How to make more money from marketing books and publications
Publisher seeking more revenues from your markets? Predictive analytics could open new horizons for you.
Publishers the world over know just how difficult it is to make a decent margin. This is because most publishers rely on third party retailers to generate most of their business. The problem with this approach is that you don’t know who your end reader is – or how much they value (or not) what you produce.
Free white paper for publishers wanting to grow margins
In a recent article, consultancy group Accenture defined a process called “predictive analytics” to help any company generate better returns from their sales and marketing. Here at Red Page Consulting, home of A Brand Day Out, I have taken a good look at this article and have written a free white paper on the topic for publishing companies which you can download here, with my compliments. You don’t even have to register your details!
Or, if you haven’t got time to read how to increase your publishing revenues…
If you haven’t got time to read the piece, let me try to explain. Predictive analytics is a management process whereby you examine your “descriptive” analytics (your conventional marketing and other data), agree internally on a consistent approach to that data, and then use this information – combined with field information/segmentation etc to predict certain outcomes algorithmically.
Put simply, predictive analytics allows you to future model your different market segments to determine various “what if” scenarios. After a thorough assessment, you can determine how market growth, shrinkage or stability affect the performance of your publishing portfolios.
Predictive analytics lets you manage underperformance out of your business
It can be surprising what is thrown up by this process: sales discounting issues; individual staff performance problems; problem customers; renewal problems in certain segments; completely failing product ranges…
Using predictive analytics to model the future, you can define different approaches to your marketing and your pricing to ensure revenue growth by segment (rather than the traditional publishing model of one price – or price point – fits all.
Value-based pricing is crucial for publishers
Pricing is of course crucial. Publishing companies are often averse to the idea of pricing out of a price point. Many indeed are unable to comprehend the concept of “value-based pricing”. But in a world where a 1% change in price can leverage an 11% increase in profits (assuming volume and fixed costs stay the same), the folly of not understanding value-based initiatives is starkly revealed.
But top management needs to “buy in” to make it work!
The key to the successful implementation of predictive analytics in marketing and pricing is for top management to commit to the process and to ensure that all data analysed is agreed beforehand. The Accenture authors call this a company-wide agreement to “one version of the truth”.
No deviation: every department understands and agrees what is being assessed at the beginning. Which means that all future decisions – both comfortable or not – are all taken objectively and with the company’s best interest in mind.
The white paper tells you more than I’m able to in this brief blog. Please download and take time to read it yourself – or see other useful downloads for publishers on our downloads page. And, if Red Page can be helpful to you in implementing the process, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
