Online Magazines

Media and marketing strategies are like a jigsaw puzzle – for the picture to be complete you need all the right pieces to fit together. But, for a lot of retail brands hoping to create customer loyalty and up-selling opportunities, there’s an important piece of the puzzle that’s missing.

They need a marketing vehicle that connects their e-commerce web sites, social media pages, blogs, premium clubs, and traditional advertising.

I am talking about a digital brand magazine packed with entertaining lifestyle content that attracts customer attention, associates the brand with the satisfaction of customer interests, and leads loyal customers to more purchases.

Here are three companies using variations on this concept to influence customers:

• A flip book from New Era Caps
• A microsite Sherwin Williams Paints
• A flip book from grocery chain Hannaford

Custom brand content can be packaged in digital magazines, custom apps, print magazines, microsites, and a variety of other formats. It’s all custom media and it helps your brand to become the best source of information on the lifestyle interests of your best customers and prospects.

There’s a lot of talk about the current and future explosion of video usage in online magazines. Take a look at Steve Smith’s recent article, Magazine Video Streams Up 90% in 2010, for some exciting numbers from major technology provider Brightcove.

Here are three key points from this article that quantify how video viewing and production have increased in the past year:

1. “Among its magazine publisher clients, Brightcove streamed 190 million videos in the first quarter of 2010, up 90% from the 99 million video streams during the same period last year.”
2. “In terms of “player loads” or the number of times a video player’s assets are loaded onto a page in order to make them playable, magazines had 1.2 billion player loads in Q1, up 70% from same quarter last year.”
3. “The number of discrete video assets loaded into the Brightcove system from magazine publishers was up 60%, from 27,224 in Q1 2009 to 43,554 in 2010.”

If you’re trying to convince someone of the popularity of video in online magazines, these numbers are very encouraging.