Digitally Marketing a Regional Magazine

In our brief to market our regional magazine we will be designing a billboard and creating a radio advertisement however I wanted to research into how regional magazines developed their marketing campaigns in the digital age.  This will give me a broadened outlook as to what regional magazines have included in their larger advertisements which will help make our radio and billboard advertisements more succinct to draw the public's attention.

Website

This is most common for regional magazine to be marketed. Websites are the easiest digital platform for all ages to use, creating an easy access source for older demographic.The audience who find genuine curiosity organically search, convert visitors to email subscribers.

A more high budgeted and popular magazine, like The Economist for example have a rotating ad at the top of their home page that speaks to both digital and print subscribers, asking “Which Economist reader are you?”Later down the home page, you’ll find a “refer a friend” promotion, offering access to their digital in exchange. In print sales The Economist UK edition lost 3.5% however in digital sales grew 72%.

In comparison, the website for Cheshire Life Magazine, doesn't contain those interactive savvy features.  The content isn't as organised, you get lost in different features on one page, so the information so there is new pieces of information jumping out at you.  because regional magazines aren't as well known this makes it quicker for a first time visitor of the page to get some understanding of what the magazine is about.  To add to this the subscription advertisements are further down the page as you scroll so the user has an understanding for what they're signing for

Email

Digitally subscribing to a magazine, if not automatically will always include an offer in your emails to directly target your audience. With the direct address to the subscribers it is convenient for their use and knowledge of new source of entertainment.  

Social Media

The use of social media in promoting regional magazines is a 21^stcentury medium to promote another.  For example, Cumbria Life Magazine featured a prominent promotion for the digital edition on their timeline.  Advertisements are circulated around Twitter and Facebook timelines, which encourages the idea that the magazine can be accessed wherever and whenever digitally.  Searching on my private Twitter for various regional magazines almost all had Twitter accounts and shared special features of what would be included in the upcoming issue.  They encouraged interaction with their readers including feedback and responses, which will enable them to grow and publish stories their readers are interested in.    

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YouTube is an incredibly popular marketing tool with all kinds of products advertising.  The user-generated content encourages small business owners and companies such as regional magazines to advertise.  Also due to the free content and upload makes it easy to access. It is a portable app in which you can do both upload and watch on various devices like smart phone or tablet 

Example of advertising on YouTube from Cornwall Living Magazine

Newsstand

Apple newsstand is the leading source for the vast majority of digital magazine buyers. Other options you may also have already considered include Amazon, Google and Zinio. I have seen a couple of  regional magazines on Apple newsstand however you have to manually type the name of the magazine for a hit being not the most popular general bought magazine.  Even further with the digitalisation of magazines, in the U.S,  Zinio, best known as a traditional newsstand, has launched a Netflix-style program called Z-Pass, in which the consumer pays $5 per month for any three magazines.   

Apps
“Free” magazine apps that have no actual free content are something consumers hate. In that free content, you have the opportunity to sell subscriptions and single issues.  The free apps there is the opportunity to promote one another. This is generally through suggestions to related apps or once you have downloaded the app advertisements for another free app with come on your notification targeting the audiences attention in more than one way. The rise of smart phones and tablets I am not surprised to find my local magazine, Wolverhamtpton Magazine available on Newsstand for iPad, to reach a larger audience.  

Magazine Codes and Conventions

The promotional aspects of magazines used specific terminology to meet specific standards, this is to understand the connections and techniques industry standard magazines use to sell their product.  With this, I can incorporate these techniques into my regional magazine to increase its professionalism. 

Promoting a magazine

The institutions can do so much to make a magazine sell but the magazine company themselves have to make a product worth buying.  Due to the decline in print based magazines, we want to promote our magazine in a way to reverse this effect and investigate the ways from preventing a loss in sales. The promotion of a magazine is one of the key elements in the sales and success of a magazine.  We will use one of these strategies in bid to increase the popularity and overall sales of our magazine.  The promotion may also add to the content of our magazine.

