The Thomas Blog

The Right Mix Of Social Media Content For Manufacturing Marketing

Social media allows industrial professionals another vehicle to connect with their existing client base and showcase their expertise while attracting new prospects. It has been playing an increasingly important role in today's digital transformation of sales and marketing.

Posting regularly on your social media platforms using the right hashtags helps to gain broader brand awareness. But to really get the most out of social media, you need to truly engage your audience.

Unless you stopped paying attention to how humans work when you were back in middle school, you know that talking about yourself nonstop is a terrible way to keep someone’s attention. Likewise, constantly promoting your products and bragging about solely your company is not a sound strategy for manufacturing marketing.

Proper social media marketing requires a commitment beyond the weekly Facebook post or the occasional Twitter retweet. You’ll need to maintain a constant stream of updates and, since you shouldn’t just be talking about your own company 24/7, let's discuss the mix of social media content that has been working for manufacturers and industrial companies.

The Last Phase Of Inbound Marketing: Keeping Your Customers Happy

Buyers often encounter different challenges every day, and each phase of the buying process has opportunities (using inbound marketing!) for suppliers like you to position yourself as the best partner. 

Inbound marketing is defined as the data-driven approach to marketing that attracts people to your brand, engages them, and converts them to lasting customers. The approach is multi-channel and accounts for where people are, and how they want to interact with you using the main driver of quality content. It allows you to bring visitors into your site through various forms of channels like blogs, email marketing, and social media.

Unfortunately, a lot of marketers don’t even consider this last element of inbound marketing after the sale is made. That phase — customer delight — is perhaps one of the most important of all.

4 Steps To Grow Your Social Media Networks

What now? If you’re like many other small business owners, that may be what you’ve been asking yourself after taking the first steps in a social media marketing plan: setting up your accounts, branding your pages, and creating and sharing content. There’s one important element missing: building your network.

And you’ve probably even begun that process and connected with existing customers who had also taken the plunge, big OEMs with hundreds of thousands of followers, maybe some friends and family, perhaps even a celebrity or two (depending on who’s in charge of your accounts). From everything you’ve heard about social media, there must be more to it. So, what now?

Inbound Marketing Case Study: How One Manufacturer Increased Leads by 285%

If you were to ask any business leader what their main goals for their company are, the answer would most likely be something along the lines of increasing sales and leads. In fact, even if they mentioned other goals, such as improving website performance and SEO, or redesigning a website for better user experience — the main objective behind these actions is to get more people onto the site, ideally leading to more sales.

For Corrugated Metals, Inc., these were the goals in a nutshell. But as with many companies in the industrial space, carving out time to improve their online footprint was a daunting task. As a roll forming manufacturer creating necessary products for the construction, equipment, transportation, and defense industries, focusing on customer needs usually trumped their own business development.

6 Social Selling Tips: For Sellers In Manufacturing

Facebook? Check. Twitter? Check. LinkedIn? Check.

If you’ve already put in the work of building out profiles on these major social media platforms and have gained some followers, you’re off to a great start. But even more important than gaining followers, of course, is gaining customers — and simply having a social media presence isn’t enough to reliably convert connections into leads.

Below, we’ve outlined six tips to remember when developing and optimizing your social media marketing strategy. These tips will help you to better leverage your professional online brand to create more relationships with buyers through social media interactions — the process known as social selling. Here's how you can keep your social selling on point.

Opportunities For Business Growth During The Summer Slowdown

Every year, thousands of manufacturers around the country shut down their plants and facilities for a few weeks in the summer. They do so for a variety of reasons — to allow for vacation time, to take care of deferred maintenance, or to retool for the second half of the year.

While these activities are certainly important, too many manufacturing companies let the summer slowdown distract them from one of the most important activities of all — generating new business.

8 Wordpress SEO Plugins To Optimize Your Website

Search engines are a major source of website traffic — 93% of all internet experiences start with a search engine. So it makes sense that many manufacturers are stepping up their online presence by using Wordpress for their website and implementing smart SEO to get their website found.

If you think about your own behavior when you type in some keywords or key phrases, you probably click on one of the first few results on the page. If you’re serious about having your business' website make it to the top spot on Google, make SEO one of your priorities. In fact last year, 61% of companies listed growing SEO as their biggest priority. Luckily, you don’t need to be an SEO expert to begin.The following list of plugin recommendations can help improve SEO on your Wordpress website.

The Basics Of Instagram For Manufacturers

When it comes to content marketing, social media plays an undeniably huge role in how businesses manage their online interactions with consumers and partners. You’re likely already familiar with the “Big Three” social media channels — Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. 

These networks are just the tip of the digital iceberg; the social media landscape is vast and teeming with a wide variety of platforms. In order to master your social media game, it’s important to understand these networks and how they can be utilized.

One of the most popular social media networks is Instagram. Synonymous with ethereal, nostalgic filters, and heavily edited photographs, this image-based platform might not seem like an obvious choice for an industrial social media marketing strategy. However, with its high popularity and excellent engagement rate, integrating Instagram into your social media marketing strategy is definitely worth considering.

Top 3 Pitfalls for Industrial Sellers

Over time, sellers learn that not all customers are created equal, and some customers are more difficult to sell to than others.

That's because the industry is evolving and the buyer’s journey of an industrial customer is changing along with it. As an industrial business, how are you managing these changes — are you keeping up internally, or are you facing roadblocks when it comes to connecting with the right buyers and closing your sales?

In this post, we discuss three common pitfalls industrial sellers experience, important things to remember about the industrial buying and selling process, and how to make sure you're on the right track to closing those deals.