Where would industrial suppliers be without ThomasNet? Read below to see how ThomasNet is the simple marketing solution to putting you in front of your buyers. Want proof? Sometimes it’s no so easy, but it’s certainly not worth you missing large orders of the magnitude of 300,000 pieces! Luckily ThomasNet is there to help you determine the Return on Investment from your Internet marketing & SEO programs.
Marketing 101: Be Where Buyers Look for Your Products. Here is a quick demonstration of this philosophy at work followed by a re-visit to our old friend ROI.
Using the free advanced tracking programs from ThomasNet is the cornerstone to any marketing program and we’re here to help you make sense of the numbers. Most people don’t really know what all this reporting means. BUT, we see numbers and we are comfortable with numbers so we place value on what we see because 10 is more than 1 and 1,000 is more than 100. But where will the next SALE come from and where did the last SALE come from (note: the true measure of ROI is in evaluating sales and not “leads”)
The day before I met with this client they got a lead for 300,000 welding studs for Ford Motor Co. We want to use Webtrax to identify where that lead came from.
Measuring ROI
Marketing stats and conventional wisdom would give a search engine like Google the credit for the order because they generate the most raw traffic. But, the reality is that the quote came from a company that found them on ThomasNet and only spent 31 seconds on their Website!
NOTE: The only reason we flushed this out is because I happened to meet with this client the day after the lead came in and we were reviewing the Web results.
There are 2 takeaways from this exercise:
- You can’t rely on raw numbers when making marketing decisions. Marketing 101 says that you win business opportunities when you position your company in the places where buyers search for your products. BE WHERE THE BUYERS ARE.
- You must actively track your leads in order to determine your ROI. Don’t rely only on numbers, ask people how they found you, work backwards from leads to the source.
You can’t afford to miss sales opportunities—the last thing you can afford to do is take yourself out of the places that are generating sales in your industry!
Do you want people calling you out of the blue for 300,000 piece orders?!
Can you afford to miss these sales?!
For More Information About Our Industrial Business to Business Internet Marketing Solutions
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