Could Your Company Benefit from a Client Magazine?

Is i worth it?                                                                           Return on investment is something no marketing manager can afford to ignore. No matter how well conceived and executed a project, how brilliant the design or the copy, the most pressing question will always be: ”is it worth it?” While traditional marketing collateral promotes your services, and independent publications serve the readers’ needs, effective client publishing/client magazine targets the business opportunity in the middle – the ‘sweet spot’ – where client services and reader interest overlap. Companies that occupy this space can build a relationship of trust with their clients and deliver highly-effective marketing messages.

The challenge of client magazines                                                                                                                               Never forget that decision makers are a sophisticated and demanding audience. They will not respond to rehashed marketing material. You need to get under their skin to find out what article topics are going to get their attention. This means respecting your customers and thinking about them as readers who can turn to several other high-quality independent magazines if they find your magazine boring or irrelevant. Only then can you use your magazine to reinforce your company’s position as a trusted partner. This is the fundamental challenge that separates effective client publishing from either marketing collateral or trade publications.
Understanding this challenge is just the first step to publishing a successful client magazine. Next, you need to define what, specifically, you are trying to achieve. Cross-selling services and broadening the client’s customers understanding of the range of services your company can provide are common objectives, and ones where a good magazine can deliver outstanding results.
Publishing a high-quality client magazine can deliver significant benefits, but a decision to start publishing a magazine should not be taken lightly. This is a complex area requiring knowledge and skills. Producing one issue of a magazine is a challenge; publishing three or four issues throughout the year in accordance with a strict schedule of deadlines requires a high level of commitent.
So what can you do to make sure you get it right?                                                                                                 First you have to ask yourself simple questions like: -What kind of magazine do you envisage? -How much money are you willing to spend? -How many pages? -How often will you publish? -How many copies? -How much is budgeted for content (both articles and artwork)? etc., etc… A publication audit might help to overcome financial resistance. What are you producing already and what does it cost? Could you replace several low-impact newsletters and outdated brochures with a single high-impact magazine?                                                                Finally you might consider advertising revenue from your magazine. Financial resistance from the company’s management tends to disappear like fog in sunshine if a probability calculation shows that your client magazine can be published purely or partly by advertising revenue.