More UK magazine publishers support newsagents online than we see in Australia.
Tweets like you can see in the image are common – a UK publisher promoting the latest issue of their magazine and pitching availability in newsagents.
Tweets like this help drive vital in-store traffic.
Every publisher with magazines in newsagencies should be promoting the newsagency channel. The top two ways they can best do this are:
- Have a list of all retailers on their website. This needs to be on the home page, easily searchable and viewable by a map.
- Promote newsagents when every new issue is out, on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. With a link to the page from where people can find their local stockist.
Given the low margin for magazines, it is incumbent on magazine publishers to drive traffic to retail outlets if they want such outlets to continue to stock the low margin product.
Another thing publishers could do would be to provide retailers with easy access to social media friendly collateral that retailers themselves could use on their social media accounts. This needs to be content that meets the rules of the various platforms.
The magazine publishers that should engage with these ideas the most are those with their titles only in retail newsagency businesses. If they are in supermarkets too I don’t care as much. Titles exclusive to the newsagency channel are more niche and more interesting in terms of publishers leveraging their own communities to drive retail newsagency traffic.
What I suggest in this post costs nothing except for a small amount of time. The return should be worth it and would include appreciation from retailers you support.
Mark your first suggestion of “have a list of retailer on their website” is great in theory but with G&G forever changing allocations and range within individual stores it’s probably a full time job just keeping the list up to date, especially for niche magazines which are the ones that need promoting.
Now a company like Hallmark who know exactly who their retailers are should have no problem keeping such a list up to date. Which doesn’t explain why when I put my stores address into Hallmarks find my nearest store location I’m told my nearest retailer is 200km away in Perth.