Branding

Branding refers to a medium to long term pro-active strategy that helps to create a positive, quality oriented image of a business in the eyes of its clients. Publishing houses, authors and illustrators can benefit enormously from this marketing strategy.

Today, each business and every company, even in publishing, has to manage their image and their brand in order to stand out and be noticed amongst a multitude of similar companies.

Branding – for a publishing house, author or illustrator, branding is most often developed on the B2C (business to customer) market by working on one’s image related to readers.
That said, the B2B (business to business) relationship shouldn’t be overlooked when an author, illustrator, agent, advisor or the publisher begins working with another publisher, a producer, service provider or even a museum. The language and the actions to follow in order to develop positive branding are different depending on whether one is dealing with the final consumer (B2C) or another business (B2B).

Our field, the “authors’ rights market,” involves a B2B relationship. It’s a crucial field in the publishing world and we work to help establish and maintain long term partnerships.

Content

The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as follows:

Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

A content marketing strategy can leverage all story channels (print, online, in-person, mobile, social, etc.), be employed at any and all stages of the buying process, from attention-oriented strategies to retention and loyalty strategies, and include multiple buying groups.

As explained in the “branding” section, language and presentation techniques have to be adapted depending on who they are addressed to, whether it’s a business or an individual consumer.

Based on our experience in the publishing market in France and internationally, our consulting services and training programs offer clients and trainees (authors, illustrators or publishing houses) the possibility to communicate using strong content linked to their publishing brand, showcasing their individual business or publishing house on the B2B market, thus providing their authors’ rights with added value.

Strategy

A good action plan that hopes to reach medium and long term commercial objectives takes into account not only diversification, but also editorial trends in the B2B market. The authors’ rights market is at once an internal, national and an international market. The strategies put into place will therefore vary depending on the specific goals of each project.

We are able to analyse and study an exciting variety of author market types. We’re motivated by the diversity of the markets to accompany our clients with knowledge and passion, helping them to make the right strategic choices.

Creativity

Last but not least! There’s a lot of information out there in the B2B market and businesses all possess the same data. Market research is identical, the same analysts are used again and again and often the strategy is to “do what everybody else is doing.” The B2B market isn’t based on impulse buys, but there is a certain amount of room to manoeuvre that is often ignored.

The only real way to stand out and be successful is to discover, amidst the plethora of shared information, some unique and original inspiration that hasn’t been used before. How? By adding creativity to B2B communication strategies.

This final point is what has made our company a pioneer and a leader in the French and international markets, through audacious and innovative strategies and marketing techniques.