Put down the sunscreen and register before summer fever sets in
So, look, I know you’re headed on vacation in the next week or so, but we have an early bird deadline coming up for our first ever one-day Digital Magazine Publishing Workshop, and I don’t want you to forget.
If you want to attend for the ridiculously low price of $697, or the even more insanely low price of $497 when you bring a colleague, then you should register today.
Next week, you’ll be too busy watching fireworks on a beach, or buttering corn on the cob, and I know those things are very important (as they are to all of us).
But if you forget about our early bird deadline of July 14 because you were too busy squeezing ketchup on hotdogs, you’re going to be bummed. And you might put it off until next year. But next year might be too late.
If you’re a magazine publisher, or you work for a magazine, this workshop is for you. You will walk away more inspired than ever, and it happens on a Tuesday in August (August 2nd). A Tuesday! Not a weekend, but a perfectly good mid-week day you’d be sitting at your desk anyway.
Instead of checking off a few mundane tasks from your to-do list that you’ve been checking off for the last year, JOIN US in Boston and create a totally brand new to-do list that will make you and your company better and more profitable.
What do you say? Will you join us?
What you’ll learn at the Digital Magazine Publishing Workshop
My executive team and I will share all of our strategies with you, from the magazine editions that are critical in today’s publishing market to upsell opportunities for publishers who have digital editions to pricing, marketing, staffing, and more.
Because we teach it all in a single day, there’s no need for long hotel stays and no wasted time. Reservations for this one-day workshop that will change your business forever are now being taken on a first-come, first-served basis.
Here’s what you’ll learn at the Digital Magazine Publishing Workshop:
What American Magazine Readers Really Want to Buy
As the author of the nation’s largest multi-year magazine study, The Mequoda 2016 Magazine Media Study, we’ll show you that consumers still value print products, and for which types of magazines they specifically prefer it. You’ll hear about the attributes of app-based magazines that appeal to consumers. You’ll also learn that consumers are divided on which platform is valuable to them – underscoring the need for triple platform publishing. You even hear about trends in spending for both print and digital editions.
This data will drive your decision-making going forward and provide a foundation for every publisher at this event to understand how Americans view magazine media and their consumption preferences. You’ll use our study’s results in designing products consumers will buy, read and renew.
And if you have any questions about this data, the author of the study will be on hand to answer them, interpret the data in the context of their experience working with hundreds of magazine publishers, and help you understand what it all means and what you should do about it.
The Five Magazine Editions You Can and Should Create
You already know you need a digital edition of your magazine in order to make your content available when, where and how your readers want it. But did you realize that “digital” means different things to different people? It means you must have an iPad, Kindle Fire, and Google Play edition.
As mentioned above, Mequoda has identified a full five editions of your magazine that you must publish to survive in the modern era: print, digital editions on the Apple, Amazon and Google platforms, and web. Never heard of a web edition? It’s the most flexible, most widely available, most promotable, deepest version of a magazine – and 95% publishers don’t have one yet. The remaining 5% (The Economist, Time, The New Yorker, and our clients Biblical Archaeology Review and Countryside among them) know it’s the most forward-thinking edition possible: available on all devices, searchable, and the only edition in which you can directly promote specific articles from social media, search engines and email. We’ll discuss best practices for creating, delivering and marketing this edition.
We’ll also discuss how print media is still not only viable, but critical in a successful publishing system. Don’t forget, it’s not just about consumption but about distribution; without your print edition, you can’t keep your product legacy newsstand channels such as bookstores, grocery stores and specialty stores. Similarly, your three digital editions keep your brand in front of consumers on those platforms.
We’ll also discuss the attributes of each of these five editions, what makes each one special and how to market each one. Please believe me: It’s not as hard as it seems.
