How Thomas Routes Business To You

Thomas connects industrial buyers with sellers.

Thomas is able to drive QUALITY traffic your company with pinpoint keyword and geographic accuracy at the precise moment decision-makers are searching for a new supplier!   

No other company or medium has such a comprehensive and diversified means for routing new customers to your business.

Our President, Eileen Markowitzis right on target when she states:  QUOTE “As a result of communicating regularly and directly with both our users and customers, we realized a need for a single, state-of-the-art online solution for all of their purchasing and marketing needs; ThomasNet.com has been designed to meet the ever-evolving needs of the market we serve, and improves and facilitates the way industry does business.”  End quote.  

We continue to capture and drive significant numbers of new customers to our clients on an ongoing basis in so many ways that there are too many ways to mention all our marketing and advertising methods on this CD-ROM, but the following is a good overview.

The Internet has accelerated our abilities to connect industrial decision-makers with industrial suppliers with greater accuracy and faster than any other time in history. 

www.ThomasNet.com is now an industrial search engine as well as an internet directory specifically designed for the industrial market.

www.ThomasGlobal.com is the largest and most used international online directory.  We have the ability to translate your ThomasNet listings into 8 other languages and market them in 23 foriegn countries!

The Thomas Industrial Newsroom http://news.thomasnet.com/ is the largest supplier of online industrial news.  This is a daily, online industrial new products newspaper serving decision-makers looking for news on new products and services.  Our news is found on hundreds of sites on the internet including: Google News, Yahoo News, AltaVista News, Dow Jones, Topix.net, MSN News,  Verdex, Factiva, Lexis Nexis, IEN Online, Managing Automation, Custom Source,  many Thomas sites, and to many other sites to mention here. 

In addition, if you are a client who is introducing a new product, we have a product information Newsroom on the ThomasNet website; which is the perfect entry point for furthering your company’s name recognition associated with your new product offering.

Thomas is the largest publisher of daily industrial new product and service news on the web.  With 450,000 average monthly site visits, 800,000 average monthly total page views, 45,000 average monthly clicks to manufacturers’ sites, 10,000 average monthly clicks to ThomasNet Company profile pages.  

In addition we deliver product news directly to the desktop of the industrial decision-makers through product news e-Alert newsletters and Really Simple Syndication news feeds. Our users choose their categories of interest, the frequency, and the format that meets their needs.

With ThomasNet.com being a destination industrial website also has the tremendous advantage of being a solution for regional coverage.  With the ability on the ThomasNet.com site to narrow a search geographically by region and/or a chosen mile radius from a zip code, many regional industrial suppliers will get a solid return on investment on ThomasNet.com.  

Being an industrial directory and search engine hybrid, we have many innate advantages for achieving top rankings on the top search engines. Our knowledge of how search engines index combined with our website size, the high number of quality links to industrial websites, the number of people linking to and visiting our site, the number of keywords in our web pages that match any industrial search, and the fact that we have substantial quality content uploads on an ongoing basis all combine to make us a Giant in top positioning on the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Excite and others for industrial searches.

This shows how valuable we are as a sourcing tool and how significant our Thomas brand name recognition is; if you don’t have a Thomas program you are out of the decision-making process with these quality decision-makers before it even begins.  

We are continually implementing additional marketing initiatives on the top search engines, on a mass scale, in order to obtain top ranking in both the natural indexed results and as sponsored links for industrial keywords.

Simply put, because we own search engine technology we have the search engine expertise and we spend the time and efforts to maintain prominent exposure on the search engines so you don’t have to.  

Even if you wanted to tackle SEO yourself it is very difficult to compete with Thomas and other associations or organizations due to the advantages just mentioned.  Also, you can spend a lot of time and money optimizing your website and then the search engines can change their algorithms, this happens and it happens often.

In addition, when you start to analyze the cost for optimizing each keyword and keyword phrase it quickly becomes very cost prohibitive to cover your target market.  Especially when you take into consideration that search engines look at upper case different than lower case, they look at plurals different than singular keywords, and one of the biggest issues is that most decision-makers don’t type in generic search terms… research has found that buyers and specifiers type in detailed search strings to find what they are looking for, and when you start calculating two, three and four or more word search strings to optimize for you will quickly and easily understand the magnitude and costs associated with this.  

