Content Marketing Today

The Embarrassing Advertising Secret Publishing Companies Don’t Want You to Know!

Although they are in the advertising business, publishing companies do very little advertising for their magazines. This may be somewhat less true for high-profile consumer and lifestyle publications.  But for the vast majority of B2B and B2C publications, truly insignificant sums are spent on advertising.  Why?  There are two reasons. 

1. Because they don’t need to. 
2. Because it doesn’t work.

Believe it or not, it all comes back to content marketing.  As a savvy marketer in the 21st century, you are now well positioned to apply the lessons learned by publishing companies over many decades. You, too, may want to consider replacing a significant chunk of your advertising dollars with a comprehensive content marketing strategy.

Why they don’t need to advertise

Here is how publishers increase the likelihood that influential buyers will purchase advertising from them.  It couldn’t be simpler. Simply create an outstanding magazine filled with world-class content that provides thought leadership for their publication within their carefully targeted market.  Not only will  their subscribers value what they do, but their potential advertisers will value them just as much. 

Why?  Because the best marketers immerse themselves completely in their target markets.  When they find a publication that brings a market alive, it will become a trusted partner in their ongoing acquisition of marketing knowledge.  Moreover, there is a synergy between reader loyalty and the willingness of potential advertisers to invest money with your magazine.

This fundamental truth has been unchanged from my very first publisher role at PC Tech Journal in 1983 to my last corporate gig at running Logistics Today at Penton Media more than 20 years later. 

It has been universally true that prospective buyers who are regular readers of every publication that I managed were dramatically more likely to accept an appointment, to listen carefully to what you had to say, and ultimately to buy advertising.  Conversely, for those buyers who were not regular readers, it was much more difficult just to get your foot in the door–let alone to persuade them to buy advertising.

This, of course, is precisely the way that content marketing works.  Publishers didn’t start out to do content marketing.  But, we all knew that marketing executives who read and loved our publications, would almost invariably become our very best customers.  That’s because we were providing relevant and compelling content about the markets that they cared very much about–that is markets that they were targeting with their products and services.  These marketers made the inference that because we were providing consistently outstanding content, they could trust us as a place to put their advertising dollars.

Why publishing companies don’t get a worthwhile return on advertising dollars spent promoting their publications.

As a former publisher and owner of a small publishing company, I was acutely aware of a major challenge that we face in advertising to our buyers.  Here’s the problem: there are almost no efficient media vehicles that will reach advertising buyers.

That’s exactly the challenge I faced when I owned a small regional business magazine called,  Southwest Florida Business.  We called directly on other business owners and executives in the region.  We attended targeted business events.  We were active in the business community.  That was great, but we would have liked to do more.

We would also have loved to deliver a consistent marketing message in a targeted media vehicle that reached our buyers. Unfortunately, there was no such outlet.

Apart from our own magazine, there was no well targeted place to invest advertising dollars.  Traditionally, our most logical choices would be local newspapers, radio or TV, and the Yellow Pages.  More recently, we might also consider comparable online venues.  None of these entities enabled us to target our buyers efficiently.  Any message that we delivered via traditional advertising, would be just one more form of interruption marketing.  Why?  Because only one of our choices honed in on our most important buyers.  Every other choice provided just a scattershot approach to reaching possible buyers.

What was that one choice?  Of course it was our magazine, Southwest Florida Business.  Any outbound marketing that we did, was done in the pages of our magazine.  Because we knew our magazine was very well read and respected by our buyers, we knew that our marketing message was also likely to be read and respected.

The essential content marketing lesson you can draw from the experience of thousands of publishers.

We publisher types were practicing content marketing 25 years ago.  Of course, we were doing it by accident–and we didn’t have a name for it.  But, this is why our inadvertent content marketing strategy worked so well for so long:

• We carefully defined a target audience that was important to our potential advertisers
• We crafted content that would be consistently valuable to that audience.
• We delivered publications to those targeted buyers month after month. 
• We became a trusted source of information for those buyers
• We were able to help our advertisers succeed because they were an integral part of that trusted information source.

Today, because of the tsunami of buying behavior changes and the concurrent ascendance of the Internet, companies of every size can easily emulate best content marketing practices.  Of course, these trends are making it much more difficult for publishing companies to survive because smart marketers are using content marketing to establish their own thought leadership.  That is a sad,  unfortunate and probably irreversible trend.  In that same trend now offers you an unparalleled opportunity to dominate a market niche by delivering consistently great content that makes it easy for your prospects to buy from you.