In this week lecture we had a small evaluation of how The Yorkie was progressing and how we are accommodating peoples features into the magazine. Myself and my colleagues who are also desk editors had a meeting in which we discovered that not all feature’s can be put into the magazine due to the University’s lack of funding. Whilst this is a shame and may cause some upset within in the group it is also a motivator for people to put in 100% effort to ensure their feature is included. It also gave us a chance to see where each other’s sections were at and gave us an indication of when we should start pursuing our writers for at least a draft of their feature.

In addition to this, in groups we looked at flat plans and designed one that was identical to a magazine that we were given. This gave us an idea of how we could start to flat plan The Yorkie which will ultimately lead to a final decision in the future.

Marketing for The Yorkie with £100.

With such a limited a budget we have to come up with creative and unique ideas to successfully market our magazine. Here are some ideas that we could potentially use:

• Events
• Social media
• Media appearances
• Publicity stunts
• Competitions
• Ads
• Video marketing/YouTube, Vimeo etc
• Infographics
• Giveaways
• Email marketing
• Online contests

 

Personally, I think that social media is obviously the biggest one for us to successfully market our magazine as it is comparable to our intended demographics, “Virtually all adults aged 16 to 34 years were recent internet users (99%)”. We are all very capable of using social media and such platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and forums such as Reddit would be great ways of marketing our magazine on a larger scale. Most 18-30-year olds, male and female are constantly within touching distance of some form of social media. therefore, if we create a page with inside exclusives to our magazine such as what to expect from this issue, where you can purchase it and offering them reasons to why they NEED to read it, we can easily get the word spread.

One idea I am extremely keen on is making a 60 second video that can be published to YouTube, vimeo and also shared on social media sites. The video would include some behind the scene footage of how the magazine was developed and little clips of interviews to show that time and care has been taken to create a magazine that our audience will want to read. It would basically act as a trailer, and also allow the audience to see the people involved and the process of how magazines are created.

Finally, I think that competitions are a great marketing tool that can be achieved with only a small budget. In terms of The Yorkie we could advertise competitions/giveaways in the magazine which could also be promoted via video and social media to get people involved with the magazine. We could offer them tickets to a play at the theatre, tickets to the dungeons or any upcoming events that are happening in York. Similarly, it could be something as small as a free meal at restaurant, as long s it something that will get The Yorkie integrated in York’s community. In addition to this, if The Yorkie was to become a monthly or every 3 monthly produced magazine we could offer a free subscription for a year.