This blog introduces the basics of a customer first 5 step marketing pathway that rights professional can use. The details are drawn from a session I was asked to do by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG).
This informative session was an introduction to marketing specifically for rights professionals. You can see the workshop via YouTube and the link below:
To summarise, in the session, Clare explored how adopting a customer-first mindset and drawing on tried-and-tested marketing strategies can help you enhance every stage of the rights sales process – from initial contact to long-term retention.
Read on for more information about the 5 stages of the customer-focussed funnel that is vital for all rights professionals. Consider great marketing and genuine support should look like for our clients and collaborators.
The 5 stages of a customer’s journey through the rights funnel
Stage 1: Segment and attract customers
It may seem obvious, but do you know exactly who your customers are?
Not just a name, job title or business name, but exactly who they are and what they interested in. Having a way to record this information is so important for finding and attracting customers.
If you haven’t already, start dividing your customers into more distinct groups, based around their common needs. These are often broken down into categories like:
- behavioural (how customers are behaving now)
- psychographic attitudinal (lifestyle, values, interests)
- demographic (age, gender, occupation, income)
- geographic (city, country, region)
- firmographic (industry, no. of employees, turnover, growth rate)
This process is called segmentation.
Segmenting your customers is a helpful way to differentiate customer types so that you can determine which segments you want to pro-actively target. It can also help you to differentiate the different ways in which you plan to target them.
Having determined which customer segments we want to target, we can then look at how we will differentiate ourselves from others in the market. This is called positioning. Positioning helps us to establish our offering as unique, it sets us apart from others who may be offering a similar product or service.
Stage 2: Match interests
Now we know who our prospective rights buyers are and what they might need, next, we have to make sure they know that we are relevant to them.
Typically, the marketing tactics at play here would involve contacting your targets with emails, newsletters, or social media content to show the relevance of your product or service, and how it will solve your prospect’s needs.
Your work on segmentation, targeting and positioning (see Step 1) means you are in good shape to determine the sort of messaging that will resonate with your prospects. For rights professionals specifically, we can add our rights guides to this stage. Also, the face to face pitching we do at Book Fairs. And finally, the follow up emails we regularly send too.
Importantly, in all of our content, we need to get really clear on our ‘call to action‘ (CTA), i.e. what do we want our customers to do next
Stage 3: Nurture your submissions
Up until now we’ve been in what’s known as the Top of Funnel or TOFU!
Hopefully, we will find that our calls to action have elicited some responses, and we received requests to review material.
This next stage is the point where our prospect is actively considering our offering – or in rights terms – submissions
It would be easy to assume at this point there is little we can do to influence our prospects at this stage. We will send them the material. They will review and they will decide whether it’s a good fit for them or not. Whilst that is true to a certain extent, there are definitely things that we, as rights professionals can do. Let’s support our customer in this process and increase our chances of success.
Firstly, we can really think about what we send to each individual customers, aka Customer-Centric Submissions – not just sending anything to anyone, or everything to everyone.
Secondly, we need to nurture. This means we are looking after those we have sent submissions too or been in contact with. Effectively, it is chasing! But, don’t think about it like that. Think about how you can nurture your relationship. Can you offer more helpful information or support to help with the conversion process?
Stage 4: Convert and close the purchase
To get down into this bottom part of the funnel, your prospective customer has signalled their desire to make a purchase.
Maybe they have made an offer or perhaps they have asked you what your terms would be for a deal. Either way, in order to get them across the line, you will likely have some negotiating to do. A great deal has been written about negotiation styles and tactics, and you will develop your own approach.
However, let’s move away from the traditional view that negotiation is about pressure. Think about taking a customer-centric approach to winning the business and signing the deal.
I think it is worth saying that negotiation is not a required part of the process. If you receive a fair offer, that matches well with your requirements, there is nothing that will delight your customer more than simply accepting it and moving straight to a contract! Establishing yourself in the customer’s mind as someone that is straightforward and easy to work with is certainly no bad thing.
Other times, however, you may need to negotiate. You may need to do a bit of bargaining. And you also need to get that contractual agreement. There can be a lot of steps and it can take time, but it can still be a positive part of your funnel and customer-focussed marketing, as a rights professional.
I always say that to get a rights deal over the line, the stars have to align. It has to be the right book, at the right time, for the right market. So, the odds of taking people to the next stage of the funnel for this particular opportunity are not necessarily high. However, the good news is that having taken a customer-centric approach to get to this stage, you’ve substantially increased your odds of scooping them back into the funnel again with a different project, even if this one isn’t to be.
Stage 5: Continue to retain customers and nurture loyalty
Once the deal is signed this is not the end! This is the biggest mistake rights professionals make: “deal done and move on!”
No!! This is the place to put just as much effort as stages 1 and 2. Maintain your customer focus for the whole duration of the relationship, because it is really powerful in the long run. It helps to nurture long-term relationships. It also makes future deals much easier, than starting from scratch and building it all up again.
Look at your workflows and systems to see how you can make this easier. Do you have a good rights management system to help you stay in touch? Do you record where each customer is in the funnel? Can this be made easier and not a chore?
The Customer-First Rights Journey
A natural way of marketing for rights professionals
This is a quick guide to the 5 stages in an ideal Customer-First Rights Journey. I think when we explore marketing for rights professionals, it is often obvious that we are generally very good at customer-centric thinking. There is almost a natural pre-disposition to be accommodating, but maybe there are new applications for these skills that we hadn’t thought about previously.
One final point is to remind you that it’s important to pay attention to all stages of the funnel. Whilst retention is vital, it’s not the whole story. We have to keep attracting plenty of new business at the top, and nurturing our leads in the middle to ensure we get a good number of deals flowing out at the bottom. All of it is made easier when you have the systems in place to support all of the marketing activities you want to do and you have the customer-focussed content you need.
Want to talk about more about this? Want a system that was built with customer-obsession in mind? Need something that supports every stage of the rights funnel described?
Get in touch with us today: info@rightszone.co.uk