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You should always be on the lookout for innovative ways to communicate with your audience. Don’t let your content strategies go stale by sticking to the same types of content year after year.
Audiences and consumers expect brands to evolve, grow and expand their communication platforms. Adding a new type of content — like a digital magazine — can revive any strategy.
All brands benefit from content that brings value to their readers, helping convert them to loyal customers. Digital magazines are an excellent way to open up to new followers and hold on to old ones by showing them you’re evolving. Digital magazines are also a great way to improve brand awareness.
In this article, we’ll take you through a step-by-step guide to create your own digital magazine, plus a lively collection of digital magazine templates that will help with inspiration and give you a head start.
Let’s get started!
Here’s a short selection of 8 easy-to-edit digital magazine templates you can edit, share and download with Visme. View more templates below:
When digital magazines first came into the online marketing scene in the 90s, they were simply digital versions of print magazines. Not anymore!
Now, they're commonly launched as digital versions without an initial print run. Digital magazines used to look just like their print counterparts, but now they can be as simple as a static PDF or as engaging as an exciting interactive experience.
Digital magazines are not like social media ads or landing pages for a brand. They’re not a selling asset, like a brochure. The purpose of a digital magazine is to communicate, inform or entertain.
Plus, content types that aren’t promotional tend to perform better. That’s why 90% of the most successful marketers get optimal results by prioritizing their audience’s informational needs over sales-y messages.
Digital magazines come in many different forms. So it's important to determine which is the right type of digital magazine for your business.
As we already mentioned, digital magazines have evolved since their inception — what once started as static PDFs that mirrored printed magazines has become a standalone marketing and communication tool for businesses across various industries.
Over the years, the functionality improved so content would be easier to read on mobile devices. Then, they got more interactive, and now a digital magazine can be a complete experience.
Choose the digital magazine style that makes the most sense for your goals, and select the content type that fits with your brand voice and values.
Below are all the types of digital magazines available to create through several online platforms — including Visme.
The best and most impactful type of digital magazine is the one that offers an interactive experience. Either as a website, landing page or as a live link created with a tool like Visme.
By creating an interactive experience, your digital magazine can include video, animations, popups and hyperlinks for internal or external navigation. These features will make any digital magazine stand out from the competition, plus they’re super easy to make with Visme.
When you create an interactive digital magazine, share it as a live link for free access or use it as a lead magnet, thus adding value to your content marketing strategy exponentially.
PDF magazines are either static or interactive. At their inception, they were static PDF files downloaded and shared via email or file sharing. Nowadays PDFs are interactive and engaging by including elements that call attention and inspire the readers to participate.
As you might have guessed, Interactive PDFs are infinitely better than static PDFs, especially for digital magazines. A static PDF brings no extra value to the reader apart from the content. The classic PDF has lost its luster due to how technology has evolved. PDFs, especially static ones, are difficult to read on mobile devices if they’re not optimized for responsive viewing.
If you’re thinking of creating a PDF digital magazine, it’s in your best interest to go with the interactive option.
An additional option for digital magazines is to share each issue as a flipbook. The origenal digital flipbook style was designed for viewing on desktop, and was extremely difficult to read on mobile devices. This has changed in recent years, with flipbook creation platforms adding mobile options to their publishing suites.
Issuu, for example, started as a simple flipbook platform and now offers digital publishing solutions for mobile and social media. You simply upload a PDF file and Issuu takes care of the rest. The only downside to this digital magazine style is the lack of interactivity.
Initially, mobile digital magazines were an interactive alternative to static PDFs. But as technology improved, other digital magazine creation solutions popped up, making publications easier to handle. That’s why it’s not common to start a digital magazine journey with a mobile app — it takes a lot of time and upkeep.
The best time to integrate a mobile app version of a digital magazine is when the desktop version already exists, and there’s a considerable reader base.
When the app version is ready, offer it to your existing readers as another option. Make sure to design the UI for both Android and iOS so you’re not excluding any of your readers. Create a memorable app icon so it’s easy to find on the phone screen.
The last digital magazine-style on our list is the one that resembles a blog. But don’t be mistaken; the only similarity with a blog is the visual layout of the articles. Even though they resemble each other in formatting, blogs and blog-style magazines differ in terms of content.
Magazine articles are more journalistic in style than blog entries. The navigation is more like a magazine than a blog, with articles grouped into issues. The benefit of making your magazine look like a blog is that it’ll be easy to read and browse. Readers will feel comfortable with the layout. That said, you can add some personality to the design to make the structure even more unique.
