TAKE AWAY- You can attract new advertising revenue without changing your editorial content by understanding your market and changing how you position the magazine.
Long before I founded RevenueGPS, I joined Scientific American Magazine in 1985. At that time it was already a well respected 140-year-old magazine featuring cutting edge technology articles from across the spectrum of science. The advertising sales staff had been positioning the magazine as a great way to address the technology staff at the Fortune 500. They felt that our competitive set was largely vertical technology magazines like IEEE Spectrum, Nature etc.
When I worked at J. Walter Thompson I handled the Northern Telecom data products business and knew we spent a great deal more money with the business magazines than we did on the trades. I saw an opportunity to considerably grow Scientific American’s potential revenue. The challenge was how to re-position Scientific American as appealing to corporate management rather than continue as a largely engineer-driven magazine.
The key target for many corporate advertising campaigns was the Professional / Managerial audience. I dove into the MRI numbers and discovered that the readers of the business magazines were heavily skewed toward the Manager / Administrator side. Scientific American, I could see, was more heavily weighted toward the Professional side.
I used that information to position our magazine as the perfect complement to a Professional / Managerial media buy. I suggested that our prospects use us to “balance their media buy” by dropping one business magazine and adding Scientific American to add more weight on the Professional side of the P/M target.
It worked and we significantly increased our revenue on the corporate side.
The magazine had not changed its editorial mission one bit, but by identifying a new way of thinking about our magazine audience and knowing what the market was seeking, we created a significant new revenue opportunity.
I can do that for your media property, give me a call.
