Medtech sites often look the part… but do they deliver?

Medtech websites often look like they’re in a genus of their own. How they ‘look and feel’ is partly driven by the culture of the company and the attitude of its management to these things. It’s also driven, quite understandably, by the unifying characteristic of the target audience: educated professionals with their own language. So sites can look techy and jargon-filled. Paradoxically, while we’re all striving to make sites that tap into the target market, what the internet likes is somewhat different. Which is why you shouldn’t DIY.

The form of any website and social media presence is often symptomatic of its origins. This isn’t really the place for a delve into the corporate culture. In essence, whoever drives things and how you create and manage your online activity, will ultimately dictate how it ends up looking and working.

None of this is derogatory by the way. It’s more of a call to arms for medtech companies to recognise the importance of curating your online presence. It’s also to point out the plain truth, that especially website development needs to be more requiring of method than instinct and personal preference if it’s to deliver for you.

Why is Your Online Presence Important?

A stupid question if you “get it”, but not everyone buys in to the power of online marketing. So, back to basics, it’s important because it generates business… whether or not the human workforce acknowledges this. When someone comes to you via your social media or a contact form on the website, this is a qualified lead. Instead of your reps knocking doors to find a friendly face, the leads have (rather efficiently) come to you. And a tired old site speaks of a tired old company; Who approaches companies like this?

A device company with a particular specialism will usually want to portray itself as an/the authority in its field. “Authority” means many different things of course, but usually it means being current and across its subject. By offering up a well-curated online presence a company can gain “authority” status, at least as far as the internet is concerned. Meaning higher ranking, which means people find you, with obvious positive consequences.

We regularly encounter examples of sites that look great, but have little hope of registering with our friends at Google. This is because they’ve failed to do those “authority” things that make search engines view them as companies that people need to find when they go hunting.

Why isn’t this More Widely Recognised?

As for recognition, the company website and its presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. will never gain much praise for actually achieving anything tangible. With medtech being a human to human business, this always means a human person will have made the “sale” or managed “the account” regardless of its real origins. This is often why companies don’t invest in their online efforts, coupled with the (wrong) notion that clinicians never visit company sites.

Example

Whatever management’s attitude to the company’s online presence, all you have to remember is that firstly IT IS IMPORTANT. Secondly, what may look superficially lovely, can actually “drive like a pig.”

Here’s a recent worked example of the problems we quickly found on first run at a randomly encountered medical device site. I’ll say right now that (as the writer rather than the technical guy), I thought it looked superficially fine. Not for the first time our tech team, straight up and honest as the day is long, gave their verdict over a 30 minute skype conversation. Here goes:

  • 100% full width: too wide for its content.
  • Logo and menus can end up miles apart.
  • Product drop-down a long way from Product Menu and poor/no links.
  • Many links not working.
  • Overly aggressive sign-up: offputting.
  • Home page too big at 2.6Mb.
  • Not fully current PHP compliant.
  • Shows debug errors: bad security-wise.
  • SEO mess: no ranking for their subject.
  • Page titles “wrong”.
  • etc…

Overall 7/10 with room for improvement

This is all before we started unpicking the language and sentences structures, readability etc.

So here’s our plea if you’re a medtech marketeer… if you want the job doing properly, quickly and attentively by people who speak the language, you know who you need to talk to. We’ll not BS you into something you neither want nor need. We’ll not recommend changes for the sake of it. We’ll make sure your site works for you in the context of your overall online presence. Perhaps most importantly, we’ll be at the end of an email when and if something jumps up, without the need to schedule work in and receive another bill for every little tweak. Check out “how we work“)

If you’d like to talk, we’re here to help.

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