Revamping Your Print Brand through Digital Publications

In the wake of an unstable economy and dramatically changing consumer trends, many publishers are finding that now may be the best time strategically to re-evaluate their branding strategies. Being seen to evolve your brand and expand or concentrate your market offering is a sign of an active, focused and thriving business. By showing this strength of brand character, you will not only promote confidence externally in your customer base but also internally in your staff.

In an article entitled “8 Tips for Using Digital to Beat the Recession,” author Jeff Maling writes that the digital divide can now, more than ever, be used as an opportunity to market and that those who can crack the digital code during the recession will be winners when the economy improves.

But what does this mean for you, Publishers? It means that now may just be the time to update your message and medium for the digital frontier. While it may seem like a difficult challenge to keep your print brand exciting and relevant without sacrificing the value and familiarity that your customers have come to know and trust, it’s not. Digital publications fully support your brand identity (the vibrant images, alluring layouts and aesthetics neatly blended with content), while offering you extraordinary opportunities to enhance and refresh your print through e-media. With digital publications, you can create an exciting new way for your customers to experience your print!

One way to get creative your digital publication is to add multimedia, such as audio, video and animation. With multimedia, you can elevate a product or service beyond a static picture and text, swaying consumers when it matters most – in the act of shopping for a product or service. It’s an excellent way to add simple yet effective impact to your digital publication and it also serves as an excellent revenue generation tool for those publishers in the business of selling ad space.

Another way that digital publications can revamp your print is through the use of hyperlinks. By adding hotlinks to either an advertisers’ website or a retailers’ ecommerce site, you lead customers/shoppers/readers directly to the pages they want to see, enabling them to take action immediately.

Other interactive features that give your print brand a fresh new feel include sticky notes, web thumbnails, product information rollovers, mapping, integrated order forms, banner ads and search. Combined with your print content, these interactive features make the product easy and fun to use and encourage the user to return to the product.

While revamping your brand with the state-of-the-art features mentioned above, you can simultaneously expand your brand presence, drive your marketing and circulation-building with our “share” tool. The share tool not only allows users to share the publication by email but also via a number of different social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Digg, etc.

Other viral programs to consider are RSS, email and blogging, which all allow you to notify your audience immediately when new publications are available – no more waiting weeks or months for fulfillment and delivery!

If you are looking for a brand extension offline, we can also digitally convert your publication(s) for use on CD, kiosk or USB Flash drive. Consider the possibilities here! A CD and USB Flash drive can be bundled with your print or distributed separately in-store, in the mail, at conferences, business meetings, and much more! A kiosk could be located in an airport, mall, travel center, retail store or hotel.

One final touch on any digital branding enhancement is the ability to show your care for the environment. Dirxion knows all about going green and consumers want to know all about it. Give your customers the knowledge, power and ability to give back to the world we live in. Your print publication has so much to offer and can offer even more with a little digital revamping, all while helping the environment.

It should be mentioned here that digital publishing also offers the potential for a lower-cost distribution platform, particularly when it comes to international distribution. Digital publications work really well for publications reaching that kind of broad geography, especially in today’s economic climate. Publishers simply pay a one-time fee to digitize their publication and then they have the capacity to distribute it to as many people across their network at a nominal cost.

As you can see, brand innovation doesn’t have to be expensive, and may present the best opportunity to secure competitive advantage in a high-stakes economic environment. You’ll also have the piece of mind knowing that digital publications can refresh and enhance your brand in a way that can be measured and tweaked accordingly.