How To Help Your Customers Make Buying Decisions

How often do you walk into a shop or log into a website, immediately go directly to an item, put it in your basket and purchase it? You might do this if you’re nipping to the corner shop for some orange juice and a newspaper, but sometimes we have to put a significant amount of work into the task of shopping. It’s easier to make a decision when making small, inexpensive or frequent purchases. But bigger, more expensive things like cars and houses take so much time and thought that all the options can start to blur into one - so much so, that it would be less painful to just ask the salesperson to make the decision for us.

It’s likely the product or service you sell falls somewhere in between those two extremes, so how can your website help undecided customers to make a purchasing decision and consequently buy from you?

Understand the customer’s problem

Once when I was at school we had a theatre group visit us and put on a small production of Romeo and Juliet. I distinctly remember how Juliet stood up on the stage and called “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” And one obliging young boy pointed to the back of the hall where Romeo was standing and shouted “He’s over ‘ere!” The audience erupted into laughter, partly because in his endearing attempt to be helpful, the boy had misunderstood Juliet’s rhetorical question - she didn’t mean “Romeo, where are you?” but rather, “Romeo, why are you a Montague?”

The moral of the story? Like that little boy, your website should endeavour to be helpful. But for it to do so you must first understand your customers. What problems are they trying to solve, and what are their needs – and just as importantly, what don’t they want? You can find out by listening to what your customers are saying online and offline, and by researching your target audience. Only then will you be able to lead them in the right direction. But you should also follow the young boy’s lead by being memorable and showing a bit of personality while you do it!

Explain the options

If you sell a lot of products or operate in a niche or complex industry, your website could benefit from content such as buyer’s guides, how to guides, FAQs or blog posts explaining your products, why customers might need them, who might benefit from each one, and how the products can solve your customers’ problems. Helpful content could be distributed via your email newsletter and social media, but it should also be on your website so everyone can see it. Whatever format it takes, it should be easy to find, and easy for first-time buyers to read and understand.

The important thing is to focus on the customer and their needs, rather than you and your product – make it all about how the customer’s life can be made easier. Think benefits rather than features.

Why should you put helpful content on your website?

In other words, why should you help your customers? So they will buy from you, of course. Because if they are having trouble making a decision, they will look for help – and if you’re not the one to provide it for them, they may go elsewhere, and therefore buy elsewhere.

Plus, if you have all the answers you won’t just be an extremely helpful company, but you will also be seen as extremely knowledgeable. You could even go the extra mile by writing blog posts around topics such as how to get the most out of a product, or news about the industry that may be helpful for customers to know. These articles may not help customers decide what they want to buy, but they will help you to develop a reputation for being an expert in your field. The additional content on your website could also be a great boost for your organic rankings, and well-written SEO content could help you to target search terms you might otherwise not rank for quite so well.

Finally, customers who have all the information they need about your products will feel a sense of control rather than confusion. Feeling in control is an important part of a good user experience, and a good user experience means a higher likelihood of conversion. You can find out more about user experience in my blog post ‘Website Interaction and State of Flow’.

If you would like any help with content creation, contact SilverDisc on 01536 316100.