10 Marketing Ideas for Your Magazine

You’ve put your design team to work, to craft the ultimate digital magazine experience. You’ve got a seamless, easy-to-use interface (thanks to mag+); complete with animation, videos, and delightful ways for readers to interact with the app. Not to mention, your content sings.

But if you haven’t put a solid marketing strategy in place, all your brilliant work is essentially wasted. With platform challenges to overcome, it’s more critical than ever to have a thorough — or shall we say saturating — approach to marketing your digital magazine.

Here are ten readership-boosting strategies to get you started.

1. List segmentation. Create a separate email list for each area of interest in your magazine. This makes it easier to target readers with specific reading tastes and convert them into subscribers.
2. Include a subscription offer in every email. Every email you send should have a prominent digital subscription offer that clearly tells the reader the benefits of subscribing.
   
3. Affiliate marketing. There are two great ways to use affiliates and not enough publications are doing it. The first is to reward existing subscribers with free issues or subscriptions for every reader they bring in.
   
   The second is to work with influencers in your space and give them a cut of new subscriptions. Affiliates are a great tool for finding like-minded people and turning them into subscribers.
4. Leverage your social media pages. Whether you are active on Facebook, Instagram, or any other social media platform, utilize them as a medium to reach your potential audience and inform them about the latest issues or information. Ask them to opt for digital subscriptions and tweak until it starts converting. Also, run ads on social media channels, mostly used by your ideal readers. Run A/B tests and determine what works best for you.
5. Have a great offer. Make sure your digital subscription price is so good that it’d be crazy not to say yes. And dangling a free tote bag as a present never hurts. You may work with sponsors to create great contests and giveaways and promote digital subscriptions.
   
6. Native advertising. There’s more than one flavor of native advertising. Use sponsored content, branded content, advertorials or in-feed ads on the websites your potential readers love.
7. Offer all types of different subscription options. The digital era is all about options. Why not give your readers a range of subscription choices from a single issue to multi-year subscriptions.
8. Reach out to lost print subscribers. If you’ve got a corresponding print edition, take the list of people who didn’t renew and send them an offer to try a digital issue free of charge.
9. Track and analyze. Track the marketing efforts you’re undertaking and double down on the ones that are working best for you.
10. Go big. Bundle a bunch of the strategies above to create an awe-inspiring approach to launch or relaunch. If you’re suddenly everywhere, your target audience is sure to take notice.

Spending time, effort and a bit of money on your marketing efforts is the only way to ensure you’ll earn readerships for your wow-worthy content.