4 steps to generate Institutional Sales
Apart from being a year of great strife, 2020 also proved to be a game-changer for the publishing industry, especially considering the changes in the dissemination of information. Since the beginning of the pandemic, both individuals and institutions have continued to grow more invested in the value and potential of digital libraries.
As institutional sales bring about further business avenues, publishers are able to expand their outreach to larger and more diverse audiences with fewer barriers and inefficiencies.
Institutional Sales: The Power of Digital Libraries
Digital libraries offer a greater possibility and scope for institutions to generate sales. Every institution can have its own digital library on the Publica platform. With Publica, organizations are easily able to create a library from a catalog of books and audiobooks and offer it as a whole collection to other institutions. In this way, organizations are able to upload their content and build a brand image and tailor it to a specific audience. As businesses get ready to expand their business models and shift their approaches due to the pandemic, institutional sales have become a new way for them to grow and engage with customers.
Publica has benefited several different stakeholders such as government organizations, educational institutions, and nonprofits. For example, Publica offers university libraries the possibility of uploading all of their content on its streamlined and centralized platform, mimicking a virtual campus setting. Also, government organizations have been given access to digital books from hundreds of publishers found in the Publica catalog. They are able to purchase and consume them through a library license model. Publica has also been an asset to businesses allowing them to create corporate libraries that are able to make their content available to employees, collaborators, and families. For instance, employees have access to an extensive catalog of books of their interest.
During the pandemic, Santillana Argentina, an educational publisher, was able to increase digital sales of their textbooks through the Publica digital library. Also using the Publica platform is Paraguay Educa, a publically-funded organization that promotes technology and innovation. They intend to reach over 60,000 users by promoting reading for different audiences and covering diverse topics. They also offer teacher training and educational titles that include skills required for 21st-century education.
Organizations can create a complete repository of knowledge, information, and other learning resources for their audiences since the online library is tailored to the needs of any organization. Institutional sales are also proving to be a new opportunity to create Business to Business (B2B) sales within the content and publishing digital marketplace.
Institutional Sales: The Dos!
It is necessary to use a more systematic approach when generating institutional sales. The following 4 steps are fundamental to generating further institutional sales as they allow institutions to offer content directly to their customers:
Determine Who Is Leading Institutional Sales Today
First, it is useful to determine how a future sale will be made. When an organization offers their digital library to other institutions, it can choose one of two approaches to do so. This can either be done through people or teams that are indirectly responsible for making a sale or direct institutional sales.
If a publisher does not have the necessary infrastructure for making a sale, it should ally itself with relevant individuals within the organization to ensure that the sale is made. The people chosen for this must be extremely familiarized with the content they are trying to sell. Of course, it wouldn’t hurt if those responsible had contacts within the target audience because this would help the publisher get their foot in new markets.
In the case of direct institutional sales, publishers need to ensure that they build a strong sales team within their own organization and create strategies based on the various stages within a future sale: pre-sale, sale, and after-sale stages. Having this in mind will ensure a positive outcome.
Know Your Market: The Pre-sale of digital libraries
Publishers need to understand the depth and scope of their markets during the pre-sale stage of their digital libraries. In this way, the publisher is able to target a specific readership or institutional base with the appropriate content and information. At this juncture, it is important for publishers to define what type of institutions could potentially become interested in their content: governments, companies, universities, etc.
Planning And Strategizing: The Sale of digital libraries
It is easier to generate institutional sales on a platform where the public can view the content directly. This stage of the sales process requires careful planning and strategizing. Thanks to technology this is a lot easier to do nowadays. Publishers are now able to sell their content simply by giving access to a collection at the click of a button.
You can easily analyze and track your user reception data and analytics from your user database. In this way, you can customize your approaches accordingly. With the Publica platform, content creators and publishers are able to successfully track and interpret their business analytics and content reception with greater ease. Institutions can also customize their digital libraries with their logo, colors, and icons in order to keep the institutional identity intact.
Last But Not Least Plan For The Future: The After-sales of Digital Libraries
It is necessary to give careful consideration to the after-sales strategy of digital content. Generating and maximizing institutional sales takes a great deal of both short-term and long-term planning. This is so that institutions are armed with the necessary tools to not only make sales, but also sustain them, and build a readership brand.
It is essential to provide good training to those individuals who will be in charge of generating institutional sales. In this way, organizations are able to use the Publica platform and its content properly and profitably. It is also equally important to monitor and study reader data metrics so that content creators and publishers are constantly able to anticipate the needs of their audiences and tailor their approaches and sales strategies accordingly.
Today, organizations are in an opportune position because they are able to engage with their audiences by leveraging technology and building a credible brand of content online. As digital libraries seem to be becoming a norm and a constant in the publishing industry, especially in the “new normal” and post-pandemic world, it is necessary for institutions to take full advantage of the benefits.
Does your organization want to create a digital library and benefit from the new possibilities? Market and sell digital content without intermediaries when you set up an online store with Publica!
