Buyers these days are buried in choices. A typical Google search generates millions of options. A harried grocery shopper looking for canned peaches, confronts dozens of choices. What’s a buyer to do? More to the point, what’s a marketer to do?

With overstressed buyers facing a sea of information, marketers are now starting to realize that providing more information isn’t the answer. Instead, more and more business owners are positioning their companies as concierge marketers.

Take a tip from the concierge
Most of us are familiar with hotel concierges; the helpful souls who are stationed just inside a hotel’s front door. They are there to answer guests’ questions about restaurants, shows or other local happenings. Their years of accumulated experience help guests cut through mounds of information and save valuable time and money.

A concierge can recommend the best restaurants because he’s been asked that question a hundred times before. So the hotel, as an added-value feature, offers the concierge’s services to its guests. Some concierges are so good they end up being a point of difference for the hotel versus its competition. It’s this experience and a company’s willingness to share it that is the cornerstone of concierge marketing.

What is a concierge marketer?
At the heart of it, a concierge marketer tries to simplify a buyer’s life. The concierge marketer offers a buyer helpful tips, tools and knowledge so the buyer can navigate through the mounds of available information and get straight to the point of making a knowledgeable decision. The best concierge marketer puts enough valuable tools in place so that the company positions itself as a wise and worldly counselor.

Some common tools
The first set of tools to consider as a concierge marketer are passive tools. These usually take the form of printed or online informational products. Using any of these, buyers can quickly get answers to their most nagging questions. These passive tools include:

• Tip sheets
• Booklets/pamphlets
• Free downloads
• Special Reports or White papers
• Checklists
• Buying guides
• Frequently Asked Question (FAQ’s) sections

One company’s website, the Original Mattress Factory www.originalmattress.com , offers several helpful tools including a guide to sleeping mattress dimensions and a tips section that help a buyer choose the right sized mattress. At my website, www.emergemarketing.com, I offer a “Marketing Lingo” section with over 200 common marketing terms and their definitions.

Interactive tools
But good concierge marketers don’t just offer these passive tools and call it a day. Instead, they give more. They offer interactive tools on top of these, to create dialogues with buyers. Examples of interactive tools are:

• Post-installation follow-up calls
• Customer clubs
• Company sponsored chat rooms
• Web-based surveys
• 1-on-1 customer interviews

One of my favorite interactive tools is Amazon.com’s “Wish List” program. While at the Amazon site, I can develop my very own “Wish List” of books, and then email it to my family members. Using this tool, my family knows what to get me for Christmas without having to ask, I get the Christmas presents I want, and Amazon gets the sales because they brokered this interactive transaction. Everybody saves time.

As you move towards using interactive vehicles, remember this: the best interactive marketing vehicles for your company are actual humans—your service reps. Great customer service reps, order takers or delivery personnel notice immediately when there is a void between a company’s product and the buyer’s experience with it, and work hard to fill it.

Next steps for concierge marketers
If you’d like to become a concierge marketer, first identify the most common information voids your buyers face. Ask yourself these questions:

• During which stage in the buying cycle are our buyers confused?
• What information do they lack?
• What customer questions does our service staff repeatedly field?

After you identify and prioritize the answers to these questions, you can then start designing tools to address the highest priority ones. Say for example, your buyers are confused about which elements of your service are outsourced and which are performed in-house. The concierge marketer might then develop an ad slick or PowerPoint slide that clearly identifies outsourced activities versus ones that are performed by your company.

Remember…
Today, we’re living in an ever-expanding universe of information. And it will only continue to grow. As a marketer, you can turn buyers your way if you alter your approach slightly. Act as their concierge and doors will open for you.

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Author Bio

Jay Lipe, aka the “Plan Man”, is the CEO of Emerge Marketing; a firm that helps growing companies improve their marketing. He is the author of the book The Marketing Toolkit for Growing Businesses (Chammerson Press) which is available at major bookstores and online at www.amazon.com. He is also a sought after speaker and seminar leader, and can be reached at (612) 824-4833 or lipe@emergemarketing.com .