How to create a digital magazine

One of the most important principles of content marketing is to deliver your content to your audience wherever they spend most of their time. While printed magazines remain hugely popular (one in three UK adults consume print magazines every month), 82% of adults engage with magazine media digitally, so the time could be right to add a digital magazine to your brand marketing mix. A carefully considered content strategy, broad platform expertise, strong digital design and an accompanying cross-platform marketing strategy for your publication can provide an effective way to reach your audience.

Though there is some overlap in processes, creating, publishing and distributing a digital magazine has significant differences to creating a print title. Done correctly, it could help your content to go further than it ever could before.

The benefits of digital publishing

Digital magazines can dramatically expand your content offering. A straightforward print article made up of words and pictures can include video, photo galleries, podcasts, hyperlinks, polls, internal shortcuts and more in the case of high-performance digital magazine platforms.

This provides a new realm of creativity for writers and designers, while calls to action are trackable and encourage immediate responses. The digital magazine experience is measurable through metrics such as downloads, click-through rates and time on pages. This allows you to fully understand your audience behaviours and interests and means we can tailor content to suit.

And all this holds true for advertising as well. Digital magazines offer advertising data, providing real value. Being able to use data insight to reassure a sceptical prospect or a wavering customer makes a crucial difference in sales and retention.

What’s the best digital magazine platform?

Digital magazine technology is constantly evolving and keeping up with best practice to ensure success can be demanding.

It’s necessary to keep formats in mind because consumers access content on different devices, so user testing is essential. In a print magazine, a designer knows the size of the page and works with that in mind. However, in digital, designs must be formatted for desktops, tablets or phones. For example, a mobile screen can mean a lot of fiddly zooming and scrolling for the user if the design isn’t optimised. A responsive design that adjusts to the device means no-one gets left behind.

At Dialogue, we take a bespoke approach to digital magazine production and choose the right format for the brand and its goals. Whether it’s a page-turner digital edition, an online content portal or microsite, or an app, we have experience across platforms such as PageSuite, Mag+ and InDesign Publish Online to ensure a high-quality experience throughout.

How does distribution change?

A digital magazine removes the expense and time of a physical supply chain, with some cost savings as a result, but you’ll still need to invest in a digital distribution strategy.

Create a strategic plan that targets your audience and complements the publication, especially around the point of first launch. Find out more here: What you need to know about digital magazines.

Every digital magazine will require a different strategy, but you could turn each new magazine into a launch event, complete with teasers beforehand via direct mail and social media. You can turn the spotlight on each of your features in turn on your social media channels as well, or target them to specific audience segments through advertising.

A regular email newsletter is another great way to distribute your digital magazine, especially if your digital magazine is a paid-for member benefit or the magazine is kept behind a paywall to retain exclusivity. Stories can be selected and shared to your audience with direct links to the relevant pages. You could even use personalisation to tailor which digital magazine content is sent to users based on their specific interests.

Case study: The Atlantic

Established in 1857, The Atlantic has featured a spectacular array of some of the world’s most prominent writers and cultural voices, including Martin Luther King, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Einstein, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain and Barack Obama.

The magazine has significantly expanded to include a digital edition as well as a well-regarded website, daily emails, a podcast and social media channels.

The print magazine is published 10 times per year, while the website and social media channels are in constant operation. The digital magazine is closely aligned with its print counterpart, but it has advantages over it even though it is a straightforward pageturner. The launch of a new digital edition is highlighted directly to subscribers by an email that includes a download link. Many of its individual features are also promoted to the public by social media, with the website allowing the opportunity to access them directly. Subscribers get unlimited access to the digital edition and the website, while non-subscribers can see a small number of articles on the website per month.

This approach can be seen replicated across a vast number of fields and industries. It offers the existing reader easy access to high-value content while providing an easy way to attract fresh prospects as every new issue’s content is discussed and shared.

The benefits of a digital magazine

Helping your content find its audience is within easy reach, and the benefits this offers for future-proofing your brand can be just as valuable as the savings in time, money and carbon emissions (although our article Are printed magazines sustainable? offers more on how that really works).

If you would like to see people go from awareness to commitment to your brand too, a digital magazine and a good strategy around it can be powerful tools.

Find out how a digital magazine could align with your brand’s content strategy, or contact Dialogue to see how we can elevate your content.

Resources

82% of adults engage with magazine media digitally – Magnetic

The Atlantic magazine