How a brand magazine can be the missing link in your content marketing

A printed brand magazine is a way for a company to strengthen its identity and promote its products or services by offering original, engaging content that informs and inspires readers. The content offers value to the target audience and often foregrounds the brand’s products or services in a lifestyle context, engaging with readers who can see their own lives reflected in the content.

Launching your own brand magazine provides you with a useful tool for building deeper connections with the audience through editorial-style storytelling rather than overt sales messages. Unlike traditional advertising, which focuses on promoting products or services directly, a printed magazine delivers value through engaging, high-quality content that reflects the company’s values, lifestyle and point of view.

You can also build a sense of community among advocates that fosters a sense of loyalty; custom publications that feature content showcasing and celebrating their fans help them to feel recognised and valued. 

A brand magazine offers several advantages:

• Storytelling comes first. Articulate a brand’s identity, voice and purpose in a way that feels real. Read more here. Storytelling through content is effective across both print and digital channels, so explore the full range available for a joined-up approach.
• Encouraging audience engagement. Foster loyalty by creating content that aligns with readers’ interests; this could be travel, motorcycling, wellness or fashion, for instance.
• Print holds attention. Magazines, whether digital or print, tend to hold readers’ attention longer than other forms of content, offering a richer space to raise awareness of the company’s ethos.
• Showcase expertise. A well-crafted brand magazine can position a company as an authority in its field by offering insight, expertise and opinion pieces.
• Soft selling. Nurture customer interest without relying on a hard sell by subtly weaving in products, services or experiences.
• Monetisation opportunities. Brand magazines can also include complementary third-party advertising, aligning with similar businesses and products that resonate with the audience and echo your own ethos. This could also include branded content, which further reinforces the storytelling element.

Ultimately, it’s not about broadcasting corporate messages, it’s about delivering content your audience wants to engage with, with your values seamlessly threaded into the narrative.

It’s important to distinguish a brand magazine from a product catalogue. Unlike a catalogue, which simply lists a company’s products or services, a brand magazine offers engaging narratives and meaningful content. Explore the differences between a brand magazine and a catalogue.

How do brand magazines fit into content marketing?

Brand magazines play an important role in content marketing, particularly when it comes to driving retention and building loyalty at the bottom of the sales funnel. They offer a unique opportunity for companies and organisations to foster a relationship with their audience, often blending digital and physical experiences in one cohesive platform.

As Nicolette Beard of Top Rank Marketing notes in ‘Print Magazines for Content Marketing: Pros, Cons, Brand Examples and Best Practices’: “A valuable piece of brand content doesn’t exist in a vacuum. In fact, custom content is such an effective medium for brands because it maps back to a broader narrative – the story a brand is telling about itself. Essentially, content exists to tell a story, which is why, for the right business or brand, developing a print magazine as an offline component of their content marketing strategy offers a unique way to solidify its relationship with its audience while building brand equity.”

Brand magazines can also serve as a useful resource for targeting potential customers higher up the sales funnel. By repurposing content from print into bite-size digital snippets, brands can attract a new audience while providing fresh and engaging content. You can read more about effective ways to repurpose content.

For luxury brands in particular, magazines – particularly in print – remain one of the most powerful ways to deliver narrative, reinforce identity and deepen relationships. As the Financial Times noted in April 2024 in an article titled: ‘Printed word proves its power for brands to promote their stories’, luxury houses like Chaumet and Cartier publish their own magazines, not as an afterthought, but as a flagship storytelling medium. These aren’t adverts; they’re cultural dispatches that reinforce heritage, authority and emotional bonds.

FT writer Milena Lazazzera explains: “... books and magazines produced by luxury brands are still very much alive, healthy and growing. Many of the best-known houses have their own magazines, publishing them up to four times a year. They also release books to commemorate milestones, such as exhibitions or anniversaries.”

You can read more about how effective luxury print magazines can be when it comes to communicating with the discerning – and changing – luxury audience. 

And it’s not just the luxury sphere: in June 2025, Microsoft launched Signal, a 120-page quarterly print magazine aimed at business leaders. The goal was to cut through digital noise with thoughtful, longer-form storytelling on topics like AI and enterprise innovation. In ‘Corporate storytelling goes analog’ Eleanor Hawkins acknowledges the trend and writes that “Microsoft, Hinge and Costco have created their own print magazines to tell their corporate stories, enhance their reputation and engage with hard-to-reach audiences.” She adds that its “part marketing and part strategic storytelling.”

These examples show that far from print fading into obscurity, companies are now embracing printed magazines, using them as a part of a wider marketing strategy to reach their audience with engaging content.

Creating engaging content

Brand magazines go beyond just ‘branded content’, which often carries a direct sales message. They serve as an extension of a business itself. As Nicolette Beard explains: “The content in branded magazines represents an opportunity for customers to explore a brand that they feel strongly about and one that they already connect with.”

To succeed, brands should ensure they really understand what their audience wants from a magazine in order to deliver useful and entertaining content.

