5 questions to determine if your company needs a custom magazine

Here are five key considerations you should take into account if you’re looking at producing a custom magazine for your company.

Do you sell a lifestyle?

If you sell products that fit within a certain lifestyle (and most companies do), then creating your own magazine allows you to paint the picture of your customer’s lifestyle and where your product fits in. The average reader spends 50 minutes with a lifestyle publication. This is far longer than is spent on one particular advertisement, even if seen more than once as reader’s flip back and forth. With a custom magazine, you are in control of delivering the entire lifestyle picture. Next time you’re in a hotel, check to see if they are producing their own magazine. Hotels often have excellent examples of bringing relevant lifestyle information to their patrons, who have often chosen their establishment based on an image they have of themselves.

Are you looking to expand your brand?

If you need to reach a new demographic or geographic area, a custom magazine is an excellent way to enter the market as a friend to your new potential customers. You arrive in a beautiful package of interesting information and your brand is immediately associated as one with their interests in mind. Magazines are an intimate, tangible experience for readers. They touch, feel and retain the information provided. It’s the ultimate branding experience.

Is information delivery a key part of your business?

If you are an association with a membership, then being a resource is a fundamental aspect of the business. By providing members with a magazine, you’re providing them with the relevant information they need in a format that looks good on the coffee table, easily stores on a shelf, has longevity and can be passed around to friends. In any instance where your business is a resource, careful attention should be paid to the package it’s delivered in. The ability to pass it around easily is a great way to grow a membership base.

Do you need to increase customer loyalty?

Of course you do. Everyone needs loyal customers. Sometimes you need to provide some incentive to keep them loyal. Often people are loyal to a business only until a new one comes in and appears to serve their needs better. The relationship between you and your customers needs to be strong enough that they feel personally attached and would experience guilt over doing too much business elsewhere. A custom magazine provides a little insurance by offering information your competitor might not be providing and keeping your brand front and centre in the form of a magazine, which is a medium proven to be effective at forming attachments with its readers. A magazine is a gift to your customer that says “we care enough about you to bring you the information you need to know and you can get while you’re curled up on the couch.”

Would you like to be positioned as the expert in your industry?

People want to do business with the experts, the best and most respected professionals in their field. This is because there is an inherent trust that the company or individual would not be held in such high esteem if they were not legitimately a credible source of valid information. Be the place your customers go when they want to talk to an expert. A magazine that delivers highly customized and relevant content to your customers that’s accurate and data driven makes you the trusted problem-solver.

Keep these questions in mind when you are deciding whether a custom magazine is right for you. They will help you define the objectives of your marketing effort and establish your measurable goals. Keep in mind, with the new technologies in printing available it might be more affordable than you think.

Beyond magazines

When you hear the words “custom publications”, magazines is often the first kind to come to mind. Magazines are the most familiar type of custom publication on the market, but far from the only and not always the best one to serve the purpose at hand in print or digital formats. It’s key to identify the goal of the custom project and then suit the type of project to it. Here are a two other types of custom work that serve distinct purposes.

Books

A beautiful coffee table book cannot be replaced by any digital medium. The combination of world class photography, glossy thick paper and well presented words on a lot of white space makes a slick first impression. If the business has a lobby, a book could be the perfect method of delivering that extra upscale feel to the operation. In particular, if the product for sale is expensive (such as a house, car or boat), a nice hard cover book featuring the lifestyle and history of the company makes a memorable custom gift for special clients. E-books are a great option for those who want to disseminate a lot of information quickly and easily with less expense.

Advertorials

I seem to see these less these days, although they are a great way to make use of a full or double page ad buy. Done well, they can tell a story that captivates readers and has them spending much more time with your advertisement than they otherwise would. Plus, advertorials can be repackaged for online use, printed as part of a brochure and used as content on your website to maximize the text.

Print or digital, magazine or otherwise, it’s most important that the format serves the goal.

The web has its own place in content marketing

While print definitely has its role to play in a successful content marketing strategy, so does the web. With options that seem to be expanding daily, companies need to figure out the best way for them to reach customers across all platforms efficiently, while staying true to their brand.

What is content marketing?

Whether you call it content marketing, custom publishing or branded media, these marketing terms refer to the development, production and delivery of information designed to build a relationship of trust and loyalty with the sponsor’s customers, so they regard the sponsor as the vender of choice when they make purchasing decisions. This is accomplished by providing content that meets the needs and suits the tastes of the sponsor’s target market. It serves the interests of the audience, rather than overtly plugging products and services the way ads do.

The benefits of the web

Web content marketing generally involves providing information that is interesting and relevant to a specific demographic on a corporate website, social media, blogs, microsites, ebooks, white papers, webcasts, digital magazines and enewsletters.

The main benefits of incorporating the web into your content marketing strategy are interactivity and flexibility. Creating a web presence is relatively easy to start and frequently update, and it enables you to begin an ongoing dialogue with your prospects and customers.

By providing online forums, allowing people to post replies to your blog posts, and becoming active on social media sites such as twitter and facebook, you add an element of interactivity that isn’t available in print mediums such as magazines. You can display your personality, create a dialogue and establish bonds with your customers in a unique way.

Because there are no printing costs associated with adding content to the web, there is a greater flexibility in being able to update your content more often. You can do more testing and make changes as needed, thereby keeping things fresh and encouraging customers to visit your website more frequently.

Enewsletters are a great way to keep in touch with current and future consumers and drive traffic to your website and generate feedback. They can also be tracked to display behavior patterns and capture data.

As with printed elements of content marketing, the sales aspect the majority of your web content should be somewhat subliminal and the editorial overtly valuable. While product descriptions and sales pitches certainly have a place on your website,  genuine efforts to entertain or educate your client base with blog posts, enewsletters and twitter posts will be rewarded in a more loyal and profitable following.