Thomas has been connecting industrial buyers and suppliers for more than 125 years. The Industrial Icons blog series celebrates the longtime customers who have grown their businesses with Thomas and the marketing and advertising solutions that have evolved along with them over the years.
American Crane & Equipment Corporation has been manufacturing cranes, hoists, and other specialty lifting equipment for more than 50 years. For generations, the family-owned business has served industries where trust is paramount and there is no room for mistakes, including aerospace, automotive, chemical, and nuclear. Senior Marketing Leader Michele Downie discusses how ACECO’s partnership with Thomas has helped the company with everything from recruiting to launching its Shopify store.
American Crane has been advertising with Thomas since the 1990s. In June of 2018, I started at American Crane and was in charge of our marketing department — at that time, it was just me. I was the only marketing person, but I was told, “We have this wonderful team of people that help us from a company called Thomas, and they are like my team.” Not only did [Thomas] help bring my ideas and strategies to fruition, but they also helped me form better strategies. It was just a really good learning experience at the beginning, and as I've grown in my role, so has our relationship.
We’re currently working on a major initiative to build a brand-new Shopify store, and the Thomas team will provide a lot of backend support to get it to the finish line. We're really excited about it. My team actually designed the user experience, including what the store will look like and how it will function, working with our parts group to make their vision a reality.
We’re running a lot of paid ads around our products as we transition to the new store, and we also have paid ads to support our HR recruitment initiatives. We have had non-stop applications for most of our open positions. We’ve put a hold on billboard advertising, which costs thousands of dollars a month, because we're getting so many applicants for these positions from the paid ads.
We're also doing a lot of foundational auditing of the base systems that are working with all of our marketing systems. It’s not always the most visible work, but it’s essential. And the Thomas team is great at just getting it done. They've been working on auditing our downloadable resources, the traffic they’re getting, and what we could be doing differently, and updating the forms so they're functioning better. There's always going to be ebb and flow depending on what's happening with us as a company, what's happening out in the world, and how much bandwidth we have. The Thomas team has taken on some things that we just don't have the bandwidth for — the Thomas team truly operates as an extension of our internal team. So we have our people here, and we have the Thomas team, and together we are making all this happen.
"The Thomas team truly operates as an extension of our internal team."
-Michele Downie, senior marketing leader, American Crane
I've learned that you don't know what you don't know, and Thomas provides the support to try things out, talk through ideas, and hear pros and cons from someone who knows more than you about specific topics. I focus on strategy and the high-level vision of what I want to happen, but I'm not necessarily the minutiae person who knows all the details and the best ways to make it happen. So I rely on the Thomas team for that.
We are seeing a trend toward a lot more visual content — little bites, little reels, and smaller chunks of videos instead of longer full-length videos. And we’re also seeing that mobile use, rather than desktop, is the primary way we are engaging with people. So we’re making sure the mobile versions of whatever we're doing are working and are optimized.
People are leaning into AI, and I think we all use it a little bit differently, and we're always learning best practices. We produce a podcast called Always Lifting, and we had Chad Harvey on as a guest to talk about how to separate tech fads from true strategic value. I think it's important for people to realize that AI isn't going anywhere, and we have to think about adopting it in the ways that make sense for us.
Considering the current executive orders on nuclear and pushing nuclear energy, I see a lot of really amazing things happening in that industry. I attend the Women in Nuclear event every year and it's amazing to see the innovation happening in that industry and how that affects us — we service more than 40% of the nation's nuclear facilities. I also see a lot of advancements with semiconductors, and there's a lot of things happening in aerospace as well right now.
There’s a lot of rapid change ahead, and the future is already taking shape. You have to be ready to pivot and flex and expand your thinking and realize that there are lots of other ideas out there, and yours isn't the only one. That's why collaboration is vital to success – you get a lot more bandwidth and a lot more ideas out of it than you would have had before.