Every business – publishing industry, corporates, retailers, and others – needs a digital presence today. It’s evident that the hastened digital transformation brought on by the pandemic will likely intensify in the coming years, alongside unveiling of the true power of disruptive technology waiting to turn the game on. Let’s explore new ways to engage readers and reignite your business revenue in 2022, through immersive online magazines. Have you conveyed the current trends to your authors and editorial team?’
Digital magazine publishing has been experiencing exponential growth since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has accelerated the ongoing transition to a digital, immersive space. The dramatic shift in online magazine consumer behavior will not just continue but also accelerate with time and technological advancements. Whether you’re new to digital magazine publishing or an experienced online magazine creator, we’ve got your back as we’ll explore proven modern methods for you to engage your readers with shoppable experience, consistency, and brand loyalty.
As of today, the average attention span of humans is 8 seconds and it’s said that readers often lose interest in just 10-20 seconds. The dwindling human attention span shows the lack of focus on a task or object, which is hard to re-generate for online magazine publishers with ‘overwhelming’ marketing options. The difference in the demands of millennials and zoomers is negligible; they want content that’s credible, personalized, engaging, and able to solve their problem. All you need is to focus on ways to turn your audience into active participants with major engagement opportunities, supplemented by digital magazine software that meets your modern-day demands.
What do your readers expect from you in 2022?
1. Shoppable experience
Although digital magazine readership is consistently on the rise, most consumers access their favourite forms of content via their mobile devices, according to a recent report. This suggests they are seeking out content on the device in their pocket more than through any other means. For a truly mobile-optimized, seamless experience for your consumers, you may want to build a magazine app and adapt it to an interactive interface to make smartphones your first priority.
Shoppable experience refers to reducing friction in user activity and providing a better user experience. Since smartphones are on the rise, you can upload content that automatically adjusts itself to the size of the device’s screen. Or, you can prefer magazine apps. You may think it’s expensive to build an app, but that’s made easy with the right magazine software. While many offered to convert PDFs into digital magazines that can be accessed via web on mobile phones and iPads, certain advanced magazine software take the experience a step further. They enable you to publish magazines in the form of an app. Using such software unveils the true power of magazine publishing as you’ll be enabled to directly launch the content on magazine apps, with no hassles or coding needs.
2. Personalization at scale
In the ‘digital-first’ economy, several brands – large or small, traditional or cutting-edge – are driving significant growth. But the question remains: how do they unlock this massive opportunity? For almost all Gen Z and Millennial consumers, digital interactions should feel easy, fast, and ultimately satisfying. In other words, personal. To achieve personalization at scale, you must have a deep understanding of your customer and real-time, relevant, connected, and actionable experience data.
Integrated web analytic tools can help your writers and marketers gain an in-depth understanding of user behavior and usage statistics. To instantly connect with your consumers, you can also leverage social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. Also, you can utilize maps and positional context to deliver geographical services. This way you can invest time in learning about your consumers and then streamline the data dissemination accordingly. With high-velocity content and automated workflow, you can optimize campaigns and ensure that the content creates valuable connections. Alongside, you must ensure to solve consumer/customer queries in direct and immediate ways via a real-time interaction point such as online/mobile customer support, AI voice chat, et al.
3. Intuitiveness with interactive components
Subtle interactive components in your digital magazine are cool, but can turn nasty if heavily utilized. Most of the time, readers leave due to lack of a simple and friendly experience. So, keeping things intuitive could enhance their reading experience. One can capture users’ interest by making use of interactive widgets, videos, animation, GIFs, 360-degree views, web links, and many other interactive elements. When people decide to engage with your content, they want to enjoy their time, so you may want to avoid using auto-movements such as auto-scroll carousels, as they can divert the focus away from your content.
With Magplus’ mag+Now product, you’ll be able to design responsive content with high interactivity. You’ll have more widgets available here, such as panorama, image sequence, and many more! Don’t worry about the time and effort required to make this happen successfully, as mag+Now is the most simplified yet advanced version of magazine software. This means that all the options, features, and tools are right at your fingertips. All you need to do is click a few times, maybe just two, to include multimedia in digital magazines from anywhere.
