Succeeding Today

ThomasNet: A Content Marketer’s Content Marketer

Using Content Marketing to Help their Customers Succeed

If you’re not immersed in the world of manufacturing, you may not have noticed the disappearance of the venerable Thomas Register. This green printed shelf-filling directory is now 100% online. The online version offers incredible functionality that far surpasses its late print predecessor. They consider it a ‘destination site’ where buyers come for the explicit purpose of finding the products they need and the vendors who can supply them. So far so good.

After their first year online, they faced an unexpected problem. Although ThomasNet drove lots of traffic to its customers’ websites, too many customers were cancelling their advertising. Here’s what they found:

Although they were sending thousands of highly qualified visitors to clients, that’s all these prospects were doing–visiting. They weren’t buying. Why?

The answer was deceptively simple. The majority of client websites weren’t designed to make it easy for visitors to become buyers. Because most of their clients were small to medium-sized businesses, they weren’t typically very web savvy. Nor did they have huge online budgets. Moreover, there was no proven model for success.

ThomasNet Teaches Advertisers How to Build Websites that Make it Easy to Buy

As soon as they understood the problem, ThomasNet got to work creating a solution. They conducted research about online B2B buying patterns to determine what elements are critical to a successful site. It turned out that real content is essential. Without it, visitors will make a brief stop, get frustrated by a lack of substance, leave, and then probably won’t return.

Alienating prospective buyers is potentially disastrous. Why? Because websites provide the overwhelming majority of information about potential suppliers and their products. Buyers don’t have time to gab with sales people anymore. They have very little leisure time at all. They are under the gun to deliver results now. So, your website needs to make their job easy. They have to know that you have what they need and that you are a company that they would like to buy from.

For ThomasNet, everything boiled down to a single question: “Does your website persuade visitors to become customers?”

If not, you lose. If yes, you have an excellent chance to succeed.

Fortunately for their advertisers, ThomasNet was able to develop a formula to guide the creation of websites that make it easy to buy. They call it VSET:

Verify that you offer the products they need – Does your website make it easy for potential customers to immediately determine whether you have what they are looking for?

Search for specific products – Can buyers search your website in
multiple ways (part number, keyword, or by product specifications)?

Evaluate your product offerings – Do you provide buyers with
enough detailed information so they can make a buying decision?
Can they compare products side-by-side? Or do you offer CAD
drawings for them to download, if applicable?

Take Action – Do you offer multiple ways for buyers to request more
information from you or buy from you, including: contact information,
RFQ links, your phone number on every page, or even e-commerce?

Advertisers who have built or rebuilt websites that follow the VSET methodology, have achieved dramatic increases in web-based sales.

For example, FlexProducts, a small plastics packaging company with $3.5 million in 2005 sales had never spent more than $5000 on promotion–all of it in the old Thomas Register. They saw a decline in the effectiveness of trade shows and were looking for alternatives. So they turned to ThomasNet for the creation of an online catalogue.

In less than 2 years the results were spectacular. Sales jumped to $10 million. 50% of those sales came from their new web catalogue. For FlexProducts it boiled down to having really useful, relevant content online. They were able to show not only what they stocked, but the kinds of custom products that they could produce.

The bottom-line: For ThomasNet and for FlexProducts, great content marketing has made all the difference.