5 Essential Tips to Making Your Brand Magazine Successful
Content marketing is a big business. Custom content spending on production and distribution is currently sitting at nearly $44 billion USD. Despite so much of information we receive digitally, many brands are turning to print to engage with their clients. 60% of B2B manufacturers for example, use print magazines as part of their marketing. This isn’t surprising.
John Deere Company—a manufacturer of agricultural, forestry and construction equipment—has had great success with its custom print magazine The Furrow. In the 100 years since its creation, the magazine has been printed and distributed in over 40 countries with over 1.5 million copies currently in print.
Few branded print magazines will reach the longevity of The Furrow. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be very successful. Regardless of your industry, what you want at the end of the day is for your employees and clients to be informed and entertained.
There are five ways to ensure your magazine is what it needs to be. Here they are:
Making Your Magazine a Success
- Develop a Content Schedule: Good content takes time. This is why it’s important to develop a content schedule. Make sure there are firm deadlines for when different parts of the magazine’s production are due. This will give your team enough time to conduct proper editing and add in anything that’s missing.
- Originality & Honesty is the Best Policy: To make a story appealing to your target audience, share an original story. It’s like sharing a secret, people crave new information.
It won’t be possible to always cover a new topic, but you can take an interesting new angle or perspective to make it feel fresh. Also remember, the magazine will be a reflection of your brand so ensure that articles are thoroughly fact-checked and avoid speculation.
- Learn about Your Foreign Audience: If your magazine is intended for an international audience, then you’ll need to do some additional work. Do research about your audience’s linguistic, traditional, religious, cultural and demographic details. Doing so will benefit you by making localization efforts easier. Articles can also be better focused to deal with issues most important to them; this improves engagement.
- Your Creative Style: People do a lot of reading during the day. Emails, internet, schedules and memos are all part of a person’s working life. You need to make your articles memorable if they are to be effective. This is where having your own creative style comes in.
By having your own style of writing, people are more likely to remember you and your articles. Do a little experimentation and see what resonates best with your audience.
- Save on Cost, Hire a Professional Printer: The cost of digital printing can really start to add up when a medium to large amount of prints are needed. An experienced printing service provider is what you need to make your brand magazine cost-effective.
The other advantage is that they also have their own team of graphic designers and proof readers. You can off-set some of the work and get your magazine printed with minimal impact to your team.
Creating your company’s own print brand magazine is a great way to communicate with your employees and your clients. It’s also an investment. Maximize that investment by ensuring the content within its pages is quality work. The magazine reflects your brand after all.