ThomasNet has the existing market share and ongoing efforts detailed in this summary that will route you quality customers.  Also, if you want to optimize starting with a solid Thomas program is by far you’re best starting point for our links from ThomasNet.com will tie your product/service pages into a community of websites directly related to the product/service keywords you are trying to optimize for!! 

Our new Catalog Navigator and website design product offerings are a perfect foundation for supplying your content in a search engine AND user friendly format.  Therefore in addition to helping you drive quality keyword traffic you will also convert more traffic as into customers.  Because ThomasNet has search engine functionality we want to help our client’s achieve performance excellence in these areas.   

We have Catalog Navigator products for every industrial company ranging from custom manufacturers to suppliers of semi-custom or stock products to distributor programs that will impress you in every aspect.  In addition, the number of inbound quality links and being tied to a community of websites relating to your keyword supplying capabilities are major factors in SEO and therefore  Thomas’s content based link package is the fastest and easiest way to dramatically improve your page rank and link popularity scores. 

To tackle sponsored links otherwise known as pay-per-click on your own is also a management and expertise nightmare.  Not only do bidding wars change the prices on hourly and sometimes even a minute by minute bases but you can blow through an entire year’s budget in no time at all with out proper management.  Even with expert management controlling your exposure, once your monthly budget is used you would be taken down from the sponsored link area and have no exposure for a significant time period each month and possibly even each day at certain times.  A program with ThomasNet you are always there and you can lock in your position for a quarterly basis no matter how many users we drive to your website. 

Another fact is that according to the experts such as Google themselves, over three quarters of search engine users skip past the sponsored links and go directly to the natural organic results.  

In addition, you are paying each time someone clicks on your link, which would mean sales people trying to sell you something, competitors, people just surfing the web not looking to buy anything, et cetera.  

We cannot promise that we will always be high ranking on each of the top search engines for every client’s keywords throughout each minute of each day, for we don’t control the search engines indexing and often changing criteria and as just mentioned sponsored links are constantly changing and taken off line once a certain number of click throughs occur even with expert management.   However, we can tell you that we are dominant on the search engines in both the organic and sponsored link areas for the industrial market.  

Because we are the go-to site for industry, due to our condensed database of suppliers without all the additional useless information that the search engines index in a search, we are continually capturing new decision-makers from a tremendous number of industrial terms.  Therefore even if we capture someone looking for other products or services than what you offer, when they are looking for a new supplier in your industry they will come back to ThomasNet due to the efficiency of our site to solve their needs.

Every time you see a link to ThomasNet or a ThomasDirectory site that is us.  There are also a lot of portals which users wouldn’t even know are us unless they asked our marketing department, for we are constantly initiating internet initiatives to drive additional quality traffic to our clients, most using the Thomas brand name recognition, but many times not using it.  A perfect example of this is www.asme.org (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) uses the ThomasNet database for all company & product/service searches!  If you sell to Mechanical Engineers it is essential that you are listed in ThomasNet!

Our CAD Register.com website continues to break new records of usage. Our offline infrastructure is in place through controlled circulation CD ROMs. In order to receive a copy of the CAD software CD ROM’s an individual must be a key decision-maker and must REQUEST a copy EACH year.  We have also partnered with CAD systems like Pro-Engineer, which has usage over 300,000.  We make your drawings compatible with every CAD System.

If your company relies on getting your CAD drawings to be bought or specified, our CAD Drawing content management software tools such as PartSpec, PlantSpec and CAD Blocks are used as buying and specifying tools for key decision-makers in specific market shares such as design engineers, plant designers, architects and other buying and specifying personnel. Many of these key decision-makers don’t take phone calls or set meetings with sales reps instead once they have a need they use our tools to quickly and easily identify new suppliers and direct-insert our client’s CAD Drawings into their specs.   In addition, these products not only drive traffic they help convert traffic into customers by updating the bill of materials spec’ing in our clients as the supplier.  If you are not a client you have no chance of being selected from decision-makers in these controlled market shares that use our tools to do their jobs.

