The Thomas Blog

What Can B2B Industrial Marketers Learn From B2C Marketers?

When it comes to marketing, many manufacturers put themselves in a very narrow box, focusing on niche messaging — and niche strategies — to get the job done. As a result, you can end up looking, sounding, and acting a lot like your competitors. 

Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is designed for a complex process of consideration and comparison way of communication, often with heavy emphasis on cost or time-savings and efficiency — which makes sense since these products and services are often more expensive with longer purchasing cycles than those sold directly to consumers. Business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, on the other hand, has greater flexibility to be light, creative, and even play to consumers’ emotions rather than pure logic.

Challenges And Opportunities In The Aerospace Industry

The aerospace and defense industry is a major source of innovation and technological advancements. It plays a critical role in national defense, enables safe and efficient air travel, increases communication and the dissemination of knowledge, and contributes to increased consumerism and the globalization of supply chains.

Since the Wright Brothers' first powered flight in 1903, the aerospace industry has had an enviable record of achievement. From transforming modern transportations to landing a man on the Moon — it's no surprise the American aerospace industry's positive track record and strength makes it one of the largest contributors of employment in manufacturing. So what are some of the challenges this group faces?

PPC For Manufacturing: What Is Paid Search?

PPC (Pay-Per-Click advertising) is an amazing tool for reaching customers online. It acts as a pull marketing technique that brings customers to you based on their searches and it's a win-win when executed properly. Through PPC, advertisers pay only when a user clicks on their ad; these clicks increase site traffic and, ultimately, also increase the chances of converting these leads into buyers. Unlike outbound marketing, which involves pushing your message out to potential customers, PPC is inherently inbound, since it brings potential customers in.

However, there are a lot of misconceptions about what PPC is, and maybe more importantly, what PPC isn't. Let's clear some faulty understandings that should be helpful when before beginning your first PPC campaign.

New Suppliers on Thomasnet.com for September 2019

With a continuously growing number of over 500,000 detailed profiles across 70,000 categories of products and services, we provide actionable information on a wide variety of companies for your sourcing needs, including on the top suppliers of each field. In this look behind the scenes series, we bring you some of our most interesting new suppliers across the Thomasnet.com platform who have been added over the last month. 

New and Noteworthy Categories on Thomasnet.com for September 2019

As North America's leading industrial sourcing platform, we love sharing how Thomas works from behind the scenes. Ever wonder how we achieved our 70,000 sourcing categories, from Alloy to Zinc? Each month, our 20+ expert supplier analyst team identifies manufacturing trends and business needs from our buyers, and create new categories to help make industrial sourcing easy. Here's a list of our latest new sourcing categories from across the platform, from Charpy impact testing to modified shipping containers. 

7 Marketing Mistakes That Manufacturers Make Over And Over Again

After all of the time and resources you’ve invested into your digital marketing engine, you wouldn’t just walk away from the progress you’ve made, would you?

Common mistakes can derail months and even years of hard work. In many cases, the biggest risk is doing nothing at all — no more new content, not following up on industry trends, and not performing due diligence. Unfortunately, we see many companies making the same mistakes over and over again and it can cost them leads, customers, and a lot of revenue.

Here are common manufacturing marketing mistakes you should avoid:

5 Things Every Product Manufacturer Must Know To Drive Leads

According to Forrester Research, rich omni-channel experiences deliver several competitive advantages for B2B businesses and manufacturers — especially those with complex products. A multi-channel experience is about providing more options while omni-channel supply chains serve customers across different channels and are fully integrated in order to provide a seamless customer experience.

Engineers and sourcing professionals rely on comprehensive, digitized product data in order to do their jobs. They need accurate data, and they need it fast. But some manufacturers are challenged with meeting the needs of B2B buyers and delivering a seamless customer experience. 

We’ve listed out five things all OEMs and industrial manufacturers must know to generate more leads, satisfy customers' needs and increase sales.

Are You Creating Quality Content?

Content marketing for manufacturing companies is a critical element to any lead generation strategy. When done right, it builds your brand image and creates a stronger relationship between you and your customer. But the last thing you want to do is crank out blog posts, eBooks, or other resources that won't be effective — it will not only waste your time, but it'll turn your prospective customers away.

So whenever you're producing content that is aimed to help drive in buyers and engineers to learn more about your company's products and services, ask yourself these key questions below and see if it passes the quality test.

Top Suppliers on Thomasnet.com for September 2019

With over 900,000 registered users (and growing!) on Thomasnet, we help a lot of businesses find the products and services they need. And as one of North America's top industrial sourcing platforms, we love to share sourcing insights from behind the scenes. Although we already provide information on the top suppliers in many of our categories in the Thomas guides, we're also here to share our info on the most popular suppliers across all categories. Here’s the rundown on our most popular suppliers across the platform by engagement metrics for the past month, who run the gamut from conservation product suppliers to injection molding services.