Placement of Magazines

Due to the decline in the print based magazine industry I wanted to see the sales techniques which institutions use to ensure their magazines are bought.  Essentially the institutions are also affected by the decrease in profit.  

The placement of magazines in a shop is not prioritised by the retailers due to the decrease in sales.
Before the recent digital age, magazine users generally purchased their magazine in a bookstore, supermarket or at a newsstand, which stocked a large variety of different magazines.  Currently, some of those big name bookstores have either gone out of business or they have cut their locations back dramatically and other places that sell magazines, have cut back on the amount of space they use in the store for selling magazines.  Although with regional magazines supermarkets are actually key part in their sales and many regional magazines choose only to be distributed in supermarkets.

For example, (based on a study from The Guardian of how many people till buy magazines)only about 5% to 10% of the magazines they have in the store actually sell.   But now, the large bookstores have chairs and benches to sit on and coffee shops in the store, people don't buy the magazines like they use to.  They just sit there and glance through them.

Depending on the particular genre of magazine, it will be at the average eye line match for its target audience.  I have circled the differentiation of the magazine genres to shelf.  For example; children magazines tend to be on lower shelves,  the adult magazines with risqué content tend to be on he top shelf and pop culture magazines are usually in the shoppers average eye line. This also protects under age children from access to restricted material, as well as being easy to access. Typically, with regional magazines, you rarely see them placed with other genres.  They are usually placed near the payment tills in a shop or at the entrance/exit. This is because people do not generally have an intention to buy them, but by placing them in these locations promotes an impulse buy or when you're waiting, it's something to look at to pass the time and then decide to buy.

The Decline in the Print-Based Magazine Industry

The majority of regional magazines are print-based therefore,  before I start planning my regional magazine I wanted to know how and reasons why the overall distribution and sales of print based magazines has declined. Regional magazines include different features so by knowing what people have an interest in, I will adapt features to fit my regional magazine.

With the increase digital platforms and convergence of media, it is more efficient and easier to access magazines on your personal device. This is the most likely explanation as to why the print based magazine industry has declined by 18% overall subscriptions with a 10% overall fall in 2011.  432 UK print magazines closed between August 2011 and July 2013.That means for every 100 magazines published in August 2011, 15 were closed within two years.  142 magazines have been launched in those two years, but seven have already closed since and that still means there are 290 fewer print magazines in the UK now, than there were in August 2011.

There have been new pitches, inventing apps which replace the magazine on tablets and electronic devices. Alternative magazine formats on electronic devices include; PDF: fixed aspect ratio layouts; HTML. The Times and Vogue apps, for instance, do as good a job in delivering the daily newspaper now as the paper version. With the delivery of the basic information these apps enable the user to organise their own interests by having a section of their most-read topics, thereby creating a more user-efficient magazine. Most aspects of these apps are free and are more beneficial for those struggling financially.
There are major benefits of ads being seen in the tablet rather than paper format. More and more  magazines are moving from a print-first production process to a digital-first process.



The Increase of particular print-based magazines
Although the overall sales in the print-based magazine industry have recently fallen, some small magazine companies have found an increase in buyers, whilst these larger companies, such as Vogue have lost sales.  I was surprised to find that the most sold magazine of 2015, according to Better Retailing, is TV Choice which has sold over 1 million single newsstand copies.  The magazine predominantly focuses on pop culture gossip, the target demographic stereotypically being young women and mothers.  However the basis of the magazine is a TV guide and so the elderly may be high buyers, being that they generally won't know how to look for TV listings in the guide digitally.

My choice of media product

This year for my A2 media studies product I am creating a print-based regional magazine.  This idea initially was attractive to me as it was another way I could put our creativity into instead of doing another moving picture. I am aware of the decrease in people buying print based media as we have moved into the digital age but we wish to challenge that. 

The brief:
To create the first four pages from an original regional magazine(if done as a group task, each member of the group to produce an individual edition of the magazine, following the same house style), together with;

•  a radio advertisement for the magazine 
•  a billboard advertisement for the magazine.