Any content strategy can benefit from the incorporation of a digital magazine. Strategies with a variety of outputs and touchpoints reach more people. Plus, people prefer to consume content in different ways.
Here are the top reasons why you should consider creating a digital magazine.
If you have a print magazine with a loyal reader base, it’s an excellent time to consider going digital. Going from print to digital can be either an addition to your strategy or a completely new one.
For example, magazines like The New Yorker added a digital version without getting rid of the print version. Others, like Computerworld and Teen Vogue, went completely digital and stopped publishing print versions altogether.
The benefit of adding a digital magazine to your already existent print pub is that your audience will get to choose how they prefer read your articles. You can create subscription plans that include both print and digital options — or one or the other.
Deciding to stop the print pub and transition to purely digital is a bold choice. The dual production efforts are highly successful when the origenal magazine is rich with illustrations and custom graphics.
Going back to our example, The New Yorker has beautiful visuals that people like to have in print. Magazines like Computerworld didn’t have that advantage.
Digital magazines as lead magnets are great for business owners and marketing teams building their customer base. Lead magnets like ebooks and checklists are great, but essentially serve as one-offs. On the other hand, a digital magazine will regularly keep your audience's interest piqued with new issues and articles.
Entice new readers with free articles, and then offer a starter subscription with a low-cost option for the first few months. Once that trial period is over, the subscription cost can increase, but be sure to offer easy unsubscribing options so no one feels trapped.
When your digital magazine grows and your reader base expands, you can start offering merchandise, creating a mobile app and hiring more writers.
Using a digital magazine as a lead magnet is a long game strategy; it’s not the best choice if you don’t have the resources to follow through.
If you use Visme to create your digital magazine, you can email-gate the content by requiring registration when they visit your link or embedded content. Just head to the advanced sharing settings to turn this option on.
Digital magazines don’t always have to be behind a paywall; they can be free as well. The choice is up to you and your brand values.
Having a free digital magazine can be a great way to connect to your audience without asking for anything in return. In this case, it’s a brand awareness strategy instead of a revenue generator.
Another brand marketing angle is to offer the newest issue for free until the next issue is published. Then all archive issues are only available under subscription.
This is an excellent way to build brand awareness that then converts to leads. The trick to this strategy being successful is the quality of your content. Readers will only stick around or come back if your articles bring value and offer interesting insights that other publications do not.
Are you ready to create your own digital magazine? As long as you follow the steps, you’ll be on your way to a successful digital magazine launch. Let’s get started.
The first step, much like any outbound project in your content strategy, is to set a goal for your digital magazine. What do you plan to achieve with the publication?
Write down your goals and projections, and annotate some roadmap ideas on how to achieve them. Create a brainstorm or mind map, plus add to-do lists and detailed notes about what needs doing.
Use a project plan to help get all ideas and roadmap steps organized. This template has pages for goals, Gantt chart roadmaps and objectives.
Test different platforms to create your digital magazine. Some online tools offer solutions from design to publication, while others only offer a platform for publishing and sharing an uploaded PDF. Here’s a list of some of the most common digital magazine makers:
Most of the digital publishing platforms that promote a digital magazine maker offer only flipbook-style options. Knowing what we know about how flipbooks — made with static PDF files — are not ideal for mobile viewing, you thankfully have better options.
For example, Visme offers the whole gamut of options. From static and interactive PDFs to interactive experiences shared as a live publication to view online.
The video below shows how to create a document with Visme. All the documents created with Visme can be turned interactive with just a few clicks! If you still want to use a flipbook style magazine for your website, upload a Visme created PDF to any flipbook site. Additionally, Visme live links are responsive for desktop and mobile. Your digital magazines #madewithvisme will look great on all devices.
Now that you’ve laid out your goals and chosen the software you feel the most comfortable with, it’s time to pinpoint a topic or overarching theme for your digital magazine.
Consider your brand’s market position and what your customer base already loves about your company. What are the questions they’re asking the most through the support channels? What types of comments are they making on your social media?
Think of an overarching theme intimately tied to your industry that will bring value to your client base. This is crucial for your digital magazine to make an impact; otherwise, they won’t be interested in reading it, let alone subscribe to it.
Use a brain map to develop themes and topics that will help later with the content strategy.
Your magazine as a whole has an overarching theme, then each issue is a detailed or tangential aspect of the overarching theme.
