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It’s an all-too familiar tale: a
magazine launches in a blaze of glory and within two issues
you’re stuck for ideas and just repeating brochure
content. That was my experience with previous customer magazines
and when it came to launching a new publication for Steria,
I was determined not to fall into the same trap.
That was the key inspiration behind the
idea of setting up an editorial board – to ensure
that the new 'Perspective' magazine would prove of ongoing
value to the company as
a whole. To do that, we felt
that we needed the input from beyond the marketing team – people
to generate ideas and to act as champions for the magazine
within their own business area.
So we approved individuals
from all areas of the business – members
of the board, people in service delivery and sales as well
as communications specialists. The very first meeting was
not seeking
out specific items of content and looking to fill the pages,
but rather to establish the objectives, the audience and
the tone and style that we wanted the magazine to take.
That
was the stage at which we chose to involve Writing Machine – right
at the start. The company effectively acted as a marketing
consultancy, really probing our plans to ensure that
we had a highly focused
proposition that would offer value to our readers.
That
was then documented and brought back to the board,
and has served as a yardstick ever since. It’s really
important in terms of decision-making: because we know
exactly what we’re
seeking, we don’t have to put every decision
to the board, but can act within the framework that’s
been agreed.
That doesn’t mean the role of the
board is any less important, quite the contrary.
On average we meet up twice for every issue
of the magazine, once to generate content ideas and
agree on what themes and topics are of interest to
our readers, and
once to provide final sign-off on the copy.
Throughout,
however, they are all involved in approving the text that
Writing Machine produces: they read
the articles not to
provide grammatical input or proofing, but rather
to assess whether or not they fit the style and
theme of the magazine.
It’s
a simple question they have to ask themselves:
would I read this?
I feel that the results, thus
far, have proved
the value of this approach. Not only have we
created a magazine
that has
legs,
and has outstanding content (content, indeed,
that we have used in other publications and for PR purposes),
but we’ve also
succeeded in winning buy-in across the company.
People genuinely feel it’s their voice
that’s
in the magazine, and they’re proud of what
they’ve produced. It means
that the magazine is shared across wider networks
of people and gets maximum exposure amongst our
target audience.
To
view the results, please click here.
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