Content Marketing Today

Your Small Business Can Emulate Terrific Content Marketing eNewsletter from ThomasNet

The Industrial Marketer Is Customer Focused and Content Rich.  Your small company can do exactly the same even with a much smaller budget.

We have written a lot about ThomasNet as the content marketer’s content marketer.  In fact, they are featured in our book, Get Content. Get Customers., We applaud them for the great work they do in teaching their clients how to use targeted content to generate online sales from their websites.

Their eNewsletter is a superb example of how their own customer focus makes it completely natural to deliver relevant and valuable content to their target market: small to medium-sized manufacturing companies.  Most of their client companies are no-nonsense, straightforward organizations who work very hard to deliver high-quality products.  The look of their newsletter is equally no-nonsense and straightforward.  It is nicely, but simply designed. Even better, it has a very useful content.

It contains seven articles that provide put it to work information:

• three easy steps to target more customers
• the importance of knowing what your customers really want
• a customer success story featuring Magnecraft’s 36% sales growth since deploying a ThomasNet tool
• discover the future of marketing–and the importance of creativity
• get buy-in for conversion rate optimization efforts
• find out why it’s sometimes better to educate than sell
• how to use content to get customers

You may be thinking that this would be beyond the capability of your small company. Not so.  Even though ThomasNet is a pretty large organization, they actually leveraged a number of outside resources for their content.  In many respects, they are using best blogging practices and finding great online content upon which they can comment and elaborate.  This benefits their customers, their sources, and ThomasNet.  In fact, we were fortunate enough to be featured in the September 2008 issue of The Industrial Marketer.  They encouraged us to provide a special three chapter excerpt from our book and provided a link to our book website as well.

In terms of design, you can now take advantage of user friendly, off-the-shelf e-mail software that enables you to create professional designs with almost no out-of-pocket expense.  You do not have to hire an expensive company to create and maintain your design from month to month.

Here are the small business content marketing lessons you can take away:

• Reaching out to your customers with highly targeted and relevant content  within an eNewsletter may be your single best outbound marketing tool.
• You do not need an elaborate design to show off your content.  In fact, sometimes simpler is better.
• You don’t need to create all of the content yourself.  Actually, you may look even smarter by knowing who else is outstanding in your field and by allowing them to share their expertise.
• Monthly frequency may be perfect for most companies if you make sure that each newsletter is chock full of relevant content that will reinforce your thought leadership.
• Your eNewsletter does not exist to sell your products.  It exists to sell your ability to solve your customers’ problems and to establish your expertise.

Your company may be orders of magnitude smaller than ThomasNet, but with creativity, customer-centricity, clean design, and compelling content you have the opportunity to make an equally powerful impression on your target buyers.

Be sure to visit the ThomasNet website to find a wealth of valuable and free information on content marketing. You will come away a lot smarter about how to get your customers to buy from you online.