Creating a Purchaser's Handbook for Your Label (Part 1 of 5)
When it comes to creating a successful buyer's guide, there are two main types to consider: the single product guide and the guide under the guise of a roundup story. To write an effective guide, follow these key tips and structure your content thoughtfully while avoiding common pitfalls.
Tips for Writing an Effective Buyer’s Guide
- Understand your target audience: Thoroughly identify the buyer and the end-user if they differ. Know their demographics, priorities, and the information they need to make a buying decision.
- Create clear buyer personas: Based on research, not assumptions, create personas that speak directly to your ideal customer(s). Limit yourself to one or two primary personas to avoid confusion.
- Use direct and personalized language: Address your reader as an individual rather than a vague group. This sharpens your copy and connects better with readers.
- Focus on buyer needs and concerns: Highlight product functionality, benefits, and potential pitfalls rather than just product features.
Suggested Structure of a Buyer’s Guide
- Introduction: Briefly explain what the guide covers and who it’s for.
- Buyer Persona Overview: Define the typical buyer(s) your guide targets—age, interests, needs.
- Key Factors to Consider: Outline important criteria to evaluate when choosing a product (e.g., quality, price, usability).
- Detailed Product Reviews or Comparisons: Highlight pros, cons, and comparisons relevant to the buyer’s priorities.
- Buying Tips: Offer practical advice tailored to the buyer persona, such as what to check before purchase or common mistakes to avoid.
- FAQs: Address common buyer questions and concerns to clarify doubts.
- Conclusion and Next Steps: Summarize and provide calls to action, such as where to buy or how to seek further advice.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Skipping research on your buyer persona, which leads to ineffective, generic content.
- Creating too many or too vague personas, which dilutes focus and makes messaging confusing.
- Using plural or impersonal language that distances the reader instead of engaging them personally.
- Focusing solely on basic facts (age, job title) without addressing deeper buyer motivations like goals and frustrations.
- Neglecting to update buyer personas and guide content over time to keep relevance.
- Overloading the guide with technical jargon or irrelevant details that overwhelm or confuse the buyer.
By adhering to these tips and structure, and avoiding the common mistakes, your buyer’s guide will be clear, targeted, and persuasive, helping buyers make informed decisions effectively.
Additional Considerations
- Gather more products or brands than will be included in the buyer's guide before winnowing them down and writing copy for each before ranking them.
- SEO is crucial in selecting products for a buyer's guide, as it reveals what consumers are searching for and the information they seek about a product.
- Consumers need additional sources of reliable information due to the abundance of reviews online.
- Including other brands in a buyer's guide can create elevation by association and help reassure consumers about the superiority of one's own product.
- Creating a consistent structure is essential for a buyer's guide, including an introduction, modules for each product or brand reviewed, FAQs, and add-on products.
- Working with a trusted partner can help manage content creation and production challenges, driving brand success.
- Balancing the good with the bad is important in a buyer's guide, avoiding over-reliance on Amazon reviews and being honest about a product's flaws.
- Balance is crucial in a consumer review, as Kennedy is suspicious of any review that's too positive or overly negative.
- The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires specific guides for used cars, and dealers must display a Buyer's Guide in every used car they have for sale.
A well-crafted buyer's guide or ebook allows a brand to own their products, backstory, and brand hallmarks. Freelance writer Jill Schildhouse suggests including products across all budgets and not staying loyal to any one brand to spread the love. Studying guides from unrelated industries can provide inspiration for unique selling points and descriptions.
Buyer's guides are core content types for marketers, providing uniformity, reliability, and transparency. Understanding the target audience is key to creating a great buyer's guide, and always having an audience in mind is important, even if it's oneself.
- To cater to diverse interests, ensure the buyer's guide covers a variety of topics such as lifestyle, fashion-and-beauty, food-and-drink, home-and-garden, education-and-self-development, and personal-growth.
- When shopping for items in the fashion-and-beauty section, it's essential to consider factors like quality, cost, and personal style.
- A well-written buyer's guide for education-and-self-development should highlight the key features, benefits, and potential drawbacks of various learning resources, such as online courses, books, or workshops.
){kind=link}