14 Ways to Enhance the Marketing Power of Printed Magazines

But print has its own, often subtle, possibilities — possibilities that are often overlooked by advertisers, 22-year-old ad-agency media buyers, and even publishers. There are so many ways to take print-based marketing beyond just static pages in ways that enhance print media’s strengths in engaging and influencing people.

This is not about whether print advertising is better than digital advertising. They both have their strengths and their uses. Just as we publishers have learned to move beyond standard banner ads to various custom units, we need to help advertisers envision how their print campaigns can stand out and be more engaging.

Here are 14 features of printed magazines — call them technologies if you will — that can help you sell more ads and more copies:

1. Permanence: Digital media’s dynamism can accomplish wonderful things, but there’s also power in something that can be held, handed out, or hung on a wall. It’s amazing sometimes how impressed advertisers are when you offer to give them some extra copies of the issue or a framed copy of their ad.
2. Targeted Circulation: You can’t know whether a particular person will go to your web site or download your app, but you can guarantee that you will send that person a copy of your magazine? Think about the people who are important to your advertisers, such as CEOs, chief procurement officers, journalists, opinion leaders, and conference attendees. Include them on your magazine’s mailing list and tout them to your advertisers.
3. Public-Place Circulation: Perhaps the biggest challenge with magazines these days is getting them into the hands of consumers. Retailers are devoting less space to magazines (though for many it’s their most profitable category-go figure), and it seems harder than ever to get people to buy subscriptions. Free copies sent to the right public places-think fashion magazines in hair salons, fitness titles at gyms, and the million-plus copies WebMD magazine sends to doctors’ offices each month-can deliver the additional audience you and your advertisers need, along with exposure to potential subscribers. Some publishers turn their noses up at free distribution, but a combination of targeted and public-place distribution often results in a better audience for advertisers than does yet another gimmicky, bargain-basement subscription offer.
4. Sponsored Copies: Here’s where those free copies can get really interesting for an advertiser and for a publisher’s bottom line. Match up the right advertiser with the right list or location and you can get paid (in some cases, a lot) for copies that the recipients receive for free. But in addition to a sponsor and a targeted audience, you need one more ingredient: a vehicle for the sponsor’s message. And that means finding a suitable way to customize the copies. Print “technologies” 5 through 11 below show some of those customization options.
5. Wrap It: Many publishers use cover wraps for circulation promotions, such as to renew expiring subscribers or to offer subscription deals on sister publications. But they rarely present them to advertisers. Think about a wrap specifically for those chief procurement officers, or maybe a promotion for a new heart drug placed on copies going to cardiologists’ waiting rooms.
6. Band It: Belly bands (no, not the kind used in weight-loss surgery) are an effective means of delivering a targeted message at events and other venues that don’t rely on the Postal Service or the newsstand system for delivery. The typical belly band is several inches tall and wraps around the magazine so that the reader has to remove or pop open the belly band to read the magazine.
7. Stick It: Cover tip-ons and stickers are simple ways to put a message in front of a targeted audience. They can be especially useful for someone wanting to call attention to a particular ad or article inside the magazine. This is one form of customization that clients can, and often do, handle themselves; just be sure you make it easy for them to obtain multiple copies of your magazine.
8. Bag It: Polybagging enables publishers to include with a magazine everything from brochures to product samples. Meredith recently used polybagging to create a two-for-the-price-of-one newsstand promotion for titles having a similar audience. Polybags and envelopes are a great way to deliver targeted content to a valuable segment of your subscribers, such as a boating magazine creating a special section specifically for boat dealers.
9. Personalize It: Copies delivered via the mail are already personalized with the name and address of the recipient. Why not inkjet an additional message about a subscription expiring or about content inside that is particularly relevant to the recipient’s company or interests? Ad agencies can get copies saying “This copy is sent to you compliments of Mary Gonzalez, your Central Publishing advertising representative.” Some of the big auto companies take personalization to amazing levels for their owners’ magazines, with coupons geared to each recipient’s model, year, and nearest dealer.
10. Inserts: “Insert” is a fairly broad word involving anything placed into a magazine that is printed separately from the normal body pages. With the use of alternative shapes and substrates, scratch-and-sniff technology, and sound chips, inserts can literally have a distinctive look, feel, smell, and sound.
11. Gatefolds: Inserts having pages that unfold (because they are attached to other pages, not to the magazine’s spine) can highlight special content for your readers and provide “high-impact units” for advertisers. Gatefolds come in such configurations as Z-gates, butterfly, French door, roll-fold, partial (AKA bookmark), and double. (Warnings: Some configurations have different names. And some don’t work well in electronic magazine editions.) Check with your printer about its capabilities and specifications, such as page widths and the minimum basis weight of the paper. A lesson I learned the hard way: To avoid miscommunication or misunderstanding, create a diagram or physical mock-up of a gatefold for advertisers, editors, and printers, showing how it will fold, where it will bind into the magazine, and the width and content of each page.
12. Regional Versioning: Many consumer publishers create distinct versions for subscribers in different parts of the country to provide targeted advertising opportunities or content more relevant to the reader. In most cases, the vast majority of the magazine is the same, but additional pages or preprinted inserts are added in select regions.
13. Demographic Versioning: It’s not unusual for two neighbors to get slightly different versions of the same magazine. Perhaps one receives a renewal cover wrap because his subscription is about to expire. Or someone might get a special advertising section because she is a business owner or has a high income. Through the magic of selective binding, the printer can create these distinct versions and yet keep the copies in the proper mail sequence. (Demographic versioning is more challenging for publishers that use co-mail to minimize postage costs, so talk to your production director or printer before jumping into this with both feet.)
14. The Numbers: Some publishers waste time and money on processes that actually undermine print quality, such as providing proofs and going on press checks. Many publishers, even those with high-end publications, have found they get the best results when they focus on creating page files to industry standards and then ask the printer to “run to the numbers.” That means relying on the press’s technology and experienced press operators to match the colors as presented in the page files without publisher intervention or the use of imperfect printed proofs.