On Tuesday, we held a webinar, sponsored by PCS, entitled ‘Six strategies for a profitable future in magazine media’ with three excellent panellists: consultant and former Cosmo editor Louise Court, Andy Hill (MD of MNA Digital) and Phil Walker (MD of PCS).
My six takeaways from the event: 1. People before spreadsheets: as publishers, you can’t bring your vision to life without a great team. The people who work for you are passionate, so engage and communicate with them and bring them with you on the journey. 2. Content is king: we all obsess about platforms and technology, but creating content that is great, scarce and better than everyone else’s is what will get people to open their wallets. 3. Cherish your assets: to publish efficiently and to maximise your reach, you need to treat each story as a “package”, which contains all the content elements (text, pics, audio, video) and rights info, in one easily accessible place. 4. Innovate or die: there is huge competition for people’s time, so whether your brand is one year old, or one hundred, you need to demand attention, and you’re not going to be doing that by “dishing up the same old potatoes”. 5. Premium, not commoditised: publishers need to emphasise the value of the environment they provide and the quality of the content they produce. Operating at the premium end of the commercial spectrum is starting to pay dividends. 6: Be personal, but not creepy: we know a lot about our subscribers, so we should use that knowledge to serve up content we know they want, and also content we think they might be interested in.
Just a small flavour of what was discussed. There was loads more, and you can watch a recording of the webinar here.
