The Thomas Blog

Don’t Play Hide and Seek With Buyers: The B2B Buying Cycle, Part 2

How do you search for information when you already have a general idea of what you need? Often, you go right to a niche source rather than conducting a web search. For example, if you’re looking for a book, you head to Amazon. Need yesterday’s basketball scores? Right to ESPN.com. Many industrial buyers get started the same way.

Impacting Prospects Before the Sales Funnel: The B2B Buying Cycle, Part 1

Last week, we took a bird’s-eye view of the entire B2B buying cycle, and how you can impact each stage of it. Over the next several weeks, we’re going to zoom in on each step of the way to a sale, and take a closer look at the strategies that can work best for you in reaching buyers.

Impact Your Prospects at Every Stage of the Buying Cycle

Content marketing is a great tool for reaching your prospects at every stage of the buying cycle — it’s a benefit we’ve revisited time and again.

This week, let’s take a closer look at that B2B industrial buying cycle — and the marketing tools that are best suited to making an impression at each step of the way.

Six Reasons You Need Responsive Design On Your Website

We talked a few weeks ago about some first steps toward optimizing your website for mobile devices — and responsive design is a great start. Need a refresher? Think of responsive design this way: imagine if movies were only available in the original dimensions they played in at the theater. Whether you later watched it on the flatscreen in your living room, a smaller set in your bedroom, or on your iPad, it only came in that one, giant size.

5 Organization Tools to Clean Up Your Marketing Strategy

Can you think of a brand where their marketing strategy doesn’t always seem like it’s on the same page — where it seems like throwing darts to see what hits? For me, the Geico commercials come to mind: there are the ones with the gecko. The ones with the banjo players. And let’s not forget “Hump Day.” They’re memorable ads, and no doubt effective — why else would Geico keep rolling them out? — but does this sort of “purposely disorganized” messaging work for every company?

Marketing on the Move: 4 Ways to Optimize Your Mobile Strategy

Are you still unsure if you need a mobile strategy?

Let’s look at some numbers: 91% of all American adults own a cell phone, and 55% have a smartphone. 63% of U.S. smartphone users use their device to access the internet – and 34% of them get online primarily via mobile. Worldwide? There are 1.2 billion people getting online through their phones. And if you thought the first digital revolution happened quickly, buckle up: mobile web adoption is occurring eight times faster.

5 Ways to Dig For Content When You’re Stuck

Yesterday morning, I walked past a truck driver stuck in some snow.

I didn’t want to get too close, because he was really having a hard time getting out and looked a bit out of control: wheels spinning, back end fishtailing, not making any headway. Luckily, he had a coworker with a shovel helping to dig him out and get unstuck. It can be easy to get stuck with our content creation in these early months of the year, too. Business has yet to pick up, news is slow, and we’re in danger of just spinning our wheels with uninteresting, uninspired content.

How can you dig yourself out?

5 Ways for Industrial SMB Owners to Make Time for Marketing

“Really work morning to night. Think about it in your sleep. Seven days a week. No breaks.” Those are Elon Musk’s (Tesla CEO and real-life Iron Man) words of advice to budding entrepreneurs — but, as you probably know, they apply to just about every small business owner, regardless of your company’s age.

With the day-to-day grind of making sales, fulfilling orders, and generally keeping the lights on, who has time for sleep, let alone marketing?

What Are Your 2014 Marketing Resolutions?

It’s that time of year again: holidays are over, and it’s time to focus on what’s ahead. In all honesty, we’re not huge fans of resolutions here — we think any time is a good time to change for the better.

Let’s take a look at some of the most common (and quickly-forgotten) resolutions — and how you can use them to prime your marketing plan for success throughout the whole year.