Using a Master License to Harness the Power of Other People’s Audiences
You have a service in high demand. You have neither the will nor the desire to work more or hire or manage additional employees. You are confident that the transformation you provide to your clients could be effectively delivered by other experts to their clients if they used the methodology and materials you have developed.
However, reaching those other experts means creating a new marketing machine—learning where they hang out, the language they use, the pains they have.
Some of you may be up to the challenge of growing an entirely new audience to sell licenses to. But many of you are not. You just want to keep doing excellent work with clients you love.
Other People’s Audiences
Let’s bring on "Other People's Audiences" (or OPA).
Using OPA is particularly effective for several reasons:
Trust and Credibility: Audiences have built-in trust and credibility with the person or organization they already follow, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates compared to cold outreach or marketing to a completely new audience.
Cost Efficiency: Building an audience from scratch can be time-consuming and expensive. By leveraging OPA, you can reach a large, engaged audience without the need for extensive marketing budgets or time investments.
Targeted Reach: People or organizations with established audiences have done significant the work to understand their followers.
No doubt you have seen many OPA strategies -- guesting in podcasts, guest posting on popular blogs, collaborations, even tagging someone on social media. These are all common OPA strategies used to share your message directly to an established audience in a way that adds value to them.
Rather than creating a new marketing machine to license to potential licensees one at a time, wouldn’t it be great to reach a whole audience of them?
Organizations and Networks
The success of leveraging OPA hinges on finding the right partners whose audiences are aligned with your offer, creating a win-win scenario that brings value to you, the host organization, and the audience.
Organizations and networks are always looking for ways to provide more value to their membership, especially opportunities to acquire new skills to become more profitable and that enhance members' credentials and marketability.
This brings us to the master license. With a master license, you provide a license to the organization that permits the organization to sublicense your materials to its members.
Master License
The beauty of the master license with an organization is its efficiency.
Instead of negotiating dozens or hundreds of licenses, you have one.
Instead of tracking payments from many licensees on different schedules and amounts, you have one.
Instead of confirming compliance with the restrictions of many licenses, you have one.
Yes, you might leave some money on the table. Just as you leave some money on the table when you convert a custom service to a product or productized service. But the return is increased sales and a shortened sales cycle. The overhead of managing a master license is many times reduced.
What does the master license look like?
A Master License Agreement (MLA) covers the same issues as a single-use license, including legal, financial, and operational terms, except it has additional provisions regarding sublicensing. The sublicensing terms may include requirements about sublicensee qualifications, uses, and fees. As with all major agreements, it is crucial for both parties to carefully negotiate and tailor these provisions to their specific circumstances and needs.
Using a master license to access Other People’s Audiences is another way for you to crack the licensing nut if creating the market and infrastructure for a traditional licensing program isn’t right for you.
IP is Fuel 🚀
Erin