Published in Walls and Roofs, Oct / November 2017
Cover Shoot: Zeitz Mocaa 'Museum of Contemporary Art Africa'
Media Conference: Official Opening September 2017
Format: A4 Portrait
Editorial value: The results speak for themselves.
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You spend thousands getting a state of the art website with links to Twitter, Facebook and other social media. Sitting back, everyone tells you how great your website looks and comments on its design.
However ...
Weeks drag on ... turning into months and your content dries out looking like a cheap supermarket paint job on a street cafe.
What am I saying? Business owners, marketing managers and even webmasters neglect the most basic facet of any marketing campaign. It's what's inside that counts and not what's on top.
Does your website, Facebook or Pinterest page have up to date, relevant content? It's probably the last thing you consider on a Friday afternoon and you switch off the office lights, lock the door and leave for home - cheerfully thinking that you will get to it in the next week.
Let me help you with this. It's what I do. Honest, clean and accurate content.
As the editor of a popular magazine on building, I receive dozens of press releases from the market.
Many press releases do not stand a chance of being published in the media because the sender does not understand how news works.
The problem is how little attention is given to the style of press releases and editorial. The same applies to the quality of photographs supplied. Your editorial stands a much better chance of being published if it is supplied with a good quality image. But with the era of DIY photography by smart phones and cheap cameras, press releases are often refused by editors due to bad photos.
The fact is: as advertiser you spend tens of thousands of Rands on booking ad space in the media. Does your artwork do this advertising expense justice? Or are you wasting money? As an editor, I can see this is often the case. And often the same advertisers follow it up with poor editorial content that comes with photographs looking like they were taken by a 9 year old. Advertising spend wasted.
Much the same rule applies to non advertisers. If you want your editorial published free in the magazines that serve your market or online, you really need to supply professional content.
It pays back.
A well prepared editorial with photography could cost you R 5 000 to prepare and distribute. However if editors like what you send, that same editorial could be published 3 to 4 times over in the different media. This means payback by up to 1200% when compared with the cost of booking the page and placing your advert at a cost of R 15 000 for the full page (as an example).
Best you hire a professional in the preparation of such editorials. The stakes are quite high and payback is huge - if you get it right.
"Advertising for Free".
I've always maintained that print media acts as a driver to online content. Why? While newsprint is experiencing difficulties and some broadsheet news media are even scaling down to tabloid, informative magazines are in a class of their own. Well, anything you touch and move around has greater affinity with your senses and there's nothing better than the feel of smooth glossy / coffee table type magazines.
They are also focus the attention of the reader/viewer better than e-editions that compete on tablets with a range of different apps. In the South African B2B media, this is especially true, which is why I always advise my clients to advertise in professional magazines.
Therefore I find the article written by Steve Smith in MinOnline at http://www.minonline.com/news/20519.html to be very relevant.
"Google and Ipsos find that 48% of smartphone readers are performing mobile queries off of ads they see in magazines. In this regard, print holds up well with other media, since only 35% of smartphone users search off of poster and billboards, while 57% do so from in-store promotions and 58% from TV. Magazines in particular are key drivers of the mobile ecosystem."
Take a look and see if you agree!
Gareth
