Promoting a Magazine

Promoting your magazine is one the most important things you'll do. Therefore, it's important for you to know how to use your promotion money. There is so much that you can do with your promoting budget, where do you begin? How do you get the most out of it? What should you avoid? Here are ten tips to help you maximize your promoting budget to get the best results.
1) Support the Strong Issues. If your January issue sales are always through the roof, while June, your weakest month, barely breaks even, promote January. This may seem counterintuitive to some. Why would you promote what's already doing well and leave the one that's floundering alone? Promoting your strong issues will increase the sales by that much, and also help you gather momentum for your other issues that will carry over to the weaker ones.
2) Promote Where You're Doing Well. Use your promotion money to boost the sales at the places that are doing the best, or have the most potential. Once again, this may seem counterintuitive; one might want to use the promotion money to boost the places that are doing the worst. This isn't the right thing to do. By supporting the stores where the sales are doing well your magazines will also gain momentum and help the other sales rise.
3) Spend Your Money Where Your Magazine is Displayed. There are so many ways to promote that it may be hard to decide which method would be the most beneficial investment. The answer to this is, promote where you're selling. Magazines sales rely largely on impulse, and while seeing your magazine promoted other places may help increase the impulse, the most important thing is for the consumer to see your magazine advertised where it is being sold.
4) Let Your Distribution Channels Know About Promotions. It is important for your distributors to know that you are promoting. It will encourage them to know that you're promoting and possibly inspire them to help you out by doing things such as increasing distribution, notifying merchandisers, or providing reference in a trade newsletter.
5) Find Local Promotion Opportunities. If you're doing an issue on a specific place, such as organic farming in Des Moines or the art of San Francisco, notify the local wholesaler and the big book chains. They might want to increase distribution.
6) Promote Early. In order to take full advantage of residual sales it's best to spend your promotion money early. The sooner the consumers know about the magazine, the sooner they can start buying. Why wait?
7) Specify the Promotion Goals. When you identify what you're promoting for, whether it is to unlock new channels of distribution, offsetting the loss of outlets in significant chains, or to boost distribution for a specific issue, you become surer of accomplishing your goal. You yourself will be able to have a clearer idea of how to go about achieving this goal and those around you will be able to help you too.
8) Track Your Promotion Results. Create a spreadsheet with all your sales data. Look at the sales before the promotion, the sales of the promoted issue, and the sales that followed. Figure out the cost of the promotion, the cost of each copy sold, and the percent growth in draw, sale and the number of outlets. Calculate the sale you were able to uphold in the issues following the promoted ones. Use the results to figure out where it would be best to spend your promotion budget next time.
9) Plan Your Promotions Early. August is the time when you should start planning your promotions and start booking for the coming year. The longer you leave it off the less likely it is that you'll get the promotions you want.
10) Promote the Special Issues. If you plan to add a special section or polybag an issue this is the one to promote. Premium placement with added value with raise your sales incredibly and help gather momentum.