Are you in the early stages of developing a website for your medical device company?
Or perhaps you already have an established website but are hoping to improve its performance?
Either way, you probably already know just how vital your website is to your business.
It’s the hub of all your activity. Sure, people can learn about you on social media and explore your various platforms to get a feel for your company. But when they’re making the all-important decision on whether to get in contact with you, it’s most likely your website they’ll go to for that final step. So, it needs to be the best it can be.
We’re a marketing agency specifically for medical devices, and we’ve built many websites for clients over the years. However, you don’t necessarily need to be a website expert to create a site that will deliver for your business. In fact, we know that just a few small tweaks could massively improve your site’s performance.
Whether you already have a website or are considering building one, this article will tell you what you need to know to get the best out of it—from how it looks to how well it works.
Make it findable
Firstly, you need to ensure your audience can find your website and that it’s not hidden away in a dusty corner of the internet. Bring your website out into the light and proudly display it for the world to see.
You’ve probably heard of SEO (search engine optimisation), which is incredibly important, but you should also ensure that all your marketing channels converge on your website. Your website should be the hub of all your activity.
Your social media posts, email campaigns, and any other digital offerings should all drive traffic towards your website.
Even your offline materials can link to your pages using QR codes. Think brochures, packaging, and congress collaterals—they could all contribute to your website’s traffic.
So, when you’re coming up with your marketing plans, always think about how it’s driving your audience on their customer journey. On channels that aren’t your website, it should probably be by driving them towards your website.
We haven’t dived into SEO here as it is such a big topic, but we have written several articles on it. If you want to become an SEO expert, have a look at the following:
Showcase your brand
The power of branding can be underestimated. Some companies believe branding is just a logo and colours, and nothing more.
Actually, branding is a culmination of all visual assets, as well as underlying messaging that reflects the ethos of your company.
Rather than being something you can see, branding provokes a feeling, and your website is the perfect opportunity to showcase it. While your website needs to look good, it shouldn’t be at the expense of your brand.
All the visuals on your site should be built around your brand, which includes the colours, the copy, and the imagery. Everything down to the shape of the buttons should be consistent and recognisably you.
Answer your audience's questions
This is probably the most important aspect of creating a successful website—does it answer your audience’s questions?
On average, it’s estimated that 70-80% of the buying decision is now made before a buyer even contacts you. The internet has given us access to more information than ever before, and people want to feel confident in their decision before they commit.
So, they’ll use your website as a place to find out what they need to know about you. Only when they feel that level of confidence will they decide to reach out to you. During this process, inappropriate customers will exclude themselves, making life easier for your sales team.
Additionally, being honest and answering all their questions upfront will build trust with your audience. If you’re open and not keeping anything back, they can trust that you’re not going to suddenly spring something on them that they weren’t expecting.
Marcus Sheridan’s book They Ask, You Answer discusses the power of this philosophy in depth and is definitely worth a read.
To put this philosophy into practice, try writing down all the questions your audience will have before reaching out to you. These will probably be based on the questions you hear every day from your customers and leads, so it’s important to get different members of your team involved in coming up with these questions.
If you already have a site, does it answer these questions? Where can you find them? If you’re building a site, you can use this list of questions as a basis for the content you need to include on your website.
Lead users on a journey
Once you know what information your users are looking for, you need to consider how easy it is for them to find it. Do they have to trawl through pages of content to find it? Or is it in a logical place where they would expect it to be?
If they can’t quickly find what they’re looking for, they’ll more than likely click away to see if one of your competitors has what they’re looking for.
You also need to consider the different journeys of the users on your site and how you can encourage them through it. This is known as conversion optimisation, and it’s how you encourage users to take a desired action, such as getting in contact or making a purchase.
Realistically, ensuring your website is set up to convert is the key to its success. Even if you have huge numbers of visitors, if they aren’t converting, what is the point?
Monitor your performance
How do you optimise for conversion? Data is one of the main ways. How can you tell how well your website is performing if you don’t look at the data?
When building your website, you need to ensure that it is well set up to report. If you’re just looking to improve the performance of your current website, why not see how you can improve your current way of reporting?
Smaller teams will probably find that Google Analytics provides all the data they need, but larger teams with a reporting budget may want to invest in software like HubSpot. Either way, the most important thing is that you’re looking at the right metrics for your goals.
When deciding what metrics to report on, you need to consider what they actually tell you and how full a picture you’re getting. Sure, looking at the visitors to your website is exciting, but what are they doing once they get to your site? Again, is there any point in knowing this if they aren’t converting?
A few questions to ask yourself include:
- What are your visitors doing on your site?
- Are they staying or are they leaving straight away?
- What pages are people leaving the site on the most? Why could that be?
- Are they getting halfway through converting and then stopping? Why?
You can find these answers in the data and then create actionable insights, wherein you optimise your site based on what the data is telling you.