Thomas Marketing Services Helps PSI Industries Connect with New Customers

After a few months of honing its skills, PSI was producing blanket bars with the requisite tight tolerances. “Once we figured out how to do it, we solved our problem, and then almost overnight we started supplying all our competitors in the industry with blanket bars,” Coates said. “That turned into a niche which is now pretty much known as precision aluminum extrusion, and we were one of the first companies to really focus on that.”

In addition to extrusion, PSI offers a range of vertically-integrated services that make it a one-stop-shop for customers that also need parts machined, finished, and assembled. The company expanded beyond printing and had a growth spurt in the 1990s, supplying telecom companies such as Cisco and Alcatel with custom aluminum extrusions. Today, PSI has customers in “almost every industry,” according to Coates, who named solar, automotive, lighting, and defense as the company’s fastest-growing industry customers. 

The Problem

A Lean Sales Team in Need of a Marketing Boost

For many years, PSI grew its customer base the old-fashioned way — salespeople made connections by visiting local businesses and networking at trade shows. Over time, this strategy proved limiting. Traveling to trade shows required a lot of time and resources, and PSI’s relatively small sales team could only cover a limited territory. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and put in-person meetings on pause, Coates knew it was time to try a different approach; they needed to bring customers to PSI rather than PSI seeking out customers.

Thomas has “been in the business. It's evolved with the times and done very well as a company. So working with Thomas and seeing them succeed gives us a lot of confidence that they can help us succeed like we want to,” Coates said.

PSI partners with TMS for web hosting and SEO. Optimizing PSI’s website was the first order of business when they started working with TMS. The new site makes it simple to request a quote, and content designed with SEO in mind helps put PSI in front of prospective customers who are searching for any of the solutions the company offers, from custom aluminum extrusions to powder coating. PSI’s website now ranks for 696 organic keywords, including 32 keywords in positions #1 - 10 and 651 keywords in positions #11 - 100.

“I don't think there's any way we could have met this customer without Thomas, because it's a West Coast customer,” Coates said. “We don't travel any more for trade shows to the West Coast. So other than them finding our under-optimized-at-the-time website, before Thomas, it probably wouldn't have happened.”

PSI first connected with the new customer, a solar company, about a year ago. “In our industry, it typically takes about a year to develop what is going to be a very good customer — from initial contact to prototyping to first article approval to production,” Coates said. This long production process means it is essential that PSI be able to continually reach out to new customers while it manages relationships with existing customers — a process it hopes to improve this year by automating workflows when it comes to following up with customers who have requested a quote. These follow-up messages are important to nurturing new business, but can easily fall through the cracks when other issues crop up. Implementing an automated email workflow ensures no lead goes untouched. “With Thomas's services, we're going to get that automated…whatever work happens, that's still going to be automatically working in the background,” Coates said.

How can Thomas help your company grow?

Whether you need help with keyword ranking and SEO, social media management, blog content, email strategy, or website design, Thomas can create a plan that suits your needs. Check out Thomas’ programs and customizable advertising.