HOW TO SELL MEDICAL EQUIPMENT
medical supply company increases online sales
Overview
A small medical equipment supply company sells hoyer lifts, mobility scooters, and other medical equipment. Traditionally, they’ve sold through direct phone calls and email campaigns to nursing homes, hospitals, and local medical equipment dealers. Now, they’d like to extend their sales force by taking things online.
The company has an eCommerce website built on Magento. They have fairly average prices for the industry, with well-rated products. There’s a limited budget, so paid advertising is just beyond reach as a sustainable marketing tactic.
How do you sell medical equipment and increase brand awareness for a small medical supply company?
Challenge
On the surface, there wasn’t much that helped make this medical supply company “unique.”
Other medical supply stores sold the same product to the same customers. To the end customer, the only difference between medical equipment suppliers was which company reached them first when they had needs. Since these needs weren’t always reoccurring, relationship development wasn’t enough to keep a steady pipeline of sales coming through the door.
Because other competitors carried the same products online, there was steep competition to achieve a coveted first page ranking for terms in organic search. A term like “hoyer lift” – while searched 34,000 times per month – was not an easy keyword to rank for.
So, with limited resources and steep competition, how does a small medical equipment supply company compete?
Solution
Fortunately, the competition didn’t put much thought or effort into internet marketing.
Let’s rephrase that. The competition was doing the bare minimum. They set up eCommerce websites. They may have set up a few Google ads campaigns to have sponsored results appear for relevant searches. But, that was about it.
We saw a real opportunity for our medical equipment client to carve out a niche in creating blog content answering customer questions and satisfying search intent.
To do this, we focused on creating blog content that fell into a few different pillars:
- “Top” pieces of content (blogs that would list out the best options for customers looking for a particular piece of medical equipment)
- Customer questions (FAQs that direct sales reps were fielding)
- Ultimate guides (everything you ever wanted to know about a particular type of medical equipment)
In other words, we wanted to create content focused on the conversations that were already happening between sales reps and customers. We just needed to bring that conversation online, and use that content as a way to attract a customer to a website so the conversation could take place.
We got started on our content creation strategy, producing weekly content published on the blog and website that would help attract inbound traffic and sales.
Result
The result? A 30% increase in year over year revenue in year 1.
Why was there a revenue increase? Mainly because our SEO content efforts increased organic keywords and traffic by achieving first page rankings for terms like “hoyer lift,” “patient transfer devices” and more.
As organic traffic increased, so did the brand of the medical equipment supplier. Appearing in the right place at the right time has a funny way of doing that.
Phone calls from nursing homes and small hospitals increased. Paid advertising costs decreased as the value of inbound traffic steadily climbed.
Over the years, our client was able to grow their sales by increasing their organic visibility. The slow, steady climb ensured that they had a new, sustainable source of revenue. By deploying a content strategy as a part of our healthcare SEO offering, the company was able to equip more customers in need.