Thomas is the only company that can get you in front of Thomas’s national and regional print directories and CD/ROMs market shares.  A lot of people have migrated to the internet, but our offline regional circulations, distributed by request only and only to personnel with decision-making job titles, are still widely used!  Many decision makers such as maintenance and engineers like using the books, for at times it is faster and easier than going on line for certain users. We built the industrial library in print; we are the phone book for industry.  Thomas would like to save the time and expense of compiling, printing and distributing the books and be solely an internet operation, but we choose not to because we would be doing a tremendous disservice to both our clients and our users! If print was dead, nobody would be requesting our books.

We have hundreds of reps educating industrial companies across the country on a daily basis.  Information includes but is not limited to ThomasNet.com, CADRegister.com, our many Print and software product offerings, website design, website tracking and much more.   Our expert internet consultant Thomas representatives push usage of ThomasNet and our other product offerings to the industrial market in an unparalleled way.

We have booths at the major industrial trade shows, such as the International Manufacturing Trade Show.

We hold internet marketing seminars and website seminars on a regular basis.

We route off line and online users through ongoing press releases and advertisements in target areas for example news portals and trade publications such as:

• Inside Supply Management, which targets manufacturing and services, government, institutions, and more.
• SupplyDemand-Chain Executive, which targets manufacturing, transportation, logistics, industrial and consumer goods, food, computer, electronics, automotive, business services, healthcare, chemicals, and distribution.
• Plant Engineering, the problem-solving resource for plant engineers, which targets general management, engineering, maintenance, supervisory personnel, plant engineering, maintenance functions and more.
• Industry Weeek.com, which targets all types of key decision-makers in manufacturing.
• Industrial Equipment News, which targets all types of key decision-makers in manufacturing.
• Inbound Logistics, which targets corporate management, logistics, distribution, production, operations, customer service, inventory management and more.

There are many more trade publications, but these are enough to prove the point that Thomas is everywhere you would like to be but can’t afford to be because of budgetary or other considerations.  Why pay thousands of dollars in shrinking magazine market shares, where your ads have to hit your prospect at the exact moment your prospect needs your product when you can have Thomas as a 24/7 industrial reference resource route decision makers to you at the exact moment they are searching for your product? 

In addition we implement ongoing promotions such as raffling off a ThomasNet Chopper and sponsoring 30-second commercials on the Jumbotron screens during many NASCAR events. 

• We run radio spots on ESPN Radio and other stations. 
• We run online advertising on major news and business portals.  By advertising on Lycos, Excite and CNN.com we are sending the powerful message that ThomasNet.com is the Industrial Internet.
• Thomas’s online advertising efforts include banner ads that aim to further brand name recognition and drive qualified users to ThomasNet.com.
• In addition to all of the above, we are in almost every library, most consulates and a tremendous number of government agencies across the country.
• We are regularly implementing direct email campaigns, and direct printed mail campaigns, and much more.

In conclusion, ThomasNet owns search engine technology and we implement ongoing mass marketing initiatives all over the Internet and offline as well.  We are the most used destination industrial website in the world.  We have the largest online industrial newsroom on the internet. We have many controlled circulations such as PartSpec, PlantSpec, CAD Blocks, and all our CD-ROM and Print circulations that will get you in front of quality decision-makers at the exact moment they are seeking a new supplier.

You can target your exact supplying capabilities with pinpoint keyword and geographic accuracy so no marketing or advertising investment is wasted. 

Picture us as a top lead generator or sales person for your company that is usually a fraction of the cost of such a person and there are no employee issues. 

Without a Thomas program you have no chance of receiving the business from our resources.  Your Thomas representative will thoroughly research and only if merited suggest a custom-fit turnkey solution.

If you haven’t taken a new look at Thomas in 2006, please at least review with your Thomas rep how we might help you achieve performance excellence in driving and converting quality traffic into customers.  This way you can make an educated decision on staying at the cutting edge of growing your business, which is critical at this moment in the industrial industry.

We will provide you with a comprehensive Internet Audit - Just going through the free evaluation process will help you clearly identify your Internet Goals.  Partnering with us will help you achieve performance excellence with attaining your sales & website goals!

Thank you.