Digital Publishing Series, Part I: Marketing Benefits

[Máire Walsh]

Over the next few months, Next Steps Marketing and the Better Paper Project will present a series of blogs and webinars on digital publishing. This information will help publishers understand how digital publishing can have positive effects on building revenue and audience. Within this series, we will include the environmental impacts and benefits of using digital vs. print. In this installment, we focus on the marketing benefits associated with digital publishing.

Your print publication is your calling card, but digital content can be the passion driver. In essence, your digital magazine or premium can move your audience to take action while creating engagement and community.

Consider the following:

• You can use the digital publication—either the entire issue, or a portion of the issue—as a “teaser” to promote the print publication.
• Companies including Hearst Publications are now getting 50% of all subscriptions from online sources. To do that, you need to increase the arsenal of online marketing you have to sell those subscriptions. Getting attention online involves three steps: Building your audience, engaging that audience and then marketing to that audience.
• Digital publications build brand better. Think about it. The reader is cocooned in an environment that you have expressly made to showcase your voice, your content. Websites tend to be more chaotic, and people go to them mostly via search, find the information they are looking for and leave.
• An interesting study by O’Reilly Media found that offering ebooks for sale did not cannibalize their print book sales; they simply found new readers from offering print books. If this finding extends to magazines, then it follows that actually selling the digital edition of your magazine may appeal to different people than your print magazine.
• MPA has researched the effect of online promotions on print publications, and found them to enhance the print promotions.
• Online promotions work best with online products. You can use your website to promote something that is online, allowing for a direct connection between product and promotion.
• With a digital publication, you can add things like polls and calls to action that your readers can immediately engage with, allowing them to more closely relate to your product.

In Digital Publishing Series, Part II, we will discuss advertising benefits.