Creating a digital magazine requires the passion for content generation and zeal to satisfy your audience. If you possess these two characteristics, then this guide is for you.
Before you start creating a digital magazine, there are a number of aspects that require detailed analysis in order to achieve success. It’s not only about creating unique content; it’s also about what’s your long-term strategy to be sustainable and able to engage your audience.
With new competitors emerging every day, moving forward without proper planning is unfavorable as it may cost you all your precious time and endless efforts. Thus, to successfully turn your desire into a reality and produce a quality product, it’s essential to devise a well-thought-out and robust strategy.
To help you achieve long-lasting results and prosper, let’s go through some of the essential points to be considered before you get started.
Know Your Audience Inside-out
First things first, you are going to cater to the needs of your audience and all that is welcomed and appreciated by them is sure to bring goodwill. Thus, the more you know about them, there are more chances that you perform well.
Analyze whom you will be delivering the content, their age group, reading patterns, which magazine they prefer, topics they love to read about, expectations, likes, and dislikes.
Let your brain wander and find answers to all the possible questions — Are your users reading online? What are they reading? What are their expectations? Average time they spend on their devices? What demographics do they come from? And so on.
Choose Your Niche
Centered on your field of interest and requirements of the target audience, choose the desired niche. For example, if you’re in the app development niche, then your content should include tips on do it yourself information, some tutorials that they can watch and learn, and easy steps on creating the digital app on their own, etc.
Your niche may fall into a category of consumer magazine to approach the general public or a member magazine to get in frequent touch with your community say sports fans or music lovers. Or you may publish a business magazine to remain in constant touch with your employees, stakeholders, prospects, and customers.
Know Your Competition
Boost your enthusiasm and dive straight into a detailed research about your marketplace and the competition within. Know what are the leaders doing which differentiates them from others. What is their approach? What are their content marketing strategies? And all that is relevant to your business.
Try to get an edge over your competitors by delivering high-quality valuable content, adding interactive features, increasing customer-satisfaction, enhancing engagement, and being up to the minute. Best of all, identify the customer requirements and try to fill the market gap with innovative content ideas and creating an enthralling user experience to engage the audience.
Get out of your comfort zone and don’t leave any stone unturned to gain an in-depth understanding of your market before you move to selecting the right digital publishing platform to make your content engaging for the users.
Choose the Right Magazine Platform
Based on your target audience’s preferences and needs, decide which magazine platform you are going to select. Would you publish a website magazine or an app magazine or both?
A website magazine can be read by users through browsers and provides similar experience universally. It allows you to upload your magazine to the website and directly distribute to the users.
On the other hand, an app magazine is distributed through various App Stores and online marketplaces. These app magazines are accessed using the mobile devices and provide the advantage of personalized content and myriad of mobile-specific features for industries that include publishing, automobile and education etc.
Make sure that the distribution and delivery process is carried out smoothly and your magazine successfully gets in front of the consumers.
Devise Your Design Strategy
A magazine is meant to grab the attention of users; hence a great user-friendly design is a prerequisite. Assure that your magazine content is presentable on target devices, operating systems, and screen sizes. You may choose to hire a designer or utilize the services of magazine software.
While designing, you may choose to design from scratch or simply convert your static PDF into a dynamic digital magazine. Well, to optimize the use of the technology-driven innovations and make the most of available resources, it is suggested to separately design the digital edition of your magazine while using Adobe In-Design or similar which is compatible with digital magazine publishing software’s available in the market.
Design an impressive magazine with an attractive graphical user interface, clean layouts, and smooth navigation. Increase engagement and user retention by integrating multimedia, readable text, and lots of interactive features.
Check Available Finances
Expenses calculated ahead of time will not surprise you later on and save you of future nightmares. Take into consideration all the process-related costs say design, publication and marketing costs. It is also suggested to keep some additional savings for any unplanned incidents.
For designing, you may need to hire a new resource, partner with someone or buy magazine software. This will incur costs in terms of employee salary, service fees of magazine software, per publication fee, and others.
Also, frame a pricing plan for your digital magazine. You may choose to categorize the prices depending on the number of editions, associated features, and accessibility options (e.g. multi-platform).
Formulate Marketing Strategy
Ponder over your set goals and intended outcomes to frame a promising marketing strategy. Consider reaching your prospects or existing customers across different platforms. Promote your magazine through your website, emails, social media, and other emerging digital mediums.
Attract your audience by providing special offers, subscriptions, free issues, valuable information, and all where your innovative imagination takes you. Further, to be on the safer side it is suggested to broaden your vision and think a few years down the line.
Ready to Get Started?
For a phenomenal digital magazine creation, you’ll need to go the extra mile. It’s not really that hard – it just takes perseverance and time.
Think over the mentioned steps in the article and I’m confident that you’ll nail it and create your own space.
Contributed byhttps://www.magplus.com/
What steps did you consider before creating the digital magazine? Let us know in the comment section below.
