Corporate communications have evolved in recent years to go beyond building a shared understanding about company goals to using storytelling to build trust and connect with employees, customers and investors. While businesses develop magazines and other content initiatives to share stories, it’s important that these materials engage internal audiences. Otherwise, the message is lost.
Recently, businesses are taking a page from publishers’ playbooks and are creating newsstand-like mobile apps to fill the innovation gap, engage readers and gain insight into the type of content readers prefer. Using mobile apps as the vehicle, businesses can quickly distribute corporate digital magazines, also known as digital editions of company magazines, as well as a variety of corporate communication material, like presentations, annual reports and even newsletters.
Here are 5 reasons why your business should publish corporate digital magazines and materials in a branded mobile app:
Your audience is mobile.
Delivering a printed copy of your digital magazine in a digital world feels antiquated. It can also negatively impact how your brand is perceived.
A Cone Consumer New Media study found that over 60% of people admit preferring to interact with a brand in a new media environment, which in 61% of cases ends up in a stronger connection with the brand itself. Why? Digital media is dynamic, accessible and personal – all qualities that are hard to reproduce in print media.
Furthermore, with mobile usage quickly outpacing desktop, it makes sense to look to apps to provide a more focused mobile experience. Chances are your employees are already using mobile apps to connect to your website, email and social media channels, so why not deliver the latest information directly where they want it? Give audiences the freedom to access information with the tap of an app, anywhere they are!
Plus, with a mobile app you can manage access by requiring a login or use an enterprise publishing license to keep your app private (ie. in-house usage only).
Tell more engaging stories.
While a picture can say a thousand words, animation and multimedia elements can grab attention and provide a more immersive brand experience. A quick look at content formats like Snapchat Discovery and Facebook Live proves that mobile audiences demand visual content alongside the written word.
Whether you want to provide readers with a digital replica or re-design your content entirely for digital, adding multimedia can be as easy as adding a link or as sophisticated as designing animated HTML pages. The choice is yours!
Leverage archiving & supplements.
Unless all your employees, investors or consumer pass by the same coffee table, chances are they aren’t getting to flip through old issues of your magazine. When you publish digital editions to a mobile app, you can get the most mileage out of each and every issue by making them available in an archive.
Businesses can also choose to publish supplementary materials, like newsletters, presentations or reports, in what is commonly referred to as a multi-publication newsstand app. By building a sort of “content hub”, your app users have the freedom to download content at any time. In addition to publications, your mobile app can also stream a live-RSS feed (ie. from a company blog or other website), allowing you to share updates with your audience immediately.
Must-have mobile marketing.
Do you know how many of your employees, investors or consumers actually read your corporate magazine? Wouldn’t it be great to know the precise number of views of specific pages, or who are your most loyal readers? With a digital magazine you can track these stats and more thanks to analytics.
But that’s not the only benefit of mobile apps. You can use these insights to inform your marketing campaigns, including the use of push notifications and in-app messages. Push notifications should be used to inspire users to launch your app and consumer content. For example, you can alert readers to new issues, the latest sales highlight or a company milestone.
For more on push notifications, check out: “5 push notification campaigns to help you sell more digital magazine subscriptions”
Digital costs less.
Printing, shipping and distribution make up the majority of the costs associated with getting a magazine to your readers. Multiply those costs by as many issues you have a year and the picture we start to see is that print magazine production can be very expensive.
A common breakdown of costs to produce a magazine (Source: WTW magazine)By developing a mobile app, you can eliminate the need for printing, shipping and distribution. And once an app is published, new issues can be deployed immediately, without incurring additional costs.
Creating an app from scratch can require a large up-front investment, but there are self-publishing solutions out there that can be very affordable and integrate with your current content production workflows. With Paperlit you can quickly upload your digital files to a custom newsstand-like template and take advantage of all the features we mentioned above.
Thinking about using a mobile app to solve your distribution problems? Request a demo today!
