words that SPEAK

Whether buyers are individual consumers, corporations, nonprofits, or government agencies, when budgets tighten they become increasingly vigilant about spending. They know an imprudent purchase will be harder to overcome during lean economic times, and could even have lasting detrimental effects. For large-scale purchases, the consequences of an ill-informed decision during these slumps could be even worse, creating a substantial long-term financial burden. Buyers therefore strive to minimize the risk of making poor decisions by seeking and analyzing more information about their purchase options than they do in times of prosperity.

Economic cycles are not the only factor affecting the buyer’s decision process: marketing dynamics are also undergoing a significant shift. In the past, marketers were largely limited to using a push approach that conveys information to target audiences through one-way channels, primarily print and broadcast media. Today’s interactive media, by contrast, enable buyers of every description to engage in buyer-seller information exchanges that could be described as a push-pull approach. Yet, all too often sellers fail to recognize and respond to these changing market dynamics and buyers’ increased information needs.

THE BUYER’S CHALLENGE
Despite living in the Information Age, the process of finding significant high-quality information about a product or service frequently frustrates buyers. Marketers understandably tout the positive attributes of their offerings while remaining silent about any negative ones. Some even oversell, making it difficult for prospective customers to determine how well the respective products or services would actually meet their needs. Even when sellers provide product specifications they sometimes tweak the metrics involved so their own offerings appear more favorable than those of competitors.

As buyers, we all know the challenges of finding and sifting through such information, whether shopping for ourselves, or our employers. We dial up our internal hype filters and wade through the weeds of marketing fast talk in search of unadulterated facts about the pros and cons of what we contemplate buying. What we want is reliable, detailed, easy-to-understand facts—high quality information that will enable us to be knowledgeable buyers and make wise purchase decisions.

And while information quality is a big concern, so too is accessibility. In their quest for knowledge about products and services, today’s buyers might scour an ever-growing maze of information channels, including websites, independent review sources, blogs, social networks, and print publications. But broad in-depth searches frequently consume valuable time and even then may be unproductive. Many websites offer basic information, then ask prospects to call for more information, thereby making the caller captive to an often-unwelcome sales pitch. Clearly then, access to the broad range of high quality information buyers seek is vital, but too often it also comes at a high cost.

IMPLICATIONS FOR MARKETERS
Once sellers recognize the hurdles they place before prospective buyers, the solution becomes clear. At a basic level, it means providing easy access to a broad spectrum of high-quality information that addresses a wide variety of buyer concerns and scenarios. Information needs can generally be classified in terms of content, quality, and accessibility. Here’s a closer look.

• CONTENT: Most product and service providers offer easy access to basic facts about their offerings while hyping the respective benefits to customers. While this may be okay for simple everyday purchases, more complex ones require more information—not only about the offering itself, but also about its use under different scenarios, the availability and cost of ongoing support, warrantees and repairs, special programs, pricing, discounts, and many other factors.
• QUALITY: Prospects need information delivered in a straightforward style, stripped bare of jargon and hyperbole. Hypnotic marketing prose may draw prospects near, but reeling them in requires providing the factual information they feel they need to be well-informed buyers. Sellers acquire much of this knowledge—often in vast quantities—through customer interactions, but too often it remains only in the minds of frontline staff and gets shared with buyers only when interacting on a one-to-one basis. Making this deeper insight available in a more forthright way can facilitate prospects’ decision making.
• ACCESSIBILITY: When the information buyers believe they really need is difficult to find, or obtain, they may well be motivated to buy a competitor’s offering because it involves less time and hassle. In the past, sharing a wide range of product or service insight with prospects was, itself, not an easy task; but today’s digital information networks can provide 24-hour information access at minimal cost to sellers.

PROVIDING IN-DEPTH BUYER INFORMATION
Marketers have several options for making more in-depth information easily accessible. The simplest, most flexible, and least costly of these is, of course, the website, which makes it an excellent starting point. Websites can give prospects immediate access to the insight and details they seek without triggering time-consuming sales pitches. In fact, many sites attempt to address certain deeper information needs by providing answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs). Unfortunately, however, marketers infrequently update these and often fail to include sufficient detail to be truly helpful.

Product and service information can be supplemented using a variety of formats that center primarily on the following:

• FAQs: The Q&A format is generally best for providing relatively short bits of information that require little description or explanation. Grouping FAQs by topic can also help searchers find the information they need faster. As with all website content, keeping FAQs current is important because outdated information rapidly diminishes buyers’ confidence.
• SHORT ARTICLES: Brief narrative pieces that range from a few paragraphs to a few pages are excellent for resenting information that would clearly benefit from a discussion format. An article can provide more depth than a FAQ, but takes considerably less time to read and comprehend than a typical paper.
• PAPERS: This more lengthy narrative form (often 10 pages or more) has long been used as a marketing tool by high-tech firms, which often refer to them as white papers. Publications of this length provide much more insight and depth, often addressing many aspects of their subject products, services, or issues, and they frequently include multiple viewpoints.
• VIDEOS & PODCASTS: As buyers grow more comfortable with online technology, more websites are featuring recorded messages, a format well suited for the buyer who’d like a break from reading, or who simply prefers less impersonal forms of communication. If thoughtfully scripted and produced, these e-casts can deliver in-depth information and simultaneously reduce the emotional distance between buyer and seller and thus stimulate more purchases. These diverse formats enable marketers to present different types of content in ways that buyers can digest at their convenience, and importantly, that can be disseminated by various means. All of these formats can be, and commonly are, included on websites. However, to find information there buyers must actively search for it or know that it exists someplace online and exactly where to find it. Websites, therefore, are effectively passive communications tools, so some supplemental communications effort is helpful to build awareness of new in-depth content.

Marketers can use any of several approaches to proactively raise awareness of the availability of expanded buyer information. The simplest and most cost-effective is placing the information online, then providing direct links to it whenever opportunities arise, whether in newsletters, ads emails, brochures, sales letters, or any other means of communicating with buyers. Even the messages themselves can be distributed proactively, whether online or in hardcopy form.

Sound marketing means making it easy for prospective buyers to choose your products or services instead of a competitor’s. Because buyers typically feel it is more important in difficult economic times to be prudent and well informed in making their purchase decisions, savvy marketers will provide the deeper levels of information those decisions can require. That information, when carefully crafted, made easily accessible, and its availability made known to buyers, can boost sales just when they are needed most.