The Thomas Blog

The Best Online Marketing Courses to Boost Your Marketing Skills

B2B marketing evolves at a breakneck pace; with new trends, innovations, and technologies being developed every day, staying ahead of the curve can seem challenging. But keeping your marketing skills sharp and your know-how current is essential for remaining relevant among the competition.

This doesn’t mean you need to start making your own memes or communicating solely through emojis. Or that you need start using strange millennial slang in your content marketing. But it does mean you should be thinking about ways to hone your skills and increase your leads — which may even mean advancing your career at the same time.

Online marketing courses allow professionals to hone their skills on their own schedule, at their own pace, and can be hugely useful in gaining new leads. Below are five of the most popular online courses available.

3 Proven Tips To Source Packaging Materials

No matter what type of business you run or what industry you are in, chances are that you will need to source packaging materials at some point. 

Packaging requirements vary widely, and so do the solutions in the marketplace. For example, simple shipping needs can be addressed with off-the-shelf corrugated boxes, while custom-designed, die-cut folding packaging material may be necessary to withstand volatile shipping environments.

Whatever your packaging needs are, it helps to understand your options. Let’s take a look at three areas of sourcing flexibility to find best performance, price, and supplier.

Setting Yourself Up For Social Media Success

The world of social media has changed tremendously in the past decade. From Facebook toTwitter, these social networks were originally designed as a place for users to connect with family and friends. Now these platforms are a venue for brands to reach their users and potential customers.

There are many great ways to reach your audience through social media. Here are a few tips to ensure your strategy is on the right track.

How To Create Buyer Personas For Industrial Marketing Campaigns

The whole point of inbound marketing is to entice your target customers to come to you on their own accord, and you do this by providing valuable, directly helpful content that will help them reach their goals. Think of it as the antithesis of cold calling. But how do you go about creating the content that will attract the customers you want? Well, that depends on the customers themselves.

How To Outperform Competitors Using Your Product Information

Everyone knows we live in the Information Age, but how useful is it if the information never reaches the right people? This is especially true for manufacturers and their quest to get product information to the appropriate audience.

Why Organic Search Alone Won't Cut It For Your Marketing Strategy

Let’s say a manufacturing firm needs a new supplier. One of the first places they’ll go is the Internet. They enter some keywords, and Google or another search engine returns a list of results; this is an organic search. 

How Much Are Buyers Spending On New Suppliers?

A lot goes into generating industrial sales — great emails, valuable content, an optimized website, and a commitment to staying ahead of the latest trends — just for starters.

An Introduction To Account Based Marketing

Have you heard about the latest trend in B2B marketing, the new approach all the cool kids in the industry are talking about?

Account Based Marketing, or ABM, is an approach to marketing that concentrates sales and marketing resources on a specific set of targeted accounts.

The idea is to clearly define the clients you want, then launch campaigns tailor-made for each of them rather than going broad.

The State Of Manufacturing Reshoring Today

Over the past several years, many U.S. manufacturers have moved operations offshore in order to reduce labor costs and bring jobs closer to their raw material sources. Although this can be an efficient way of increasing profits, it does come with its drawbacks — more complex supply chains, delivery issues, culture and language barriers, and long distances to operations, to name a few, making it hard to keep track of jobs and quickly address issues as they arise.