The Prices, Offers, and Incentives You Must Test Now
In this session, we put it all together for you from A to Z. We’ll share our data on decoy pricing and give you models that demonstrate the magic it delivers, discuss the details of orders and renewals for the different offers on the spectrum mentioned above, and show you how publishers exactly like you have profited from the strategies described here. In short, there’s much more to offers, pricing and incentives than there is room here to discuss them. How do auto-renewals impact renewal rates? Is there hope for a traditional pricing model? Find out in this session.
We’ll also walk you through a 13-week test program built on the same strategies we’ve used to build direct mail campaigns for decades. By the end of this session, you’ll understand all the variables and offer construction that still work in the digital age: hard and soft offers, introductory pricing, auto renewal, payment gateways. You’ll also learn the best practices that are required in a world where credit card continuous service is becoming the norm.
How to Run an Integrated Multiplatform Marketing Campaign
Yes, we’re a long way from the old direct marketing days. But that doesn’t mean a marketing campaign has to be complicated. First, using the offers we just discussed, we’ll discuss the radical differences between that old-fashioned direct mail marketing and the new email marketing, which allows us to promote a magazine 52 times a year instead of just two, four or six times.
We’ll discuss how magazine cover story selection can drive sales in these campaigns, and explore incentives, premiums, special issues and free reports – how all of these are used to drive orders in the digital age. And all of this comes with a very disciplined campaign framework based on a 13-week cycle so that marketing is literally managed with Six Sigma discipline. This approach allows you to run 52 campaigns efficiently, fights fatigue and maximizes overall circulation, revenues and retention rates.
How to Upsell Print-Only Subscribers into More Expensive Digital Packages
Remember, once you have digital editions of your magazine to sell, you can upgrade print subscribers smoothly using our contrast pricing strategy and our finely-honed renewal series. Your subscribers get handy unlimited access and convenient auto-renewals, and you get more orders at higher prices than before.
In this session, you get all the details mentioned above, and even learn how to work smoothly with the leading fulfillment companies.
A Step-by-Step Roadmap for Making the Digital Transition
We don’t recommend that publishers cherry-pick our strategies, or try to execute the Mequoda Method without the training we deliver in this workshop. So we’ll take all of the strategies you learned earlier and lay out a project timeline in which we identify all the milestones necessary for your transformation journey.
You’ll follow along through all the steps necessary for changing your production flow, and we’ll discuss how new bonus content like extra articles, videos and slideshows can be incorporated into your digital offerings.
We’ll also walk you through the process of becoming partners with Apple, Amazon and Google, how to select the right software, and how to troubleshoot the approval process.
You’ll even get a timeline for building a magazine website featuring all the features and functionality required for your profitable new system, accessible on all screen sizes and read in linear fashion. Everything from generating new issue announcements to promoting individual articles is included in this master schedule for your entire production, distribution, and marketing programs.
12 Case Studies of Publishers Like You Who Have Blazed the Trail to Success
At the end of the day, you’ll take home a list of 12 mentors, including those discussed above, as they execute this revolutionary publishing system every day.
We’ll discuss the product offerings for both B2B and B2C publishers on our mentor list, studying their platforms via a multiplatform brand wheel, and discuss content strategy, audience development channels, pricing and revenue strategies.
All of our case studies will be live, cutting-edge mentors that you can follow after the program to use as a benchmark set for setting your own policies and for developing test ideas – so you won’t be left behind as the new magazine world continues to develop.
This is also a great opportunity for burning questions and drilling down into the way our examples apply to you.
You know that the magazine industry is evolving at an explosive rate, and that traditional publishers must keep up to thrive, or even survive. At the Digital Magazine Publishing Workshop on Aug. 2, 2016, you’ll learn the strategies that hundreds of publishers already know, and that thousands more will be embracing in the years to come.
I urge you to register now, before all seats are filled. As much as we’d like to offer this workshop to more publishers, we just don’t have the time as we always put the needs of our 20+ Gold Member Organizations first – clients who have learned the Mequoda Method and value our help in implementing it for them.
