In eCommerce, the ultimate goal in everything is getting happy customers, maximizing sales and profit, and targeting the right audience. However, it’s a fact that there’s a lot of products and services in the market, which confuse and overwhelm buyers in making the right purchase decisions. It doesn’t matter what niche market you’re in, this poses a significant challenge for all businesses.
How would you capture the attention of your potential buyers? How will you help them in making purchase decisions?
Buyer’s guides are one of the best solutions for this. By providing your audience with comprehensive guides with a wide range of information related to your products, you can help your customers make informed decisions and even convince them to buy from you, leading to more sales. To make sure you know how to utilize your guides well in your business, we’ve compiled a list of all the ways you can use it to your advantage.
What’s a Buyer’s Guide
A buyer’s guide is a piece of content made to help customers in making purchasing decisions. It’s a guide with all the product information they need, which can include functionalities, prices, features, comparisons, tips in using the product, benefits, and more. Ultimately, your guide should highlight to your audience that you’re an expert in your niche and it should show what sets you apart from your competitors.
Although it’s not mandatory when you start a business, it’s extremely beneficial. Here are some of the benefits you can expect:
- Increased brand trust
- More conversions
- Improved SEO
- Better customer service
12 Ways to Use Your Buyer’s Guide In Marketing
Buyer’s guides are one of the best ways to deliver and get value to your target audience. Here are 12 different ways you can use them:
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Landing Page Optimization
Landing pages are designed and made to convert your visitors into leads, and ultimately into customers. One of the best ways to get value from your buyer’s guide is to combine its power with that of a landing page. Create a dedicated landing page for the buyer’s guide.
With a dedicated landing page for the guide, your site visitors will be more inclined to take specific actions, like checking out your listings and making orders. Moreover, since the guide would be the only thing on the page, they’re more focused on the guide and its content, making it easier for you to track how well the visitors are responding to your guide. This makes it easier for you to adjust it accordingly to achieve your goals.
Aside from dedicating a landing page to the guide, you have to make sure that the page is optimized. Make sure it’s optimized for conversions by having a clear value proposition, engaging visuals, testimonials, and a simple form for downloading the guide. This way, you can convince your potential customers that you’re unique from your competition and they can expect great things from you.
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Lead Generation Form
A buyer’s guide is a great tool for lead generation. When adding the guide to your site or on its dedicated landing page, add a lead generation form that visitors have to answer first before they can download and completely read the guide.
Require users to fill out the form with their basic contact information. Make sure to keep it simple, short, and sweet – name, email, and possibly one or two qualifying questions related to your business or niche, like their interest level in ergonomic furniture or their planned purchasing timeline.
In eCommerce, getting email addresses of your visitors and customers is a priority. With a list of email addresses, you can have many more opportunities to get your target customers to make and complete a purchase in your store.
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Email Marketing
With the collection of email addresses you got from the form, you can then start with email marketing. Engage your leads with a nurturing campaign. Offer your potential customers additional value in the form of follow-up content, product recommendations based on their interest, discount codes, etc. As you do so, you can add a link to the guide in every follow-up email.
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Retargeting Campaigns
With all the previous efforts, it’s very likely that many leads have downloaded the buyer’s guide. Use this user’s action as an event for retargeting or remarketing.
This is an advertising method where you reach out to your previous visitors by displaying ads. It’s used to recapture potential leads that have left your site without converting or meeting a specific marketing goal.
With retargeting ads, you can highlight the benefits of your products and direct potential customers back to your site so they can make a purchase.
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SEO Optimization
Buyer’s guides are widely used in SEO strategies since they’re effective, especially for on page SEO. A buyer’s guide is naturally rich in keywords, which is already useful in SEO. You can also use it for internal link building since you can add product pages using relevant anchor texts to make it more effective and to improve your site’s overall SEO.
For the best results in using the guide for SEO optimization, make sure its landing page, your main website, and the product pages, are also optimized for search engine visibility. This means that they should rank in search engines organically, using organic keywords. So, use keywords related to your products or niche, like ergonomic chairs and desks, in your content and pages.
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Content Sampling
You can use your buyer’s guide for content sampling. Provide a sneak peek into the guide on your website or on social media to pique the interest of your visitors and drive downloads. This would make it easier for you to add a lead generation form and collect email addresses that you can use for further marketing campaigns.
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Social Media Promotion
Social media marketing is a great way to boost conversions and sales. Promote your buyer’s guide on all your social media channels, especially on Facebook and Instagram. You can do this in many ways, like sharing and making engaging posts that link to the guide or running paid campaigns to reach a larger audience.
By sharing and promoting it on social media, there’s a higher chance of reaching a wider audience, increasing traffic, and making more conversions. Moreover, by sharing informative content, like the guide, you can engage more with your audience and even increase your followers.
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Partnerships and Guest Posts
Collaborate with bloggers or influencers from a related industry or niche as yours. For example, if your niche and products are ergonomic chairs and desks, you can partner with those who are in the home office or ergonomics space.
You can offer them an excerpt from the guide to post on their site or social media so you can direct their audience to your site to download the full guide.
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Cross-Promotion
Promote the buyer’s guide on your product pages, checkout page, and even in your email signatures. Add links to the guide wherever they’d make sense.
You can add them to related blog posts so if ever visitors who are reading your other content can move into the next stages of the sales funnel. You can also leverage your email signature and offer the guide to your audience. This way, you’re continuously giving them helpful information, which in turn would convince them that you’re an expert in your niche that they can trust.
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Follow Up Survey
Send a follow-up survey to the people who downloaded the guide. This could help you understand their needs better and personalize your future communications. You can do this by sending a quick email to the leads and asking them to answer a short survey.
Remember, don’t try to push and pitch your products or services too much. Simply ask them to answer a short and sweet questionnaire about the guide, what their possible next steps would be, or your products or store as a whole.
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Upsell and Cross-sell
You can use the guide itself to promote your other products. When making or writing the guide content, introduce potential customers to your range of products. Include product links in the guide to encourage users to check them out on your website.
You can add multiple product links using different anchor texts. This way, when a certain topic interests the user and they see a relevant link, they’d be enticed to click on it and be redirected to a certain product.
Let’s say you’re making a complete buyer’s guide on ergonomic desks and chairs. In the content, you can add different product links that lead to different products in your store. For example, there’s a section that talks about ergonomic accessories, you can then insert the link to your entire accessories collection or add separate products as you discuss more about that topic.
This would help in promoting your other related products, not only your primary products.
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Affiliate Marketing
Lastly, you can work with affiliate marketers who can promote your guide and products. You can start a program where interested affiliates can sign up. In the program, you can require them to promote the buyer’s guide on your products.
This will help improve your brand awareness and traffic, especially once their audience comes to your website. Moreover, it’s also a great way to build trust with potential customers, which can then lead to higher conversion rates and sales.
Get Value and Boost Sales With Your eCommerce Buyer’s Guide
A buyer’s guide is a simple yet powerful content that you can use to get value and boost your eCommerce sales. Once you’ve used it correctly in different ways, you can surely see great results. Still, don’t forget that it’s a continuous process so make sure to track and monitor everything. This way, you can make proper adjustments that will help you target and win over your customers.
