It’s been a contrasting start to the year for me in my role managing Bauer’s UK ePublishing business. While we’re making huge progress in some areas – we’ve got some cool launches and functionality improvements to our apps coming up – in other areas, things have been, well, a little ‘tricky’.
The performance of some of our digital magazines (judged in terms of downloads and sales) over the Christmas period and into 2015 hasn’t hit the heights we were forecasting. While we’re up year-on-year, particularly in subscriptions, what we’re not seeing is the kind of growth we were hoping for in single issue sales. We saw the expected seasonal spikes in downloads and sales between Black Friday and the end of January, but in comparative terms, those spikes were not as pronounced as they had been during the Christmas periods of 2012 and 2013.
We’ve made some swift moves to address that, moves that will improve our understanding of how our customers interact with our content. This includes signing a global deal with App Boy, a company which seems to offer a myriad of potential solutions to help publishers maintain (and grow) user engagement with their apps. I’m excited to be working with them.
I don’t want this to look like a sales pitch for App Boy because it isn’t, but I think having a strategic partnership with a company such as this is a positive move. What’s impressed me about them specifically is the intuitive nature of their console (CMS, call it what you like) and the range of marketing tools and analytics publishers can use to help develop a broader picture of the consumer and how they’re interacting with content on a very granular level (we’re not just talking about standard pushes and emails here, etc).
As an example, let’s take Q magazine, one of our better performers in the digital space. Using App Boy, we can potentially see how many people bought covers featuring a specific band (let’s say Blur, for argument’s sake) but no others. Then, if we know we have Blur content coming up in a future issue, even if it’s not on the cover, we can market directly to those consumers – within legal guidelines of course – letting them know there’s an exclusive interview coming up with Damon Albarn. Or that bass-player bloke who makes cheese. Whatever his name is.
The same applies for all other app users who we know like buying and reading specific areas of content, in whatever magazine they may have installed. Over time, feasibly, you can get to know which readers like what, build a database and sort your content marketing accordingly.
Abandoned icons
This is a way of addressing one of the major problems all digital magazine publishers face: that as soon as someone has downloaded an app onto their device, how do you keep them coming back? Too many users simply install, have a look around and then disappear, never to return (which is another metric App Boy can tell us about), their apps becoming abandoned icons on the screens of their devices that never get opened.
It also looks like it’s possible to use App Boy to pull feeds from related websites into our apps, thus creating our own continuous publishing scenario, something I’ve been hankering after for a long while. The theory is that continuously publishing content in-app would turn the app from something where new content is published once a week or month (traditional publishing) into a hub for someone’s specific interest, where they might find relevant news, features and more every day. You can then upsell to the paid magazine and, on the basis that people engage with your product more often, are more likely to sell digital issues as a result.
Yes, I know we’re talking Google Play Newsstand to an extent here, but the difference in this instance is we’re dealing with our own content and analytics / marketing integration, and not a platform provided us by Google.
All this leads to the question of what constitutes a magazine and what constitutes a website. I could write a whole feature on this, but rather than just take feeds and duplicate website content in the app, I’d like to think that switched-on editorial teams would create content strategies based on the needs of their readers, where one platform doesn’t cannibalise another and where native apps complement websites (and vice-versa).
I’m delighted that Bauer now has dedicated marketing and analytics tools in place to help grow downloads and sales. I’ll keep you informed on how it goes. Perhaps Christmas 2015 will see a return to the spikes of 2012 and 2013, with better user retention as a huge bonus.
Before I round off for this issue, I want to mention iPhone sales. I’ve talked before about the need to have a smartphone strategy in place. That’s even more important now, given Apple’s staggering iPhone performance in Q4 of 2014, where they overtook Samsung (75m devices sold versus 73m). Consequently, this is something we’re looking very closely at. We all know that iOS users are more likely to spend money than Android, so this has to constitute a big opportunity, especially if the trend continues.
Content strategy again will be vital here: I don’t feel an iPhone magazine has to have all the content you see in an iPad magazine, or be tied to traditional print deadlines. It certainly shouldn’t be a PDF replica, if possible. User experience is far more important on a phone, so you might use a tool like App Boy to determine the popular areas of content and major on those in your interactive app.
This time, let’s take Empire as an example. What would look great on a phone there? Exclusive trailer releases and vid interviews with ‘A-list’ actors would be cool. And most definitely, you’d use your phone to check out Empire’s reviews. Guides to what’s on where at cinemas around the country (that could be free) with upsells to Empire’s most authoritative reviews in the paid magazine. The possibilities are there… But, it needs to be done in such a way that any investment results in a profitable uplift in downloads and sales.
And therein, as is always the case with the digital magazine market at the moment, lies the conundrum. How to invest in and grow your product substantially and get people engaging with it daily, without destroying existing profitability. Urghhh!
