strategic planning foryour magazine

A publication of Magazine Training International

planningfor your

Strategic

magazine

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“Strategic Planning for Your Magazine” is a unit in the “Publishing Handbook”

produced by Sabatier Consulting. Other manuals on magazine publishing may be

purchased at www.magazinetraining.com.

Strategic planning for your magazine

Written by Lou Ann Sabatier






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A leading expert in publishing and business strategy, Lou Ann Sabatier

is chief executive officer of MediaDC, Clarity Media’s Washington Group, which includes The Washington Examiner, The Weekly Standard, and the Web site Red Alert Politics. Before joining MediaDC, Lou Ann served as the founder and principal of Sabatier Consulting, where she worked with over 100 media clients, giving them the tools they needed to increase profitability through strategic planning, audience development, financial management, fulfillment, production, advertising sales, and operations management. Prior to founding the consulting firm, she worked as a literary agent, the managing director of an international economic magazine, and associate publisher of a national opinion magazine. She speaks widely at conferences and workshops throughout the U.S. and Canada. She is a frequent speaker at Folio publishing seminars in New York and Chicago. Lou Ann joined Magazine Training International as a trainer in India and also serves on the Board of Directors.

About the Author

Lou Ann Sabatier






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THE IMPORTANCE OF STRATEGIC PLANNING

WHAT TO INCLUDE IN THE STRATEGIC PLAN

ASSESS WHERE YOU ARE NOW

DETERMINE WHERE YOU WANT TO GO

DECIDE HOW YOU WILL GET THERE

Contents

6

12

16

21

23






CHAPTER 1

importance

planningof strategic

The

7


The importance of strategic planning

The most creative business and product strategies are developed in publications where communication

between departments is good and everyone sees the publication as one team, not as individual departments.

A strategic plan is like a map that shows you how to get from one city to the next. An operational plan is like a map that shows every street, park, and public building. The task of developing an operational plan becomes much easier once strategic thinking is done.

Take close look

of its

at youra

preferencesmarket

andprejudices customers.

and the






8


1 Take a close look at your market and the preferences and prejudices of its customers.

2 Perform an audit of your own resources in people, dollars, and publications/services.

3 Brainstorming and/or creative thinking then takes place in order to create a group of potential strategies.

Evaluate each in detail, examining the potential upside and downside risk.

4 If you know the potential of a group of alternative strategies, and also their requirements in resources and

their risks, it becomes easier to decide which to pursue, if any.


Define some objectives for yourself and your publication






9



The best publishers and managers develop a sense of timing and of pattern that has to be relied on when

the quantitative data isn’t available, or when it would be too expensive or difficult to acquire.

Strategic planning must precede any new projectHere are some events that may trigger a strategic planning study:

• When a publisher reaches a certain size or complexity and corporate objectives are not automatically known or understood by all department heads.

• When changes in the environment—the competition, the government, the economy, lifestyles—must be responded to in a conscious way by the publishing company.






10



A good plan:

• must be lived with.

• includes guideposts in the budget column of your monthly statements.

• is fallible in the variations between actual and budgeted sales, costs and profits.

Strategic planning is the process of directing a publication’s resources toward selected objectives






11



A publication’s resources include its concept and format, its staff, its image in the minds of customers and its

finances.

Your strategic plan is tied to all the elements of the business:

• editorial

• circulation

• advertising

• production






CHAPTER 2

Whatinclude

strategicplan

in the

to

13


What to include in the strategic plan

Strategies will tend to be combinations of three sets of questions under the umbrella of “What is the maxi-

mum that can be achieved in this direction?”:

1 Editorial and Production related decisions such as content and format, frequency, number of editorial

pages, amount of color, etc.

2 Circulation decisions such as paid versus controlled, sources of subscriptions, types of offers, promotion

budgets, rate base targets—and most importantly—price of subscriptions and renewals.

3 Advertising decisions such as cost per thousand, pro-motion levels, rate base, and the position the maga-

zine and its sales team take in the marketplace relative to competitors.

What can be achieved?






14



It is important that management be aware that goals, within the strategic plan, can sometime be antagonistic.

When departmental goals conflict with corporate goals, the corporate goals will always lose out. For example, most advertising directors have a number of advertising pages as the performance target; but if a disproportion-ate number are sold in only one or two issues during the year, and these issues then require additional editorial pages for balance, it is very possible that the extra adver-tising pages are actually sold at a loss.

