What Is the Most Important Aspect of a Buying Guide?

What Are the 5 Main Factors that Influence Purchasing Decisions?

Customer behavior is something that every marketer is trying to figure out. When it comes down to it there are five main factors that influence purchasing decisions and search for the best products.

1. Psychological factors are how consumers think when shopping for the best products that meet their needs. Some psychological factors that influence consumer behavior are the motivation to purchase a product, perception of a product or brand, knowledge of a product, and predetermined beliefs.
2. Sociological factors are how other people affect consumers' purchasing decisions. Our family impacts our purchasing behavior because we have a tendency to desire products that were used in our childhood. The people in reference groups typically are influenced by an opinion leader when it comes to their purchasing decisions and share a consistent pattern of purchasing. We are all of course influenced by the role that we hold in society and what we think we should buy based on society’s standards.
3. Cultural factors are our values and ideologies that are shaped by the values and ideologies of the society we exist in and to the community we belong. Cultural and sociological influences are very similar in the fact that other people are influencing our buying behaviors.
4. Personal factors are individualized to us, meaning they are going to vary from person to person. Some personal factors are age, income, occupation, and lifestyle. Most businesses build target personas based off of personal factors so they can ensure that their messaging and advertising efforts target people who match the ideal customer profile.
5. Economic factors encompass a person’s income, savings, and disposable income, meaning how much they have to spend on non-essentials. How well a person is doing financially is going to impact how they spend and budget their money. Some economic factors are personal income, consumer credit, and expected income. Most people can't afford to buy cars and houses in cash however with proof of income and a good consumer credit score they can borrow the money to buy things they normally wouldn't be able to afford.

What Is a Product Guide? 

A product guide, also referred to as product catalog or product directory, is defined as a document that contains a list of products and relevant product information. A product guide is used as a source of information to the customer because they offer all the information a customer needs to make an informed purchasing decision.

Some information a product guide commonly include: 

• A Company Introduction
• Product Names
• Product Images
• Product Descriptions
• Product Benefits and Features
• Pricing Information
• Call-to-actions (CTAs)

A product guide is designed to inform customers, partners, and/or dealers. Developing product guides has historically been a cumbersome and manual process. This is why many brands only release product guides annually to announce new model years, related to seasonal demand, such as around the holidays. For example, ahead of Black Friday, retailers will print and mail product guides in the hopes that consumers will be able to find gifts for their loved ones and decorations for the upcoming holiday season. 

How Do You Write a Product Buying Guide?

When creating a buyer’s guide it's important to have a plan. Having a plan can help you be more efficient and know exactly what you need to do when creating your product guide.

You can create this plan by determining the structure of your buying guide and the information you want to include in it. This helps you know exactly what product information you need to gather in order to complete this project. A buyer’s guide must include helpful and relevant information to your customer.

To develop a digital buying guide, teams should consider implementing a digital experience platform (DXP) that includes a product information management (PIM) solution in its suite of functionality. This will ensure product data can be easily managed and digital experiences can pull up-to-date product information directly from the connected PIM solution. Lumavate is a no-code DXP that includes a PIM and content management systems (CMS) within its suite of functionality.

After creating a structure for your product guide, gather all the product information and related assets and add them all to a PIM solution. A PIM enables teams to easily create and manage everything about products from product descriptions, pricing, SKUs, images, documents, and related products.

When all of the information is uploaded into the PIM solution, you’re ready to create a buyer’s guide. With Lumavate you can either use a template to help you structure your product guide or you can add content components like images, text, videos, and much more.

After creating the first draft of your product guide go back and make sure all of the information is accurate and up to date. If you find any inaccuracies, you can update the product information in the PIM solution and it will automatically update the information in your product guide.Using a solution like Lumavate makes it easy for you to manage your product data and digital assets using Lumavate's PIM functionality and allows you to build digital experiences tied to product data in less than 30 minutes.

Let’s explore a couple of buying guide examples. Dyson produced a buyer’s guide for its full range of vacuum cleaners. Each product is summed up in one or two short sentences, making it easy to understand which one is best for their needs. Whirlpool created a buyer’s guide on how to choose a new fridge.

What Is the Most Important Aspect of a Buying Guide?

The most important aspect of a buying guide is having up-to-date product information. The best buying guide will always have accurate information. If your customers read incorrect information about a product on a buying guide, it creates confusion and distrust between your brand and the customer.

An easy solution to this is to store all of your digital assets in a centralized location, so that when it's time for an update you can have the updated information readily available for your customers. PIM software was created for this very purpose. PIM solutions allow users to store, manage and edit product data in a centralized location.

While manual editing your product guides may work in the short term, it's not very scalable. Automating the redundancy of updating product information in your pieces of content can up your team's efficiency. Using a solution like Lumavate, can help you automate that process. Lumavate is a digital experience platform (DXP) that offers a PIM solution as part of its suite of functionality. Marketers at manufacturing companies use Lumavate to easily create digital buying guides and automatically update their digital buying guide. Doing this allows your customers to have great customer experience while using your product selection guide.

Want to see our PIM in action? Schedule a demo with one of our product experts or take an on-demand tour yourself.