Tips on Selling Heavy Equipment Online

What are some tips on selling heavy equipment online? It’s not easy to sell large machinery. And deciding which equipment listing sites are worth the time and effort against which aren’t can be difficult. Many construction equipment businesses have difficulty selling their products via the internet.

Heavy equipment is a niche market—few individuals shop for quarter-million-dollar construction machines, and even fewer have the funds to make a purchase. Even if you discover a few people who are interested and have the financial means to buy a $100,000 excavator or a $300,000 bulldozer, they may not live in your area and be unwilling to bear the price of transporting the machine across the state or nation.
Selling heavy equipment is like selling a property—You have to be prepared to play the long game. The average 972M wheel loader, for example, waits on the market for 105 days before being purchased, according to MachineryTrader.com. So, if you’ve been trying to sell a machine for a while and haven’t had much luck, keep trying. If you do your best to get your equipment listings seen, the suitable buyer will eventually discover you.

With that in mind, here are nine of our best online heavy equipment selling tips.

Create an Equipment Planet account and list your equipment there.

Equipment Planet is still one of the most popular websites for heavy equipment shopping. It routinely appears at the top of Google search results for high-volume search terms such as “excavators for sale” or “heavy equipment sales,” ensuring that your listings will receive far more attention than if you merely put the equipment on your company’s website or on less-established websites.Pros: Some advertising packages include comprehensive data and analytics. You can track the number of impressions and clicks an ad receives, as well as the number of phone calls it produces. You may even record incoming phone calls so that a supervisor can listen in and provide sales people input on how they can improve their lead-to-conversion rates.

Cons: Listing equipment on Machinery Trader can be costly. Their pricing plan is still based on their print magazine, which explains why their advertising expenses are greater than expected.

Machinery Trader does not currently allow equipment dealers to simply list their equipment online—you must also pay for a position in their print magazine if you want to market your equipment on their website(s). Ad packages that include unlimited inventory listings start at $295 per week and start at $50 per week per machine.

Place an ad on Craigslist for your equipment.

Although you might not think of Craigslist as the first place to look for expensive construction equipment, it does have an entire heavy equipment category dedicated to it. The Craigslist Heavy Equipment page for Las Vegas, for example, featured 1050 local sales listings at the time of writing.

Pros: Equipment owners’ listings are free. Furthermore, “heavy machinery for sale Craigslist is an online classified ad service “is a popular Google search word, indicating that a large number of individuals are looking for heavy equipment on Craigslist.

Cons: Sellers are discouraged from offering equipment outside of the city where their business is situated on Craigslist. If your company is based in Las Vegas and you try to list your equipment in other cities, such as Los Angeles or Phoenix, your listing may be marked for removal.

Don’t include your email address when listing your equipment. Craigslist has been used by scammers and hackers to send phishing emails. If someone is interested in purchasing something, they will call—so all you need to include is your phone number and website.

Advertise your machinery on Facebook Heavy Equipment Groups

There are over two dozen Facebook groups dedicated to buying and selling farming and construction equipment. Some groups are broad “heavy equipment for sale” groups while others are dedicated to a single sort of machine—forklifts, for example—or a specific region—the Southwest United States.

Pros: Using Facebook groups to advertise equipment is free, and the platform allows you to send a single item to dozens of groups at once. The procedure of listing a piece of equipment takes only a few minutes.

Thanks to a recent modification in the newsfeed algorithm, Facebook groups may also prove to be a terrific way to get equipment spotted by potential clients. At the time of writing, Facebook modified its algorithm to “prioritize the Pages and groups we anticipate an individual may care about most,” which has resulted in posts from groups showing up at the top of many people’s feeds.

Cons: Many Facebook heavy equipment groups have thousands of members, and fresh listings post multiple times a day on each group’s page. It can be difficult to break through the clutter and get your listings noticed.

Pro-Tip: Use high-resolution photographs and provide a link to your website in the article description. Even if no one from Facebook buys your machine, including a link on your page can assist drive visitors to your site and raise brand awareness.

Build an email list of people who are interested in what you have to say.

When done correctly, email marketing may be a powerful tool for selling heavy machinery. Encourage individuals to join your email list by adding an email capture plugin to your website and running a Facebook ad that targets your Facebook fans and people who have previously visited your website (you’ll need to install a Facebook Pixel first).Pros: Email marketing systems like Mailchimp offer a free basic package if you sign up for it. Unlike Gmail or Outlook, an email marketing platform provides specific information on which of your email subscribers opened your email and clicked on your email links, allowing you to send follow-up emails to individuals who clicked on your listings.

