It is clear that national or regional magazines have much longer shelf life compared to typical newspaper, which can be discarded the following day. Magazines allow us to reach more extensive demographics and they can deliver more effective targeted placement. If we are a local business, we should consider choosing local magazines, because they could outreach or target market better.
However, we don’t have to remain local only and it is possible to choose national consumer magazines. It should be noted that magazines have one obvious drawback that is, they are published weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. Often, we need to wait for weeks or even months to see our ads in the print.
For this reason, we should research available magazines and compare rates and readerships. One of the most deciding factors wouldbe our budget and we should make sure that our budget would allow for specific magazine-related advertising. However, costs should be controllable with good planning.
Proper planning will also for more repeatable and measurable response rates. We should choose magazines that may attract repeat customers and we should start there. As an example, there could be magazines that are more focused to our business, such as health, gardening or information technology.
We should check the magazine itself and consider whether it has the quality to match our brand. Proper magazines should have the paper quality, ink colors and other factors that can boost our branding. These magazines may have in-house printing facility that allows them to better optimize the overall print quality.
This will directly affect the quality of advertising to make it more noticeable. Advertising through magazines could also offer significant savings over other media, such as newspaper, because it will need to be published each day.
If we choose magazines properly, we will start to see new responses from readers and we should be prepared to follow up leads immediately. Consumers need fulfilment and we should be able to inform them about relevant information, such as shipping, pricing and other details. Creating a fantastic advertising on magazines is actually easier than following it through.
We should scale our mailings to fit our company’s capabilities and we shouldn’t create a magazine advertising that’s overly critical. By being informative, we could gain interests from prospective customers.
Like in newspaper, space on magazines is often limited, so may not be able to include too much information, such as testimonials and location maps. However, we could make our advertising stands out if we show everything that is good about our company. Photos, colors, dimension, text and other details should be decided prior to publication.
Advertising on magazine is an important extension of our brand, so we should be really consistent. Regardless of what we do, we need to be confident with our advertising and this should be reflected on our advertising material. Many small companies have received great results from advertising through magazines, so we could also simulate their success by taking proper steps.