Case Study | Audience Research

Business Challenge

Many companies use their own customer magazine to inform about new offers. This way they stay in touch with their existing clients or reach out to new audiences. By appealing design and content, customer magazines ideally provide a positive experience in which both information and brand image are conveyed in an entertaining manner.

With the increasing digitization of marketing and corporate communication, the question if the printed customer magazine should be fully converted into an online offer or if it should be complemented, arises in many organizations. And so it became the challenge of one of our clients. They decided to publish a selected set of articles from their printed customer
magazine in an online format in parallel.

Targeted analyses should now create insights on how the relevant target groups perceive the online shift and if there is potential to transform the customer magazine into a pure online format to save costs. On top of that, there was a strong interest to learn more about the structure of the readership, the reading behavior and the evaluation of reading experience and design to optimize the offer – both in print and online.
 

Solution

If you want to learn more about the preferences, opinions and attitudes of your customers, you ideally ask them. To reach the client magazine readership across all channels, a readership survey link was placed in the print version of the magazine (via QR code) as well as on the company website. In addition the survey invitation was distributed via newsletter and social media channels. Survey feedback was controlled and weighted based on structural target group data from the CRM data base, to ensure that the results of the study represent the readership in general.

An online dashboard provided the opportunity to view survey results live during the field phase. In a profound data analysis, driver analyses were applied among other methods, to identify core strengths of the magazine as well as optimization potentials for the print and online offer.
 

Impact

With meaningful insights about customer preferences and the indication of strengths and weaknesses of the print and online offer we were able to show our client, to what extent their core target groups were ready for an online shift; and provide a clear recommendation if the printed magazine should be kept and which pieces of content could be dispensed.

On top of that the results of the study provided valuable insights how marketing and content angles can be optimized for specific target groups to convey brand image in the best possible way – both online and offline.

By means of the customer survey and data analysis carried out by insidery, the client was able to actively manage the online shift and redesign the customer magazine. Last but not least, content strategy was refined to meet the expectations of the readership in the best possible manner. With the ultimate goal to strengthen brand relationship.