Buyer’s Guides are an incredibly valuable addition to any Influencer’s website. Buyer’s Guides can:

• Generate new revenue from sponsorships.
• Become an integral part of individual content “microsites.”
• Draw additional traffic to your website as users seek to compare and contrast products.
• Help Influencers form a closer bond with participating companies.

Buyer’s Guides can be incredibly labor intensive and require significant coordination. Topics and questions need to be defined, potential participants need to be invited and sent reminder notices, responses have to be sorted and normalized, and finally the information needs to be posted live and maintained.

Before mBLAST, all these steps were customarily handled with a basic online form or via Excel spreadsheets, faxes, e-mail, phone calls, and even “snail mail.” mBLAST’s Buyer’s Guide platform solution automates the entire Buyer’s Guide process end to end via an online platform that is available to entrants and the host company Influencer 24/7/365. That’s right: Information in Buyer’s Guides can be updated automatically by the participating company, not by the Buyer’s Guide host. Our clients tell us the mBLAST Buyer’s Guide solution has eliminated up to 80% of the manual labor, time, and expense previously required for the administration of their Buyer’s Guides.

Many companies call a collection of simple company listings a Buyer’s Guide. mBLAST considers those Directories. Buyer’s Guides powered by mBLAST dip deep within a topic set, allowing users to compare and contrast feature sets via advanced filtering capabilities. They’re easy for companies to set up by using a step-by-step set of Preferences that help you make your Buyer’s Guides your own. You control the look and feel of the Guides that appear on your website, and all landing pages and logos used throughout the process further brand the end-to-end Buyer’s Guide process as yours.

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mBLAST's Living Buyer's Guide model takes the burden of data entry and maintenance off the host company, allowing users to enter, update and control their own data.


Key features of mBLAST’s Buyer’s Guide platform include:

• An entire Communications System that allows your customized e-mail messages to be sent to your entire audience or specific subsets of it.

  Communications are built right into the mBLAST system, and Buyer’s Guide organizers can quickly and easily distribute customized Invitations, Reminders, Deadline Extensions, and more to their entire contact list. mBLAST’s Communications area also allows you to target just a specific subset of your list, such as those companies that started a Buyer’s Guide survey but never completed it. This functionality allows your team to target these users individually or as a group, contact them for follow up, etc. You won’t find this feature in systems developed by in-house IT departments; unless users submit an entry, you don’t know about them and can’t do appropriate follow-ups. This same Communications System also alerts you to new entries in your Guides, so you’re always in the know about who is participating.

• Customizable Forms that let you create your Buyer’s Guides based on your specific needs. Those details can easily be copied and/or modified from guide to guide, saving you even more time on subsequent Guides.

  The “look and feel” of a Buyer’s Guide is important to the host company. You want everything about your Buyer’s Guide to have your branding and contain just the questions you want to ask. mBLAST’s extensive Preferences section asks you a series of questions that help you personalize your Buyer’s Guide with your company logo, set parameters around participation, and more. When the Guide is ready to be launched on your site, your in-house IT team controls how the information is displayed, giving you complete control.

• A complete Customer Service offering that is available via online chat, e-mail, and phone to answer any questions your participants might have about the process.

  Our clients rave about the professionalism, expertise, and promptness of our customer service staff. mBLAST’s professional support staff is available 9 a.m. – 5 p.m., EST Monday-Friday via live chat on the site and telephone, as well as via e-mail outside these hours. More than 95% of the questions from users are answered within 5 minutes, and all users are responded to within 24 hours.

• A simple User Interface that walks users through the Buyer’s Guide process step by step, allows them to save Drafts of their entries, and invite colleagues to participate alongside them.

  mBLAST’s simple registration process includes a user name and password to ensure security. Users simply register, fill out their basic contact and company information, and begin their entry. For subsequent Buyer’s Guides, users can log in and immediately begin filling out just their entry information, speeding them through the process. Two very popular features of our Buyer’s Guide solution include the ability for the user to save their entries in Draft form (eliminating any potential data loss) and the ability to grant other users access to collaborate on entries (aka, Invite a Friend).

• A comprehensive Payment System that interfaces with all of the top payment gateways.
• A robust Reporting System that automatically tallies results and tracks various parameters, such as overall participation rates, participation by company, and more – allowing you to easily track the success and profitability of your Buyer’s Guide.

See why more and more Influencers are turning to mBLAST to power their Buyer’s Guides. Subscribe now, or contact us to learn more.