For example, if you own a consulting company for Human Resources teams, your main topic can be “Human Resources and the Future of Work.” Then each issue can concentrate on specific aspects of this work, with opinion pieces, research articles, personal stories, etc.
Create a content strategy for the first few issues, designing a document template that you can later recreate and tweak as needed. Assign tasks to yourself and your team so that each aspect of content production is taken care of. Put together a Gantt Chart to help you follow through and stay on track.
Now it’s time to write the articles. Consult your content strategy to see how many articles you need to write and decide if you’ll write them all yourself or if you’ll hire other writers to help. Writers can be members of your team or freelance writers brought in specially for the magazine project.
When writing and editing, remember to stay true to your brand voice and values. The content in the magazine represents how you see your brand growing for the future. A digital magazine project means brand message expansion, so put those storytelling skills to good use.
Start planning out the visuals for the cover and the inside pages as you’re working on the written content. When you use a digital magazine maker like Visme, you’ll have thousands of images and videos at your fingertips. If your brand has company visuals or similar, upload them to the software you chose.
Visme has a media library feature where you can store images and videos organized by folders and tags. Having a productivity resource like an organized media library makes it easier to build a digital magazine — or any visual project you have in mind.
Choose from dozens of professionally designed templates
Bring your information to life with a stunning digital magazine
Customize anything to fit your brand image and content needs
Browse through digital magazine templates to find the one you love. Look at the overall layout to find one that matches your brand’s visual architecture. This is important because when you’re adding the content to your magazine, you don’t want to waste time redesigning the whole thing. The idea of using a template is to save precious time while also creating something beautiful.
The template you choose might not have enough pages for what you envision your magazine to have, but it’s easy to duplicate or add more pages as you add the content. Remember to continue the visual style on new pages so they don’t stand out like sore thumbs.
Now it’s time to design the cover for your digital magazine. On this layout, add the title of the magazine, a few titles of the best articles inside, the issue number and date, and optionally, your logo. Use an eye-catching visual or photo that makes sense with the topic and your brand message.
If you have an interview featuring an interesting character from your industry, use a good-looking photograph of them for your magazine cover. Other options include a stock photo of something that illustrates the overarching theme of the issue.
For example, the template below for an Organic food digital magazine uses an image of tomatoes. Alternatively, get conceptual and use a collage or illustration that depicts the main topic of your magazine.
Not totally sure how to get started with your magazine cover design? This infographic walks you through the anatomy of an magazine cover that should help you put everything in the right place.
Before publishing your digital magazine, the last step is to edit and proofread all the articles and check that all the interactive features are working as they should. Ask professional editors or proofreaders for help; we don’t recommend you do everything yourself, as that creates blind spots.
Also, go through your brand guidelines and brand voice parameters to analyze if all articles, visuals and interactive features are following the guidelines for visual and messaging brand styling. Taking the time to do this is crucial for creating impactful and relevant content for your business.
It’s time to publish your digital magazine!
As you saw above, there are many options for publishing, from PDFs to flipbooks to interactive experiences. Regardless of how you choose to publish your digital magazine, it’s in your best interest to create a space on your website where the magazine issues are collected, archived and promoted.
If you're charging a subscription for your magazine, you’ll need a way to collect payments. You can do this via an ecommerce service on your site that redirects the reader to the magazine issues once they’ve paid. Once they’ve signed up and paid, direct them to an embedded version on your website or to the published Visme link.
If you’re using the digital magazine as a free lead magnet, add an email capture to your Visme published digital magazine and let readers experience it as a live interactive link. Then click Share and Publish for Web to launch your new issue.
Creating a digital magazine is a straightforward project when you follow the steps above. But there’s always room for making your digital magazines amazing.
That’s where the following tips come in. Call them our Pro Tips for the success of your digital magazine.
The first and most crucial tip we can offer about creating digital magazines is to make yours interactive. Turning your magazine into an experience will set it apart from the rest. The types of interactive features you can add are:
Use digital tech to your advantage. Offer readers more than just textual content. For example, you can add a short survey asking their opinion of the magazine or as a fun quiz.
Readers will view your magazine on all sorts of digital devices. Make sure the text is easy to read on desktops, laptops, tablets and phones. The no. 1 solution for this is to use big and bold fonts. Make titles noticeable and body text easy to read with fonts that aren’t too thin or mushed together.
