How Do You Write a Product Buying Guide?

What Is a Buying Guide?

A buying guide is a document that contains a list of products, along with relevant product information that includes product descriptions, features/benefits, photos, pricing, sizing, related products, and much more. Buyer or buying  guides are often used for evaluating products before a customer decides to purchase the product. If you are not familiar with the term buying guide, they are also commonly referred to as a product guide, product catalog, buyer’s guide, or product catalogue.

Buying guide examples or product guide examples can include a manufacturing company that has a product guide for their light fixtures, faucets, or home appliances. The product guide can display all of a manufacturer's products, and any other useful information regarding the products. The buying guide can then allow customers to easily filter and search for specific products.

What Is the Most Important Aspect of a Buying Guide?

One of the most important aspects of a buying guide is having up-to-date product information. Imagine being a customer and purchasing a product and then finding out the product information is out of date. Or imagine working at a company and having to spend a significant amount of time searching through spreadsheets for the most up-to-date product information in order to create a buying guide. 

Both of these scenarios highlight why it is critical to store product data and related digital assets in a product information management (PIM) solution. By storing your data in a PIM, all of your product data will live in one place, making it easy to access and keep updated. By using a platform like Lumavate, you can use our PIM solution to store all of your product data. Lumavate is a digital experience platform (DXP), so you will be able to create a digital buying guide that is connected to the PIM, which means your data can be continuously updated, all in one place.

How Do You Write a Product Buying Guide?

Now that you understand the importance of having a digital buying guide, let's discuss the steps involved in creating a product buying guide. A buyer’s guide must include the following:

1. Determine the structure/outline of your product buying guide and what information you want to include in it. This step is essential, as you are determining what you want your customers to see when viewing the guide. 
2. Gather all of the product information and related assets.
3. Add all of your product information and related assets to a PIM solution. 
4. Create a digital experience that is tied to your PIM solution and provides up-to-date product information when the buying guide/product catalog is accessed.
5. Update your product data and related assets using the PIM any time you need to make updates to your products. Once changes are made, they will automatically be updated in the corresponding buying guides.

Using a solution like Lumavate makes it easy for you and your team to manage all of your product data and digital assets. This information can easily be updated at any time and will allow you to easily create/edit a buyer’s guide that displays all of your product information in less than 30 minutes.

How Do You Make a Buyer’s Guide?

There are many ways to make a buyer’s guide or a product selection guide. You can create one as a printed version, a PDF version, or a digital version. While printed and PDF versions have been standard for many years, another great option is to create a digital buyer’s guide. 

Digital buyer’s guides offer the flexibility to be accessed from anywhere. They also provide the customer with the ability to easily search and find the information they need. Digital buyer’s guide can also be updated at any time, which means your product data will always be up-to-date.

There are many options available to select from when looking for a solution to create a buyer’s guide. A great platform to use to manage your product data and related digital assets is Lumavate. Lumavate is a digital experience platform (DXP) that also provides a PIM solution within its suite of functionality. This means that marketers at manufacturing companies can easily create digital buyer’s guides in no time.

 With Lumavate, once you have added your data to the PIM, you can quickly associate this information with multiple digital experiences. Once you have a change you need to make to a product, Lumavate makes it easy to update in one place. The changes made to the data stored in the PIM will automatically be reflected in any related digital experiences. This will save you time and help shorten the speed-to-market.

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