Sandy Bassi
If the target market of your building product business is architects or specifiers, architecture magazines are great places for you to get listed.
These magazines allow architects to learn about new products, relevant projects and the latest advances in the architectural and design sector.
A chance for them to learn about your building products and services.
However, with the decline of print circulation of magazines, is print dying out? Find out if you should list your building product business on print or digital magazines…
What Is The Print Vs Digital Debate All About?
Both digital and print have advantages and disadvantages, but the true problem with both is, which platform is the architect’s preferred platform? Which has a more significant impact on your building product business?
With ever-decreasing attention spans and even more content available, people expect a constant stream of personalised, engaging, short-form content delivered instantly, most of which can be consumed on mobile and tablet.
However, reading from print offers a memorable experience as architects can fold page corners and save their favourite articles, tossing the pages and slowly digesting the information. Though, the problem with this is that once they’ve read it and tucked it away, they’re likely to forget about it.
Print Architecture Magazines
Print magazines generally have a loyal audience and this may benefit you when getting listed on a print architectural magazine.
Print architectural magazines can look and feel impressive, especially with high-gloss papers. This can work to bring out high-quality images of your building product.
Print media can be seen as a credible source because, with the tangible aspect, comes legitimacy. They also have a high recall value, and architects are likely to take action and respond to an ad. Whereas people on the internet are notoriously impatient and prone to ditch a website if it doesn’t fully load in a few seconds – print architectural ads inspire a more leisurely approach.
Digital Architecture Magazines
As the world is shifting and adapting to our digital era, architecture magazines have adapted too. Going online means that the circulation of these magazines are not limited to location, and they can be global, meaning that more individual users will potentially see your listing.
It also means that digital magazines can be more interactive, with videos and polls to engage architects.
As we’re shifting to this digital world, you might want to think if architects are shifting too. Your target audience of architects and specifiers might prefer digital magazines due to their busy lifestyles. And digital architecture magazines are easy to read.
Online Backlinking
Still, you might want to look at this from a different perspective. For example, a digital architecture magazine might help boost your online presence, and this is by boosting your domain authority.
Domain Authority And Link Building
Moz created the domain Authority (DA) metric, and it’s a search engine ranking score that predicts how likely a website will rank in search engine result pages (SERPs). Domain Authority scores vary from one to one hundred, with higher scores indicating a higher chance of ranking.
For example, the BBC has a domain authority score of 95, indicating it is a high performing website.
You can check your domain authority score with Moz’s toolbar, and you can compare your score to your competitors to benchmark where you need to be.
To get your website ranking higher in the SERPs, you can build your DA score with backlinking.
Backlinks (sometimes referred to as “inbound links,” “incoming links,” or “one-way links”) are links from one website to another’s page. Backlinks are regarded as “votes” for a given website by Google and other major search engines. Therefore, organic search engine ranks are higher for pages with a large number of backlinks.
What’s This Got To Do With Digital Architectural Magazines?
You can build your domain authority score with digital magazines - something you cannot do with print.
You’ll need to make sure that the publication you’re getting listed on provides a backlink and it’d be good to check their DA score on Moz’s toolbar because you’ll increase your DA score with links from websites that have high domain authorities (preferably higher than your own DA).
You can go that step further and create a campaign UTM builder. Instead of providing the architecture magazine with your URL to your homepage, or the product/services you’re trying to promote – provide them with a campaign URL.
This will deliver you a unique URL so you can track how many people have clicked on the link on Google Analytics. In addition, this will give you an idea of how successful your listing actually was – something that print magazines just can’t offer.
Sometimes They Can Work Together
Some architectural magazines do both forms, they provide a physical print copy and an online version too. This will provide you with the best of both and can mean that you’ll target architects who prefer print and those who prefer digital too.
It also will mean you’ll have all the benefits of both, whilst ensuring you have that backlink to boost your domain authority.
Conclusion
Your company news and press releases are content and should be considered an important element of your content marketing strategy as a building product manufacturer.
For your content to work, it needs to be promoted, get it seen by your target audience, and build your backlink profile because backlinks drive your search engine rankings, which drives your website traffic.
When it comes to listing your building product business to target architects, print magazines will always have a role, but digital gives you a lot more freedom in terms of reaching out to your audience on their own terms.
It’s safe to assume that print and digital will always coexist, smoothly integrating themselves into the daily lives of architects. However digital magazines will provide you with tracking information and the ability to boost your online presence.
About Insynth
At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.
We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this digital transformation era.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.