It is a known fact that businesses selling to other businesses find it much harder to communicate with their customers than businesses selling to consumers. This is often attributed to employees moving around a lot, businesses changing addresses and the fact that thousands of businesses never actually come face-to-face with their business customers. What this creates is an environment where businesses find it extremely difficult to assess which communication channels to utilise that will enable them to maximize the effectiveness of their relationship marketing.
We’ve seen the communications landscape change dramatically over the last few years and there is no doubt that direct marketing including both direct mail and email marketing have become increasingly popular tools for both customer acquisition and retention in the business sector. But many businesses are not yet making the most of the portfolio of platforms available to them.
When we think of customer magazines we automatically tend to think of the glossy titles produced by companies such as Waitrose or Sainsbury’s. But customer magazines published by companies or organisations for their customers/members provide an effective and sophisticated form of marketing communication with well-targeted editorial across a range of sectors including B2B. Furthermore, B2B advertisers don’t normally have access to the kind of advertising spends that those companies targeting consumers have therefore customer magazines offer a highly cost efficient route to market.
As a relatively new marketing channel, the customer publishing industry has grown exponentially by 244 per cent over the last ten years and is now worth a staggering £385 million. This is an increase of over 10 per cent on the figures published by the last Mintel report in 2003 and a massive 244 per cent increase over the last decade. Furthermore, Mintel indicates that customer magazines are set to become even more integrated into the marketing mix, with industry turnover expected to exceed £531 million by 2009.
Business customers are likely to receive 12 per cent of the total industry titles produced. This relatively small percentage of businesses making use of customer magazines means there is plenty of potential for businesses to adopt this as a key communication tool. The good news for the B2B sector is that the customer magazines being produced are being very well received. A staggering 94 per cent said that they found them informative and 75 per cent enjoyable to read. Most impressively around three quarters of business customers prefer companies to promote their products and services via magazines than through any other medium, as they appreciate the quality editorial and the soft sell that a customer magazine delivers.
At last year’s APA Customer Magazine Awards, Work’s Orange customer magazine was the winner of the Most Effective Business-to-Business Title. Works magazine outclassed three other business-to-business titles to claim the accolade, including Evershed’s Law in Business and Preview and BSkyB’s Business Division customer magazine. The judges felt that Works truly reflected the innovation of the Orange brand. This publication is a great example of what businesses can achieve with a good customer magazine.
In terms of distribution, the majority of customer magazines are mailed through the post. This is probably not surprising as this reflects the current trend by brands for more targeted one-to-one communication and is supported by the fact that nearly three-quarters (78 per cent) of customer titles that are mailed are now personalised, six per cent higher than in 2003 and many customer magazine publishers are taking advantage of the increased sophistication in their data management and are now also ‘versionalising’ titles.
Although mail is definitely the preferred distribution channel nearly three-quarters of customer magazine publishers say that they provide online services for their clients and replicating content for the web is becoming more prevalent.
So how can customer magazines fit into your marketing strategy? They can fit as part of the brand experience or as part of relationship marketing. Both of these work well the former particularly well if you have no direct contact with your customers or your products are intangible such as financial services providers.
With such phenomenal growth over the past 10 years, customer magazines are taking off at an exponential rate as the marketing medium of choice. They are proving to businesses to be an integral and effective marketing tool and vital part of any marketing mix, not merely an add-on as previously believed. This will be reinforced in March with the APA’s launch of its customer magazine Effectiveness Measurement Programme carried out by Milward Brown, demonstrating the return on investment in terms of brand equity.
