Product mosaic marketing for freelance editors – or stop focusing on a sales funnel!
Stop Focusing on a Sales Funnel
Marketers talk a lot about sales funnels, where you get a bunch of people to purchase a no-cost or low-cost item, then get them to buy a higher-priced product and so on up to your highest-priced product. Fewer people will buy your highest-priced product (thus the narrowing of the funnel) but your focus is on scooping lots of people into the wide mouth of your funnel at the start.
I’ve played around with this a bit and while it might work for some people with some types of products, it doesn’t work for me. (I’m talking as an editor now, not as the owner of Club Ed Freelancers.)
Most writers who come across my name aren’t ever going to purchase my highest-priced product, which is a full developmental edit on a ms. And that’s okay. But I also want to help people who can’t afford my rates or who aren’t yet at the point of needing an editor. My goal in my editing career is not to book as many edits as I can, it’s to help as many writers as I can.
Hence my decision to stop focusing on a sales funnel, and why I’m a fan of the product *mosaic*.
Potential clients can get to know me through blog posts and LI posts, which are free, and they can also get to know me by buying one of my books about writing (and editing), or taking one of my classes for writers. All of these are much less expensive than a full developmental edit.
But “get to know Jennifer and hire her as your editor” is not the only (or even main) purpose of those products. They are also ends in themselves. Maybe one blog post is all a writer needs to see to fix a plot problem. They go on with their lives and never think of me again.
And that’s fine. Glad to help.
I don’t try to drive people from book to class to edit or anything like that. Sometimes they buy a book and then a class and sometimes they buy a class and then a book and then an edit or sometimes they do buy the edit first and then a book and then a class. Or sometimes they buy a book and then another book.
All of that is fine! I don’t care. I’ve tried to be thoughtful about how the various products fit together (like a mosaic!) to create a bigger picture of how to improve one’s craft. Some people will only pick up one piece; that’s okay! Others will want to collect the whole mosaic. I really like it when that happens but it is not the only “successful” outcome.
Thinking of my products as a mosaic instead of a funnel allows me to help different people in different ways. And it allows me to treat each piece of the mosaic as important in itself, not just another way to shove a client into a higher-priced product.
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