Corporatewill always

when

goals

departmentin conflict

goals.with

lose out






15



Strategic plans may have variances of a different kind than operating plans (budgets & goals which support

strategic direction and objectives). It is not enough to look at the immediate cause of a variance. You need to reexamine your assumptions, even your theory.






CHAPTER 3

whereAssess

you arenow

17


Assess where you are now

• Macro factors—What is happening nationally and internationally that affects your business?

• Market factors—Define what markets you are in and how big they are. How are your markets changing? What are the industry forecasts for the future of your markets: growing, emerging, mature, stable or declin-ing?

• Magazine industry factors—Are publishers down-sizing? Are advertising pages up or down in the indus-try?

• Competitive factors—Do an objective assessment of all media competitors within your markets. Do you compete primarily with magazines or other forms of media?

• Internal factors

Look at how your company fits into the world as a whole and what factors will influence your future prospects:

SITUATION ANALYSIS






18



1 Is it tangibly different from the competitors in terms of appearance, content and readership?

2 How is it priced and how important is price to buy-ers?

3 Is there a corporate growth plan with explicit goals and targeted levels of achievement?

4 Does redesign or repositioning come up for regular and repeated consideration no matter how success-

ful?

5 Are new start-ups or acquisitions part of the plan and is there an individual or group assigned to this re-

sponsibility?

You must take a hard look at the publication and its managers in terms of the following questions:






19



6 Does the acquisition or start-up group have a budget and the authority to assign funds?

7 Is there a compensation plan that rewards entrepre-neurship and risk taking?

8 Is management willing to accept failure?

9 Does top management provide consistent commit-ment to the exploration of new ideas in sales ap-

proaches, production processes, and editorial content?

10 Does top management stress long-term profitabil-ity as well as short-term returns?






20



11 What are the strengths and weaknesses of your company? Can you start new products effectively?

12 What resources are available in terms of staff ex-pertise, capital to invest in acquisitions, and so on?

13 Are you increasing market share?

14 Identify opportunities and threats. Are there publishers in similar markets in the U.S. that you

should acquire or do a joint venture with? What are the barriers to entry in your markets?

15 What do your advertisers really think about your publication(s)? Blind interviews are a good way to

answer this question.






CHAPTER 4

whereDetermine

you want to go

22


Determine where you want to go

To determine direction, you need to set objectives. Objectives are broad statements, such as “We want

to increase market share.”

For each objective, develop one or more goals that sup-port it. Goals are more specific and measurable than objectives. For example, if your objective is to increase market share, you may set goals of increasing advertising pages by 10% and circulation by 5% to reach that objec-tive.

Developto

goals objectives.your

support






CHAPTER 5

get therehowDecide

you will

24


Decide how you will get there

Figuring out how you are going to achieve your objec-tives and goals and how much reaching them is go-

ing to cost is operational planning. It requires concrete plans for each area of the business that describe what needs to get done and who is going to do it.

Operational plan components:

1 Editorial plans

2 Marketing plans for advertising and circulation efforts

3 Manufacturing plans

4 Ancillary product plans






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Decide how you will get there

5 Plans for new product introductions

6 Potential merger, acquisition and/or divestiture activ-ity

7 Financial budgets

You constantly need to compare your strategic and operational plan with actual results. This is like keep-

ing score. What worked and what did not?

Review how you did






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Publishing resources available from Magazine Training International

Manuals (available in print or in PDF format on CD):

• Managing the Magazine with Confidence and Skill English Bulgarian Chinese (simplified) Chinese (traditional) Korean Romanian Russian Spanish

• Advanced Business of Magazine Publishing English Russian

• Editing the Magazine English Bulgarian Romanian

• Design for Magazines English Bulgarian Chinese (simplified) Chinese (traditional) Croatian Romanian Russian Spanish

• Writing Effective Magazine Articles English French Polish Romanian Russian

Audio/Visual resources:

• DVD course: Managing the Magazine with Confidence and Skill Subtitles available in: Chinese (simplified) Chinese (traditional) Russian Spanish • DVD course: Design for Magazines Subtitles available in: Chinese (simplified) Chinese (traditional) Russian Spanish

• MP3 audio course: Writing Effective Magazine Articles






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