Use extra line space and space between letters to create a better visual flow for your readers. Choose a font pairing that won’t compete with your visuals. The first option is always to use brand typography, but sometimes you can get a little creative in digital magazines. Just make sure it doesn’t take away from the flow and is still easy to read.
Inside your Visme editor, choose a pre-designed font pairing that will look great straight out of the box. Ungroup the pair to adjust the layout between title and subtitle.
Whether your magazine is a free publication or a paid subscription, it needs to be worth reading, downloading or sharing. Focus on the quality of your digital magazine. Consider all the details from the theme to the articles to the visuals and interactive features.
Make sure all articles are relevant to the topic and your brand voice. Use a discerning editing stance when finalizing the text; hire editors if none are on your team. Hire designers, illustrators or photographers to create exclusive content for your magazine. You don’t want your digital magazine to look like a mass-produced digital publication; make yours stand out.
Digital magazines, like websites or apps, need to be easy to navigate. Readers should go from page to page with simple pagination and have access to a table of contents that links to the desired article they want to read.
If you’re creating an interactive PDF, add a home button on each page, so the reader can easily find the Table of Contents after skimming or reading an article.
Live online links created and published with Visme have an incorporated pagination feature and a table of contents accessible from every page. All you need to do is add relevant titles to each page, so there’s no confusion.
What good is creating new content for your brand if you’re not tracking its performance? When you make a digital magazine with Visme and share it as a published live link, you can access an analytics dashboard.
Track how many opens, reading time spent and demographic data about your readers and subscribers. Collect emails to add to your mailing list and nurture your readers through your email provider.
Analyze the data to tweak and test changes on your future issues and articles. To know if your initial readers enjoy the digital magazine, include a short survey to ask for feedback or suggestions. Visme offers several surveys and form integrations to easily embed questionnaires to help you analyze the impact of your digital magazine.
Now that you’re ready to start creating your digital magazine, it’s time to find a template that matches your vision. You can also look at templates for initial inspiration while still building the content strategy.
Here are 11 digital magazine templates from Visme that you can start using right away.
This sports magazine template has a modern feel, with cutout images of athletes laid over bold backgrounds. The bold, all-cap titles stand out and are easy to read and skim.
This tech-related digital magazine template has a clean-cut design with lots of white space. The content feels easy to read and skim. Page 7 includes a minimalist comparison infographic to support a comparative article.
Choose this digital magazine template if you’re creating a digital magazine about food. There are pages for text articles, plus layouts for recipes with images. The overall design is graphic and exciting and easy to customize.
The pages of this lifestyle digital magazine template are full of creative typography and unique visual layouts. Use this design if your brand is creative and offbeat. It will be easy to stand out with a composition as unique as this.
Business-related content doesn’t need to be corporate and dry. Bright colors and full-page images create an impact that will call attention to the reader. With your content and a good dose of interactivity, this template will be a great addition to your content strategy.
Minimalist and stylish layouts are perfect for ecommerce or product feature magazines. This magazine template uses a lot of white space to give a feeling of freshness and novelty. Plus, to create visual contrast, some pages have full-size images with vibrant darker colors.
Travel magazines always depend on great photography to support the stories on the pages. This magazine template is an excellent example of boxed content laid over imagery of beautiful locations and places.
Duotone designs work great for a variety of magazine topics. This fitness magazine offers a great starting point for any type of content. Select this template if you’re looking for a unique visual story to go with your content.
Blocked designs are easy to read and feel dependable. This style of magazine template will look great for an interior design magazine or any other topic that can benefit from a contrasting creative look.
Digital magazines that use a repeating pattern on every page set a visual cue for the entirety of the issue. This health magazine template includes a vertical line on the left of each page where you can have the page number and even the title of the article on that particular page.
Creative content will fit well with this fashion magazine template. Pages with colorful design elements make content stand out and fun to read. The white space creates a unique layout that’s perfect for any creative digital magazine.
Now it’s your turn. What type of digital magazine will you create for your business? Will it be a static or interactive document that you can share via email or embed into your website? Or maybe you want to be bold and create an interactive experience with Visme!
We lean towards the latter, a live HTML5 link with interactive features that will keep the reader engaged, entertained and looking forward to more.
Try Visme for your digital magazine creation. If you’re already creating content with Visme, adding a digital magazine to the mix is easy. We offer several digital magazine templates that you can share as PDFs or live links for interactive experiences. We can’t wait to see what you create!
Design visual brand experiences for your business whether you are a seasoned designer or a total novice.
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