How to manage multiplatform brand development
Successful publishing companies have reinvented themselves over the last decade into multiplatform publishers. The most successful of these online publishing companies deliver any information the customer wants, in any form the customer wants, whenever the customer wants it. As a result, the publisher’s potential audience has exploded.
A multiplatform publishing strategy is an extremely profitable way to turn a print publication into an online publishing machine. Take a piece of information, alter it, deliver it through a different platform, and you have created a new product to reach a new area of your market while keeping costs under control.
Online publishing companies must do these three things to be successful:
• Offer users many products on many platforms. Recognize the Internet as a place to recycle, reuse, and republish information in many different formats to save on material costs, maximize customer satisfaction and increase revenue.
• Offer users a free, robust online content experience. Lots of valuable, fresh content will keep users returning to your site again and again, allowing a publisher more opportunity to cross-sell them into other product platforms.
• Offer users a personalized marketing experience. A publisher’s website or network of websites should become a digital marketing machine and act as the basis for the publisher’s entire online strategy.
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The Mequoda Method is proactive in that the publisher engages customers in a conversation about their interests and needs. Successful publishers generate online revenue by selling either advertising/sponsorships or physical information products—books, magazines, newsletters, live events, DVDs, CDs, etc. Many sell both.
Publishers can leverage their websites — whether advertising/sponsor-driven or product/user-driven — to transform a special-interest magazine, newsletter, newspaper or website into a multiplatform media empire.
In the end, the more content you create means more content for search engine optimization (SEO), which allows Yahoo!, Google and MSN to send more traffic to your online publishing site, thereby, increasing revenue. It’s a never-ending cycle, as long as you continue creating new content.
