Motive: Digital mags shaking things up for marketers

by Robyn Daly (@robyndaly) The internet has become a real scratch patch for old gems. I had a giggle over one from 2007 on the future of digital magazines.

It’s a Content Marketing Institute interview with Marcus Grimm of NXTbook Media in the US. At the time, it was pretty cutting-edge, but seven years on it’s a reminder of how far we’ve come. Well, some have.

The gist of Grimm’s argument was that digital magazines are worth considering if they’re an off-shoot from print. PDF versions of print magazines with a bunch of videos and flash elements were his idea of a digital publishing Pavlova.

Following the vision

Following this vision, consumer publishers the world over are eking out sales by slapping a PDF of an entire mag into digital format and offering it at a fraction of the price. In South Africa, Media24’s gone one up on everyone else and is bundling digital versions of their mags and selling to consumers as a monthly subscription.

But the potential for digital publications is way beyond the PDFers. They’ve evolved into interactive, extravaganzas conceptualised and built from the get-go for the platform. And, in the content marketing world, there is so much opportunity for this medium I’m hopping up and down with excitement as I write this.

From an editor’s perspective, digital magazines give instant feedback because they’ve got a backend like a treasure map.

Deep-dive metrics

The best-in-class platforms give deep-dive metrics, pointing to what content readers are actually consuming, what’s ho-hum, and what’s off the mark. There are stats on what’s being shared and to which platforms, how much time people are spending and so on. Think Google Analytics on steroids.

The vagaries of a print-publication reader survey with tick boxes and respondents muddling Getaway and Men’s Health magazines (yes, it happens! Readers can be a very confused bunch!) are gone. Online, Big Editor is watching every mouse move.

Tennis Tuesday was doing okay until the editors started snooping around the metrics.

Platform insights radically improved readership

They used platform insights to radically improve readership from one issue to the next, simply by noticing that readers were honing in on stories about tennis players’ lives and the funny, silly things they get up to. This changed their cover strategy (leading with celeb-style stories) and shifted the content bias.

The results were almost instant: readership rocketed by 72.8% in just one week, interaction was boosted 250% and social shares went up 76%.

These insights are gold in the brand world, too, because once marketers and their content teams know what customers want, they can tie it up neatly with product.

A click away

Have a look at iFly magazine, the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines magazine which, as its tag suggests, gives readers “reasons to travel”. And while you’re browsing the travel stories, drooling over the visuals, gratification is just a click away: see a destination you like and you can nip through to ticket sales, or hire a car for the journey.

Built in Flash, this must cost a bomb but, from the get-go, KLM reaped the rewards of the investment. Early research, three issues after launch, revealed it was the best marketing tool the airline had ever used to sell repeat tickets and that the click-through rate of iFly was higher than any other online campaign from KLM.

The airline is still sticking with this tactic, now on its 37^th issue.

Digital lookbook a biggie

In the UK, digital-magazine platform hosts are riding the online shopping wave and churning out interactive, shoppable digital catalogues and magazines for brands. These are great for fashion brands and the digital lookbook is a biggie. If readers like something, they click on the product and they’re hooked into the shopping portal. As they browse their magazine, they can add and remove items from the basket, then check out when they’re done.

Battle-of-the-bulge retailer, Spanx, which is well-known for its armory of corsetry, found that an online, shoppable catalogue bolstered sales conversion rates by 81% and gave the total order value a boost. Some issues of the Spanx catalogue have added content such as bra-fitting tips, but they are really just the online shop re-skinned.

Certainly, there can be a tighter connection between content and sales: Sweat Shop’s summer lookbook, for example, adds useful content such as how to prepare for race day or how to choose a running watch.

I’m just giving you a toe-dipping of what the digital magazine ocean looks like: as online shopping gathers momentum in SA, the next big opportunity for content marketing is around the corner.

Robyn Daly (@robyndaly) is content director of Narrative, a content-marketing media company.

“Motive” is the new by-invitation-only column on MarkLives.com. Contributors are picked by the editors but generally don’t form part of our regular columnist lineup, unless the topic is off-column.

— MarkLives’ round-up of top ad and media industry news and opinion in your mailbox every three work days. Sign up here!