The global market for scientific products is huge but fragmented and consists of numerous manufacturers and resellers of products for laboratory analysis, monitoring industrial processes, and health and (bio)medical applications. All these suppliers are having one goal in common: finding suitable buyers for their products. Sales and marketing are key, and it turns out that for many suppliers these can be a real struggle, which is particularly true for smaller brands with limited marketing resources. So, what kind of challenges are there exactly, and how to overcome them?
Finding buyers isn’t always easy
One of the main challenges is to not spend huge amounts on marketing of your products while still getting satisfactory results in driving new sales. While larger and established brands often build on an existing infrastructure to sell new equipment, smaller manufacturers and resellers of second-hand equipment often have their own website through which sales take place. However, generating relevant traffic to their website is not trivial as it often requires technical knowledge as well as significant digital marketing efforts and search engine optimisation. Many smaller suppliers do not have these skills in-house and fail to do this effectively.
In addition, promotion of new brands and models also takes considerable effort and time, as professionals first need to discover and understand the scientific products before they will buy them. Therefore, it is important to advertise scientific products through the correct channels that are being visited by potential customers. To this end, many suppliers use social media, for example by posting images with descriptions. Although this can generate some exposure, the advertisements often do not reach the right audience at the right time.
From a buyer’s perspective it is often important to quickly and easily find the instrument that solves their need, which in practice often means through using common search engines. However, the products that appear on top of the search results do not always include the best match for the buyer. Obtaining a more complete overview of suitable options is often a can be a challenging and time-consuming activity because of the many suitable different brands and models on the market. Moreover, there are often multiple suppliers in different regions offering similar scientific products for different prices and sales conditions, and it is an overwhelming task to select the best option from this plethora of possibilities.
In short, bringing sellers and buyers of scientific products together is effectively a matching problem with many different subtleties and faces. Solving this puzzle requires sellers and buyers to have accurate and easily accessible information on each others offerings through suitable communication channels.
Facing the matching challenge
Despite the myriad challenges that suppliers face, luckily there are also solutions to tackle them. We have been working hard behind the scenes to combine these solutions on the QuestPair marketplace with the ultimate goal to create better matches between sellers and buyers.
In its essence, the QuestPair marketplace is an online portal to showcase and present scientific products. Having a dedicated space for scientific instruments helps to make products more visible and to provide researchers and laboratory & industry professionals with better information and context about available products. At the same time we are offering buyers of scientific and laboratory professionals a platform to explore and compare different products, and directly contact suppliers through a form or by clicking a link to their website for more information.
Over the next months, we will introduce additional functionalities and services to subscriptions on QuestPair. For example, we are working on a service where buyers can request the scientific products they need, so that sellers can send quotes and information. Another topic we are working on is to give context to scientific products so that it is easier to see how and for what purpose they can be used. One way to measure this is through the analysis of scientific publications that mention a product, which we are doing through our in-house analytics algorithms. We will provide an update soon on our progress and on how we may integrate this on our marketplace!
We offer free subscriptions for suppliers that want to try out QuestPair. The sign up process is easy and straightforward. On average it takes just a few minutes before you can post your first products.
