Success with Digital Starts with the Right Philosophy

We talk a lot about the symbiotic relationship between print and web and the various tactics we teach publishers to be successful but today I'm going to address something more fundamental - the importance of having the right philosophy when it comes to digital... or at least understanding what your philosophy is so you can access how it impacts your activities.

As the CEO, one of my most important duties is to recruit publishers to join our Publisher Network and often I hear things like, "This sounds interesting but I want to talk to a local designer/developer I know."

Digital strategies and technology are not interchangeable, you need to understand the objectives and tactics to decide if it's right for you.

The implication here is that a website is a website - that the fact that both exist on the internet as an 'output' of some sort of process renders them equivalent. It would be like your advertisers saying to you, "You're a print publication, there's this other print publication - they're the same because they're both printed on paper with ink."

Obviously that is a terrible way for them to assess their advertising opportunity. They should look at the quality of the product and the work that goes into it, they should look at the people behind it and their purpose for the work, they should most definitely look at the audience you reach and how engaged that audience is. These are things that dramatically affect value both in the short term and the long term and the discerning advertiser wants to understand these details.

The other implication is that a website is a static property, I'd almost go so far as to suggest in this case it's viewed as a facade, "I just need to get something up and then I can move on to other things." One which presents the publishers brand but then is little more than an afterthought.

Clearly for many publishers digital is an afterthought though we've observed that the publishers that are having the most success embracing digital, both those that work with Locable and those who do not, view digital as an opportunity to engage their audience in dynamic new ways and provide new value to advertisers (notice I didn't say replace print?).

You picked your pagination software carefully because you know that it - through it's features, ease of use, support and future development - impacts your print publication (the output) both today and in the future. This is very true and the software that drives your website is also a tool so understanding the core purpose of the tool and company that builds it is imperative in assessing which is the right one for you business. The wrong tool for any job is inconvenient at best and potentially fatal at worst.

Digital is changing, quickly, and you need to implement a technology that provides more than a quick-fix. Once you've picked your horse be sure that you and your team have invested in how to ride - not merely the technical requirements of using the software but understand the process. Dig into understand SEO (at least at a basic level), understand what drives your visitors to share content to social media, and how to create story-arcs to convert print readers into web visitors and deliver share-worthy experiences. You're making an effort, might as well make the right effort and when you do you'll likely find that doing digital the right way is also the easy way (and most profitable).