4. Credibility and consistency
Readers are mostly active on Google and prefer the first two to three links to read and collect information; these top-ranking links are considered for credible experiences. Digital magazine creation is one thing, but making your publication earn credibility from users is another. Once you’ve earned their trust and continue doing that, with time, they’ll more likely become your permanent readers.
To rank above your competitors on the best web search engine, your team needs SEO experts and content marketers. With their expertise, you can reach your prime goal, i.e., to improve the click-through rate on organic search results. All you need to do is to optimize your magazine headline, meta tags, and content (including image and video), and try to build a strong structure of internal and external links. Use any SEO keyword tool to find your primary keyword, secondary keywords and long-tail keywords, and implement them on your page content. When you create shoppable content and run a readable magazine, the internet starts talking about you. Your role as a magazine publisher is to make sure your delivery is credible, unique (by incorporating interactive elements), and consistently solving their problems or showing trendy reading topics. Remember: It’s more about better engagement than higher engagement.
5. Real-time engagement
Now that you’ve attracted people to read your content, here comes the engagement factor. Keeping your users engaged is a challenge for digital magazine creators. To make sure your deliveries satisfy your consumers’ expectations, you can implement some proven go-to marketing strategies. Two such important tactics are in-app notifications and push notifications. In-app notifications can be pop-ups or can be listed in a place that’s easily accessible, such as by having an icon on the top-right corner. Push notifications play a major role; they can also be shared with users irrespective of their screen time. Learn more about push notification campaign ideas here.
Pop-ups can be annoying if they are less relevant to the customer and their experience at your site/app. As you wouldn’t want to lose conversions, your pop-ups must be personalized. This means you need pop-ups to display content that’s more individualized based on the customer’s experience. That’s when dynamic content comes into play, which is a form of content that dynamically updates or changes itself to appear more relevant to the reader. The more relevant the content, the higher the retention power.
6. Instant access to desired information
With fast and easy access to great content, online magazines are gaining traction and consumers love reading them. Magazines often make the readers feel desired, light, and breezy with the unbreakable flow of immersive experience that the magazines offer. You must’ve heard someone close saying that “it’s my favorite magazine, mate!”. Does this mean they are also more likely to make purchases through your magazine? Yes, it’s possible.
Now that you’ve permanent readers, they are more likely to turn into subscribers because they already like being your readers and trust your offerings. As we all have been experiencing a rapid change in consumer demands, organizations need to adopt agile operating models to quickly respond to change. Here comes the role of magnetic advertising and subscription – also two of the most important sources of revenue for a magazine. Having strategies based on these, you’ll be able to kill two birds with one stone: being agile and satisfying consumers with the desired information and being able to monetize your content as well. Read more on how to make profit from the ads here.
7. Content of all types
Last but not least, diversification in content is the key to your readers’ hearts. Being able to provide content globally, it’s also your responsibility to embrace the diverse nature of digital magazine readership that could be accentuated and then followed by other brands across the world. Magazines today are read by a diverse group of readers based on age, gender, and sexual orientation. With more effective communication come more opportunities for your digital magazine that may help you reach new readers– and potential subscribers.
Creating a digital magazine isn’t just a one-step method but a consistent approach to keeping dwindling consumer attention engaged with your immersive, portable content across your app, website, or microsites. While it’s onerous to quickly deliver what the change prompts, but not impossible! The year 2022 is more about building trust and standards, offering unsaid desideratum, reigniting readers’ interest, and increasing the revenue with new marketing strategies. We’ve always believed that quality content attracts readers, and today we need to bring an enhanced audience-first approach to certainly breathe new life into the magazine publishing industry.
With Magplus, you can create and distribute content to consumers on their personal devices. Our custom app development software will enable you to create mobile apps supported by Apply app store, Android Google play store, and Amazon app store. Our service will tackle the entire process of creation and submission of your app to the desired app stores. Magazine apps look interesting, but can be cumbersome and costly. Those who already have publish-ready PDF content can use our PDF to HTML conversion tool to convert your plain PDFs into fully responsive content that’s mobile- and desktop-friendly.
If you’ve plain PDFs or any form of content that’s worthy of being published in the form of an online magazine, we welcome you to Magplus. If you want to capitalize on ‘magnetic’ strategies and make every experience shoppable for your end users, we can help you from creation to distribution and tracking of your app or website powered by Magplus. Get in touch with us today!