Making it clear – buyer enablement content

Posted on in SME Marketing

It may sound complicated, but buyer enablement content just means ensuring your content gives your customers and prospects the information they need to make the best decision…

Help your clients make the right decision

One of the marketing watchwords for this year is buyer enablement. What it means, in non-marketing speak, is giving your existing customers, and those you hope will buy from you, the right information to make a purchase. It should go without saying, that understanding your target audience is critical in this process.

When people have the right information, it makes it easier for them to make the right buying decisions. If content is straightforward and clear, they will find it easier to make a decision – and buy from you – rather than prevaricating, putting you on a ‘to do’ list, and in the worst case scenario, going elsewhere.

Buyer enablement basically means giving people what they need to make a buying decision. We all lead busy lives, whether at work or at home, and the company that makes the buying decision easy and straightforward is likely to win the day.

There are six basic steps in any buying decision, and you need to provide the right content or tools to allow your prospects to make that decision, and get their chequebook out!

  1. Problem Identification
  2. Exploring solutions
  3. Building requirements
  4. Choosing a supplier
  5. Validation
  6. Consensus Creation

So what you really need to do is guide your buyers through the buying process. For instance, when looking at solutions, they will use all kinds of tools – look on social media, investigate on the internet, or read whitepapers for example. If you can provide the right tools for them, they are less likely to wander off elsewhere online (and offline) to do research.

So, perhaps you need to provide a calculator or a diagnostic to help them make a decision. Maybe you need to show how the solution would work for them, or perhaps you can offer an online adviser or helpline to talk them through the buying process.

You might, instead of just sending possible buyers to a page that says ‘thanks, we’ll be in touch’, to sending them to your sales people via a phone or web chat so that they can have the next part of the conversation, enabling the buyer to take the next step. After all, while they are waiting for you to get in touch, they might have contacted a more proactive seller and made their purchase!

Offering alternative ways to get in touch is also key. Some people like to talk to an actual person, so a phone contact should be provided. Others may prefer to email or text. Don’t lose a customer because you haven’t offered the correct communication method!

Look at your content and decide if it is helping to fulfil any one of these steps in your customer’s buying process.

Checklist

Here’s a few questions you can ask yourself to gauge if your content is doing the right job.

  1. Does it help someone to make a decision to buy?
  2. Is this a purchase that buyers find hard to make?
  3. Does the content help them to complete the purchase?
  4. Is the content relevant for most of my buyers?
  5. Is the content easy to use?
  6. Is the content quickly effective?

You might also be interested in our blog identifying the importance of content marketing.

If you would like to have a chat about how you can improve your buyer enablement, or any other marketing requirements, please call Alison Page on tel: 07963 002065 or email: hello@alisonpagemarketing.co.uk. You can of course browse our website to see what our existing clients have to say about our work.