basis, targeting both traditional embedded markets and IoT. By supplementing these activities with one or two press releases each quarter, we were successful in achieving a solid mix of coverage types and securing a high volume of placed media.

Results: Acquisition Success

Two major milestones demonstrated the success of our activities. In 2015, Micrium’s RTOS kernels were acknowledged in a leading independent study to be the most-used in the industry. Securing that result gave the company a huge talking point and also documented the company’s leadership claims. The second milestone was the company’s acquisition in the fall of 2016.

15%

website traffic increase

8X

social media growth

2016

company acquired