For example, Dialogue’s magazine for Bentley Motors features lifestyle content that showcases luxurious global travel destinations tailored to Bentley’s ultra-high-net-worth clientele. Occasionally, these destinations are explored in a Bentley, subtly reinforcing the cars’ key attributes, such as sleek designs, comfort and technology in a real-world setting.

As with any digital content strategy, it is essential brands deliver what their audience wants. Data insights are old news in the digital space, but they can also inspire powerful and relevant print content. Tools like Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic help content creators understand consumer online behaviour and develop content strategies that work across all platforms. More advanced social listening tools such as Pulsar go even further by allowing brands to understand how consumers are discussing specific subjects online.

With this deeper audience insight, businesses can use the magazine format to explore themes in greater depth and create content that resonates on a meaningful level. Read more about using data to create a brand magazine.

Design that elevates your brand

While a brand magazine should reflect the essence of the company, it’s best to avoid resembling a piece of advertising. Instead, the design should draw inspiration from the business’s visual identity, such as its values and style, while allowing enough creative freedom to produce fresh and engaging content.

This balance can be achieved through subtle use of the brand’s elements, such as font and colours, complemented by additional typefaces and palettes that enhance visual interest without compromising brand recognition or limiting creative direction.

Maintaining integrity is also essential. If the brand is associated with high specification, professional photography, that standard should be upheld consistently throughout the magazine. The designer of your magazine must understand your audience and the medium, considering all aspects of a sensory experience which represents your organisation. Layout design should be carefully crafted to complement your brand, while paper stocks and finishes should showcase your content at its best. Read more about how Dialogue’s skilled team crafts content that aligns with your strategic goals and is designed for maximum engagement.

Know your readership

To some, the idea of producing a print magazine may seem ‘old-fashioned’ in today’s digital age. With the low production costs and easy performance tracking of digital channels, it’s easy to assume print no longer plays a relevant role in modern marketing.

However, this assumption often overlooks the audience. According to a global study by Two Sides, print’s appeal remains robust, even rebounding post-pandemic: 65% of Europeans and half of US consumers say they prefer books in print. Alongside this, nearly half of respondents admit they spend “too much time on screens,” signalling rising digital fatigue. These figures confirm that well-crafted print is not a nostalgic indulgence but a format that consumers actively choose for deeper engagement, credibility and respite from the digital deluge. You can read more about the power of print magazines.

Print also delivers greater impact when it comes to comprehension and retention. Research from a Norwegian university found that students who read printed texts scored significantly higher on a reading comprehension tests compared to students who read the same content digitally. This suggests that printed content can be powerfully persuasive – a key factor when you want your reader to move further down the sales funnel and ultimately become a brand advocate.

Print continues to be perceived as a more trustworthy medium, an increasingly valuable trait amidst today’s ‘fake news’ era.

Distributing your brand magazine

Within the current competitive omnichannel landscape, a printed magazine requires the same strategic approach as any high-performing digital content campaign. A data-led distribution strategy ensures a brand’s magazine not only reaches the right audience but does so cost effectively and with sustainability in mind.

You can send issues directly to your CRM contacts via a mailing house and even enhance the experience using thoughtful packaging like glossy gift boxes or recyclable paper wrap to elevate unboxing and reflect brand values.

It is important to reach your readers at the right time and place, so data‑driven channel selection can be highly effective. Use social listening and audience analytics to identify events, (a motorsport event or yacht show for instance), hotels or cultural hotspots that align with your brand and content. Then you can distribute issues precisely where they’ll resonate most.

You know your brand magazine is effective when demand allows you to sell via online magazine platforms as well. You can list single issues or subscriptions on ecommerce sites (like buyamag.co.uk or subscriptionsave.co.uk) to tap into true brand fans who might be seeking out your content marketing. You can even make it collectible, marking limited editions or creating themed specials to add to its collectability and appeal.

Ultimately, a brand magazine is a repository for great content – so why not repurpose it? Use standout features from your print magazine for blog posts, social media and SEO-driven pages to amplify visibility and nudge readers toward subscriptions and other actions such as enquiries and sales. A joined-up approach for your content marketing, with a print magazine at the heart and supported by content across platforms, is the most effective way of creating and distributing content.

While sustainability concerns are also often raised in discussions around print, it’s important to note that print magazines can certainly be sustainable, when manufacturing techniques, paper stock, efficient content production and targeted distribution are considered. You can learn more about Dialogue’s sustainable publishing, packaging and distribution process.

Brand magazines offer a powerful way to engage with your audience, encouraging a pause from digital fatigue and creating a more immersive brand experience. When marketing messages are delivered with subtlety, they become a fantastic marketing tool for brand building.

To elevate your business or organisation with a print magazine and a comprehensive content marketing strategy get in touch with Dialogue today.

References

Printed word proves its power for brands to promote their stories - The Financial Times

Corporate storytelling goes analog - Axios

Print Magazines for Content Marketing: Pros, Cons, Brand Examples and Best Practices - Top Rank Marketing

Reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension - Science Direct

Trend Tracker - Two Sides