Cons: Building a targeted lead list takes time and planning. It also necessitates skill, as getting it wrong could result in your account being marked as spam. If you’re new to digital marketing, we recommend taking an email marketing course. Many of the courses are available for free.

Make contact with local vendors.

Why not contact an equipment sales rep directly instead of posting a Facebook ad, commercial, or billboard and hoping someone finds it? For example, if you have many Caterpillar machines for sale, conduct a search for CAT dealers in your area and contact them by email or phone. You’ll need to obtain the person’s name and direct email address, however many equipment websites have their sales agents’ contact information displayed on their directory page.

Pros: Making a phone call or sending an email is simple and quick. Even if the sales agent doesn’t have money to buy your equipment right now, you’ll have gotten on his radar, and he could remember you the next time he needs something.

Cons: Because salespeople phone heavy equipment firms all day, they may be cautious to accept a cold call without an appointment.

Increase your SEO efforts.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a term that refers to the process of optimizing
It’s the process of optimizing your website for specific search terms that your potential customers might type into Google, such as “caterpillar motor grader” or “wheel loader for sale,” for example. If you sell a lot of the same sort of equipment on a regular basis, it can make sense to develop a page on your website dedicated to that keyword, such as “excavators for sale” or “forklift sales.” Though it may take years of persistent effort before your website begins to rank on Google’s and other search engines’ first pages, it’s a long-term approach worth pursuing.

Pros: You’ll be able to reduce the amount you spend on Google or Facebook advertisements if you rank organically in search results for popular heavy equipment sales-related search terms. This may save you money over the long run.

Cons: It can take months, if not years, for SEO to pay off. Other solutions, such as auctions or ads on Machinery Trader, can be considered if you need to sell equipment quickly.

Use LinkedIn to connect with potential purchasers.

LinkedIn is a business-to-business social media site. If you haven’t logged on in a while, it’s worth doing so because LinkedIn has worked hard to style its newsfeed after that of Facebook, making it the unofficial “Facebook for business owners.”

When you “follow” (or connect) with a new person on LinkedIn, they automatically follow you back, unlike on other social media networks. This implies that in just a few days, you can easily quadruple your number of followers. On the other side, you could follow a hundred new individuals on Instagram and only get one or two of them to follow you back.

Pros: Because everyone’s job titles are given in their profiles, you can be quite specific about who you connect with; for example, only friending people who work in the sales department of organizations you want to sell to. According to a HubSpot study, LinkedIn created 3X more conversions than Twitter and Facebook.

Cons: Many people create a LinkedIn account and then never use it, making it difficult to maintain meaningful connections on a regular basis. However, this appears to be changing. 260 million people using LinkedIn on a monthly basis as of March 2017, up from 106 million in 2016.

Let’s connect on LinkedIn, shall we? Follow our business page on LinkedIn and connect with our marketing department.

Create Facebook advertisements

Facebook is the world’s largest social networking platform and the third-most visited website, with 2.3 billion users.

Here are some interesting Facebook statistics:

Facebook is used by 68 percent of Americans.
Every month, the average Facebook user clicks on 8 ads.
A national Facebook ad targeting people who work in the construction and heavy equipment industries has a potential reach of 350,000 people, according to statistics from our equipment advertisements.
Pros: Facebook advertising are inexpensive. You may create website views for as low as a few cents per click if done correctly.

Cons: While Facebook advertising are excellent for raising brand recognition, they might be difficult to employ to get rapid results. People use Facebook to catch up with old pals and watch cute kitten videos, not to shop. The trick is to use Facebook advertisements to collect email addresses, which you can then use to remarket them via email or Facebook retargeting ads later.

Make contact with your current clientele.

Last but not least, we’ve saved the finest for last. Reaching out to prior or current clients, in our experience, is the most effective way to sell heavy equipment. Why look for new purchasers when you can sell to people you already know and trust? Our current rental clients have accounted for a considerable portion of our sales over the last two years.

Pros: It’s simple—your consumers are already familiar with and trust your equipment. You don’t need to spend a lot of time or money persuading customers to give your company a chance since they know they can rely on you to deliver them a decent deal.

There are no drawbacks. While this shouldn’t be your only selling strategy, we don’t see any disadvantages to informing your customers about upcoming sales and new inventory.

Source : HeavyEquipmentRentals

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