Why You Need to Digitize Your Magazine in 2023

Published in

marketing-and-branding

4 min readNov 19, 2022

And tips to help you get started

Of course, nothing is compulsory. Let me start by saying that. But if you are considering making improvements to your magazine, it’s advisable to get it right first time. In this blog, I give you my take on digital magazines.

First question: is everything becoming digital?

The honest answer is: probably. We are increasingly connected to our devices. Printed matter, and above all its distribution, is becoming more expensive. The desire to be sustainable is also growing. But the need for an insight into reader behavior, your magazine’s impact and the return on investment for all your efforts mean that the transition to digital makes perfect logical sense.

Here are 4 solid reasons for digitizing your magazine:

1. Magazine insights are an advantage for you and your readers

2. Video is the new photography

Your Social Media timeline is increasingly full of videos. Companies are using more video content to convey their messages. A foreword from the director, a product demonstration, a customer testimonial — video is much more pleasant to consume than dry text alone.

3. Long live interaction

Digital opens up countless new opportunities for seeking out interaction with your readers. These include processing a survey, application forms, responses to articles, but also direct conversion to your website or webshop. You are actually able to engage in dialogue.

4. One-to-many becomes many-to-one

We are rapidly heading towards information overload. The mountain of content is growing at an incredible pace. Obviously, your aim is to provide your readers with content that is genuinely relevant to them. Digital Magazines enable you to fine-tune your content to suit your reader.

How? For example by organizing your email list by target group. Foleon offers the option of excluding pages by means of a token. Alternatively, by means of smart integration with LinkedIn content, we can also exclude based on the sector in which your reader is active. The statistics show that this form of personalization results in a 70% increase in reading time!

Synergy between print and digital Magzines

My suggestion that print is completely disappearing may be a slight exaggeration. Of course, print has some real strengths. If you are not yet willing or able to make the full transition to an online platform, there are countless ways of using print and online to reinforce each other.

For example, you can reduce the frequency of your printed magazine and supplement it with several digital versions. Or you can print a yearbook and publish the other editions online. I have seen lots of great examples in which the printed magazine mainly contains long copy, supplemented by a videozine.

How to start digitizing your Magazine

I was hoping you would ask that question. It’s always easiest to start from your current position. Ask yourself the following questions:

Do you already have a printed magazine?
What would the format look like digitally? Will it stay the same size? Or would you reduce the size and increase the frequency?
What formats will you use for your content? FAQs, interviews, long reads, videos, Q&As, top 10s?
And how will you distribute it? Do you already have an e-mail database? Do you have followers on Twitter or LinkedIn?
Now that you can measure everything, what will your goals and objectives be? And how will you measure that?

Pro tip

Don’t create your magazine over in a boring, static, non-responsive PDF. Use Foleon’s Content Creation Platform or a similar tool. With such a platform, you also get data about which section / page of the magazine has been read so you can learn and improve along the way. Even if you create an Interactive PDF, it still won’t be on par with the solution Foleon provides.

Author bio

Ritesh is a digital marketing manager with years of experience in driving growth. He’s currently the director of inbound marketing at Foleon. You can find more about him on his LinkedIn profile.

Resources

Originally published at https://storylab.ai on November 19, 2022.