The Thomas Blog

Meet Manufacturer's Best Friends

At Thomas, we have a special place in our hearts for our furry friends and love to celebrate them on our new Instagram account, @manufacturersbestfriend. Below you'll meet some of the industry pets you'll see on our feed: 

How To Get People To Read Your Sales Emails (And What Not To Do)

It's no secret that email marketing is one of the best ways to drive leads to your sales team. However, most manufacturers and industrial companies don't realize that it's also one of the best ways to close those leads and convert them into customers.

So while a lot of time and energy is going into optimizing marketing emails, sales emails are often relegated to an afterthought. In fact, the task of writing, designing, and deploying sales emails often falls on individual sales reps, who have little guidance, direction, or support. That's a recipe for disaster, and it shouldn't be the case.

If you want to optimize your sales emails for maximum results, be sure to follow these suggestions. 

New and Noteworthy Categories on Thomasnet.com for September 2020

Most of the 1 million+ registered users on Thomasnet.com may not realize all of the new categories we add every month, from basic products like immersion coil heat exchangers to more exotic offerings like AI marine vessel monitoring systems and washable paper backpacks. Over the past month alone, we've seamlessly added over 50 new categories to our platform, and today we're giving you a peek at our 15 favorites.

How To Measure B2B Marketing Success

Measuring the return on investment for marketing is challenging in even the best cases. Many industrial marketers mistake commonly used online B2C metrics for effective measures of their efforts. But marketing effectiveness can affect business outcomes like revenue growth and customer retention — so with so many variables and items to test, how can industrial marketers measure the success of their marketing campaigns?

New Suppliers on Thomasnet.com for September 2020

When organizations like NASA, Tyson, ThermoFisher Scientific, Harvard, Ford, and Honeywell source on our platform, it's because they know we maintain a database of the newest, best, and brightest companies in North American Industry. Part of upholding that standard includes adding new and exciting companies every month to ensure we can supply the contact info for any supplier a B2B company may need.

This past month we've added over 400 new businesses to our database of over 500,000, including rapid COVID-19 test suppliers, IoT lighting system manufacturers, and autonomous robot companies. We're delving into the details on these and several of our other favorite companies below.

Meeting The Needs Of Your Buyers: Blog vs eBook

To effectively reach buyers and generate valuable leads, it’s critical to employ a dynamic, multifaceted digital marketing strategy — and that means creating a robust content marketing campaign.

Content marketing is a crucial tool for collecting valuable user details. It is a means of trading information; users provide data — their business, goals, their contact information — and in exchange, you provide insights and actionable advice in checklists, educational eBooks, or in-depth whitepapers.

Backlinks 101: For Manufacturers & Distributors

You’ve worked hard to build an online presence but now, as you’re trying to increase the quality of traffic to your website, you keep coming across the term “backlink.” Raise your hand if you’ve tried to ignore the term, what it means for your website, and focused on other SEO traffic-building tactics.

No shame! Some of the best marketers have been there before.

The Role Of Color Theory In Marketing

The concept of "color theory" is not new. In fact, the term first appeared in the writings of Leone Battista Alberti and the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci way back in the 1400s. 

Today, color theory is still prominently taught in disciplines like art and science. However, marketers can certainly benefit from learning about it as well. After all, no matter what industry you are in, colors can define your brand, influence your audience, and prompt people to take action. 

Why It's Important To Know Your Audience: The Key Role Of Buyer Personas

Imagine a trade school instructor working with a brand-new class of students and jumping right into the finer points of programming a 5-axis CNC machine. Or a presenter at an executive seminar who just goes over the basic concept of a balance sheet. Neither one would make much of an impact on the audience, and it is likely the presentation would only be memorable for the worst of reasons.

Both the instructor and presenter failed because they didn’t know their audience, and therefore couldn’t address the audience’s needs.