A buyer's guide is a piece of content that walks a buyer through choosing a product in a category, such as an applicant tracking system or a SOC 2 compliance tool. It explains the features that matter and the ones that do not, the trade-offs between approaches, pricing models, questions to ask in a demo, and the mistakes buyers make. It sits between an ultimate guide, which teaches the topic, and a comparison page, which names specific vendors. For a SaaS company it reaches people who are already planning to buy.
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What to include
- Who the category is for, and who should not buy it yet
- The main approaches or types of product, and when each fits
- Features that matter, ordered by importance, with what good looks like
- Pricing models and the costs buyers tend to miss, such as implementation or seats
- Questions to ask vendors, and a short evaluation checklist
- Where your own product fits, stated plainly
Writing it so it is trusted
A guide that concludes every buyer needs exactly your product reads as an advert. The guides that get used and shared admit trade-offs, including cases where another type of tool is a better fit. That honesty is also what lets you be specific about where your product wins.
Buyers increasingly ask AI assistants the same questions. Clear sections that state criteria, trade-offs and fit are easy for those systems to draw on, and give them your framing of the category.
Example
Admitting who the product is not for
A fictional ATS, Hirecove, publishes a guide to choosing applicant tracking software. One section says teams hiring fewer than a handful of people a year may be fine with a spreadsheet. The guide gets linked from a recruiting newsletter because it reads as advice, and the evaluation checklist becomes the page sales send to prospects.
Common mistakes
Making it a feature list
Buyers want to know which features matter for their situation, not a list of everything your product does.
Hiding pricing
Pricing is often the first question. Explain the models even if you do not publish your own numbers.
Frequently Asked Questions
A buyer's guide covers how to choose in a category. A comparison page sets named products side by side. Most SaaS sites benefit from both, linked together.
It can describe types of product without naming vendors. Link out to your comparison pages for named comparisons.
Keep reading
- Comparison Page: A page that compares two products side by side, written for buyers searching “[product A] vs [product B]” in the last stage of choosing.
- Ultimate Guide: An ultimate guide is a long, comprehensive article covering a topic from basics to advanced practice, meant to be the main resource readers need.
- Bottom-of-Funnel Content: Content for buyers who are choosing between products, such as comparisons, alternatives, pricing and integration pages, built to turn searches into customers.
- Commercial Intent: Commercial intent marks searches made by people researching a purchase, such as comparisons and “best” lists. For SaaS, they are often the most valuable.
- Brand Voice: Brand voice is the consistent personality in a company's writing, how it sounds across content, product and support, while tone adapts to each situation.
- Case Study: A case study tells how a real customer used a product to solve a specific problem, with the situation, approach and results, as evidence for buyers.
- Checklist Content: Checklist content turns a process into a list of steps someone can tick off, such as a site migration checklist. It matches searches from people who are about to do the task.
- Content cadence: Content cadence is how often you publish, set at a rhythm your team can sustain.
