How Do You Make a Buyer's Guide?
What Is a Buyer’s Guide?
A buyer’s guide is often referred to as a product guide, product catalog, or sometimes even a product list.
A buyer’s guide is a document that contains a list of products and relevant product information that consumers can use to help them with their purchasing decision. Brands often offer product guides to showcase their entire product offering.
Buying Guide Examples
No matter what type of products your business offers, buying guides are incredibly helpful to your customers when they are trying to find the best product for their needs. If consumers find your buying guide helpful, this will drive brand loyalty, and in return, purchase from your business again and again. That is why it's important to invest the time and resources to create an exceptional buying guide.
Let’s take a look at some buying guide examples like the Lowe’s buyers guide for washing machines.
Here’s why this buyer’s guide example works - consumers will come to trust that Lowe’s can help them solve their problems and will turn to the retailer as the place where they continue to purchase from with this exceptional product guide. It’s engaging both from a content and visual perspective and offers readers helpful information for their purchasing decision.
This washing machine buyer’s guide has tips on:
Small Space Purchasing
Pet Hair Control
Energy Savings
Mitigating Damage Control
A buyer’s guide for lawn care equipment may include some definitions describing the various types of lawn mowers (push mowers versus self-propelled), what features might be most important to customers considering purchasing a lawn mower, and perhaps the type of maintenance required for a lawn mower.
What Is the Most Important Aspect of a Buying Guide?
The most important aspect of a buying guide having up-to-date product information. The most effective way to do this is by using a product information management (PIM) solution. A PIM solution allows users to store, manage, and edit product information in a centralized location. Using a solution like this makes your product information more accessible and easier to update for your team, thus leading to increased efficiencies and a quicker speed-to-market.
A solution you can use to create a buying guide is Lumavate. Lumavate is a digital experience platform that possesses a PIM solution, which makes it extremely easy for brands to organize their product data in a centralized location and also empowers business users to create front-end digital experiences for their customers to access the product information.
Lumavate’s PIM solution includes the following functionality:
- Multiple Product Types -
Utilize Product Types to distinguish products from parts and accessories or product lines from different business units or brands.
- Unlimited Products -
Create a product record for every single product or stock-keeping unit (SKU) you offer.
- Digital Asset Management -
Centralize the management of your product images, documents, videos, and more tied directly to each product record.
- Unlimited Custom Attributes -
Quickly add custom attributes for each Product Type to align with your product data and related digital assets.
- Product Relationships -
Relate products to one another to drive increased revenue from upsells, cross-sells, bundles, parts, accessories, and more.
- Change Log -
Track product record changes made by any system user.
- Integrate to Existing Systems -
Connect your existing data and content tech stack to create a unified product record.
- Unlimited Users -
Enable multiple users in your business to create and manage product data and related digital assets.
- Drive Dynamic Digital Experiences -
Launch data-driven digital experiences that always display the most up-to-date product information.
Using a solution like Lumavate allows your brand to have product information managed within a PIM solution and create personalized digital experiences like product onboarding, product guides, and buyer’s guides for your customers. Additionally, your product information will always be accurate and up-to-date as changes made within Lumavate’s PIM solution are automatically reflected in a brand’s digital experiences.
How Do You Write a Product Guide?
When you are creating a product buying guide, think about what information your customers will most find helpful. What can you do to make your product guide accessible and trustworthy for your customers? Asking yourself these questions will help you and your team when creating your product guide.
We’ve compiled some steps to follow when you begin creating your brand’s product guide:
Determine the structure of your product buying guide and the information you want to include in it.
Gather all of the product information and related assets and add all of it to a PIM solution.
Create a digital experience that integrates or is tied to your
PIM solution
and make sure that all of your product information is updated within the PIM solution.
Using a tool like Lumavate, you can accomplish all three of these steps using the same platform. Lumavate is a digital experience platform (DXP) that includes PIM functionality.
Because your brand’s digital experiences are tied to Lumavate’s PIM solution, your digital experience will automatically update when changes are made to your product information within the PIM solution.
How Do You Make a Buyer’s Guide?
The most effective way to create a product selection guide is to use a tool like Lumavate. Our solution allows you to make a buyer’s guide online by using our platform to create digital experiences fast. We have more than 40 templates (including a buyer’s guide template) that enable markers to accelerate the creation of their digital experiences and make creating a product guide easier for your team.
Buyer’s guides made using Lumavate are more engaging, accessible, and can be created and launched in 30 minutes or less. Schedule a demo to see how we can help transition your brand’s product data into our PIM solution and help enable you to create digital experiences for your products within 30 minutes to enhance the customer experience, drive revenue, and decrease costs for your brand.
Discover how to select the right FP&A software for your business with our most popular download: The Ultimate Buyer's Guide to Financial Planning and Analysis Software.
Designed for finance leaders, this practical playbook includes a step-by-step process for conducting a successful software evaluation, including:
- Assessing and defining the current needs of your business
- Creating a project timeline
- Building a buying committee
In addition, learn how to quickly assess the current FP&A software landscape and create a vendor short-list with these 4 included tools:
1) FP&A Software Checklist
2) Vendor comparison features within leading analyst reports:
- Gartner: Magic Quadrant for Cloud FP&A Solutions
- Nucleus Research: CPM Technology Value Matrix
- Dresner: Advisory Services Technology Innovation Awards
3) Business Case Checklist
4) Sample RFP questions
Discover everything you need to know for selecting the best Financial Planning & Analysis solution for your business. Complete the form to access your buyer's guide now.