Company owners who understand the "why" of going on the Web but are fuzzy about the "how" may find that Thomas Register eases their on-line debuts. Wanner Engineering Inc., a $15-million manufacturer of high-pressure diaphragm pumps in Minneapolis, "had requests from some of our largest customers, like General Motors, who wanted to access information over the Net," says president Payton Hage. Hage figured that what was good for GM would be good for other buyers as well, but he worried about the new medium's stability. "I was dragging my feet," he says.
A visit from a Thomas Register sales-person quickened his step. Wanner now pays $50,000 a year to advertise in Thomas's print, CD-ROM, and Internet versions. That price bought him help creating a stand-alone Web site and 20 links from Thomas's site to his own. Now that his company is on-line, Hage estimates that it gets 50 to 60 inquiries each month through Thomas Register--15% more than he got by advertising in the print vehicle alone. "We have a fairly high-priced product, so we don't have to sell too many to get the investment back," he says.
Winning new customers is great, of course, but so is having existing customers spend more money with you. That happened to the Plastics Technology Group, a $16-million manufacturer of flexible plastic tubing that is a division of NewAge Industries, in Willow Grove, Pa. It paid Thomas Register $7,000 for links to its site under 100 different categories. "A lot of customers who have been buying one product look at our Web site and realize we sell other things," says marketing director Donald G. Warner. Although 275 people--many of them referred by Thomas Register--view the site each week, it's unclear how much of that traffic has resulted in new business. "This is going to be a three-year market-loss leader," Warner says. "Nonetheless, the link from Thomas's is consistently in the top 6 out of about 40 different places where people find us."
Although thomas register on the Internet may be more targeted than search engines and directories are, its brush--which glides over everything from nails to airplane parts--is still pretty broad. But many vertical industries have their own narrower virtual marketplaces. Some of the best known have been set up by traditional distributors that are using the Internet to help manage their customer and supplier relationships.
In 1994 Marshall Industries, a $1.6-billion distributor of electronic components based in El Monte, Calif., launched a Web site that sells things like semiconductors and flat-panel displays to original equipment manufacturers. Today the company does several hundred million dollars' worth of business over the Web--where it brings together 500 parts suppliers and 65,000 corporate customers.
Those customers can search a database of 500,000 parts by number, manufacturer, or product description. Unlike the Thomas Register site, Marshall consummates the deal, handling payment and order tracking, thus freeing suppliers from the onus of becoming electronic-commerce experts. Suppliers can have Marshall host their sites or simply set up a link to them. Any company using Marshall as a distributor gets a free listing.
On a more modest scale is Safety Online. The four-year-old company--a subsidiary of Coastal Training Technologies of Virginia Beach, Va.--attracts about 1,500 safety officers, facilities managers, and engineers to its Web site each day. And the site is reaching out to the hundreds of thousands of others in the industry by advertising in trade publications, through direct mail, and at trade shows.
Not all visitors to Safety Online are on purchasing missions--some are there to read articles and consult the latest updates to government regulations. Many certainly come to search the site's 14-category product database, in which vendors can secure a spot for less than $200 a month. But for suppliers, the best way to attract attention is to treat Safety Online as a trade magazine and go for the splashier advertising. The splashiest--costing $9,000 a year--includes a presence on Safety Online's home page (sponsor names are flashed in regular rotation) and up to 50 pages of content running on its server. Only 20 such premium spots are available, and as of July, 15 were occupied.
Nine thousand dollars was a little rich for the blood of Bill Sims, president of Bill Sims Co., a $3-million maker of software to improve worker safety and customer service. So the Columbia, S.C., company pays $3,000 a year for a place in Safety Online's second tier of advertisers. In turn, Safety Online designed his site, which it also hosts, and provides eight additional hours of programming support. Sims gets to display his company logo within the product category where he's listed, and Safety Online registered his site with major search engines.
For a small company like his, Safety Online "is fairly pricey," says Sims. What he's paying for is visibility. "We could get it hosted a lot cheaper, but we wouldn't get the same exposure to the customers we need," he says. Sims estimates that he gets 300 leads a year from his Web site, most of them originating with Safety Online. That translates into $10 for each lead generated from the Web compared with the $15 he spends on each lead from magazine advertising.
