You make decisions every day, but how often do you roll back to the basics, and the foundation of your business, by considering how resources are spent on production and distribution?
In today’s Strategy Spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda explains the three most important decisions a multiplatform publisher makes in their business.
Quick Strategy Tip of the Day from Don
If you go back far enough to the days of Ben Franklin, publishers had their own presses. And you don’t have to go back too much further than the 1960s to find publishers who owned their own fulfillment companies.
But I’ve been a magazine consultant for 35 years. When I came into the business and was a magazine publisher in 1979, you had two partners you depended upon:
- First, you had your printer, because nobody owned their own printing press anymore.
- Second, you had a fulfillment company.
Deciding who to hire for these crucial roles was two the of the most important decisions you could make. These decisions could ultimately affect production, distribution, and customer satisfaction.
That’s exactly how you should be seeing the third most important partner you depend on now, decades later: your website development company.
The biggest mistake publishers make is trying to keep website development in house, just like printing and fulfillment were at the dawn of time. And it’s a shame, because publishers have become accustomed to outsourcing specialties that they don’t have in-house. Many of them are already outsourcing accounting, human resource management and facilities management.
Outsourcing is not only economical, it provides a better product when tasks are assigned to specialists, instead of whoever on the team has the most free time.
No major publishers do their own printing anymore, and less than half try to keep fulfillment in house. For those who keep fulfillment in house, it’s a waste of resources, and we think it’s equally as silly to keep website development in house when you can hire a professional team. Even the largest publishers find that outsourcing website development will soon become as normal as printing presses and fulfillment.
That’s because a website development team should have a diverse skillset, between database specialists, designers, engineers, copywriters and project managers. And if you don’t have those people on your team, you should seek a partner who does.
Mequoda is the only provider in the market that specifically transforms magazines into multiplatform publishers. We have built our own Haven CXMS, a state-of-the-art SaaS tool built, owned and maintained by Mequoda to enable all the functionality that multi-platform publishing businesses need to be successful and profitable.
We provide these services under one roof, so publishers can focus on increasing revenues and executing on the strategic plan we devised together during the business planning process.
Schedule a 30-minute call with Don to talk about creating a plan for outsourcing your website development and management including a thorough exploration of both cost and revenue opportunities that can be powered by a 21st-century multiplatform publishing system.
