How can magazines build a strong community to cope with the limitless possibilities of the digital age?
There is nothing worse in the English language than being called a rambler. It conjures up images of heavy boots, sweaty faces and dull conversations. So, when you are creating a magazine for ramblers it’s difficult to be cutting edge and in fashion.
That was the situation that faced Country Walking magazine in 2015. Guy Procter had just taken over the editor’s chair and he was faced with a title that had seen sales drop by 11.8% (only from the second half of 2012 to 2015, the circulation of Country Walking dropped from 32521to 23489). The most urgent question for him was how to reverse this dismal situation and get people excited about walking outdoors.
“A magazine like ours called country walking sounds very boring,” says Guy. “When people think of country walking, they think of an uncomfortable stereotype of wearing two hats and brown leather boots in a rambler’s style. It all conspired to make our brand not very talked about.”
That was the challenge he faced. How could he get people to talk about his magazine naturally? While many people in print media blame the internet for falling sales, it is on the internet that Guy has found a solution.
Country Walking decided to bring the benefits of health and learning into people’s lives by an impressive but simple challenge and get people to talk about it in a way that they would never have talked about. And then they set up a Facebook group in 2015 and named it after the challenge—walk 1000 miles.
“Thousand miles sounds like an incredible title, and people would be proud of that. And we were trying to divide it by three hundred sixty-five days. And it comes out at a very manageable two- and three-quarter miles, which is an easy hour’s walk. So, you can do on your lunch break, which becomes a much more socially transmissible saying something. People will be happy to say, hey, I’m doing this,” explained Guy.
In addition, an increasing number of researches suggest that walking for an hour in a day — coincidentally, is equal to the amount of time it takes to walk 1,000 miles in 12 months — is the best medicine for almost any ailment. Cancer Research UK believes walking can help prevent over 3,000 cases of cancer each year. And it’s free, simple, easy to fit into your daily life, and you don’t need any professional equipment other than a comfortable pair of shoes.
Country Walking hopes that everyone can benefit from this free and best medicine. So, they launched Walk 1000 miles as a free challenge for everyone. This community encourages people to go out and walk in their spare time to achieve the incredible mileage. People in this group will also receive constant encouragement, celebration and advices, as well as free contents and prizes from magazine partners.
“Walking helps whatever the weather As I have fibromyalgia. As my GP suggested it helps increase endorphins. And I do like this group. It’s interesting dipping in and out of it to read people’s stories and occasionally add my own bit if they ask something practical that I might have had some experience of,” said Penny Bowers, who is a freelance production editor on scientific academic journals. She first joined Walk 1000 miles by word of mouth after a friend shared it with her.
However, the word of mouth does not built in a day. Country Walking has provided care for the members of the community, as much as possible trying to create a relatively comfortable, healthy and high-quality community environment for the members. The purpose of this is that people can establish their own community relationships here with confidence, and then the community can also gradually grow in stable membership. This win-win situation, country walking, has now been achieved. For they have passed the hardest times — the first step of building the community.
Facebook provides a very open and supportive environment. Everybody is on Facebook. That’s where the readers are. And the number of readers on Facebook is more than other in scram or twitter or anywhere else. It’s such an intimate medium. Because here people are willing to share their lives and what they are proud of, people can find comfort and support from this social platform. But on the other hand, the platform is too big, everyone is here, how do you get people willing to participate in your little world?
“When you create community, most people have quite a strong desire to understand the rules and to receive the approval of the people in charge. At the beginning, especially, I make a lot of posts about why you are welcome in this group and what you’re welcome to do,” said Guy.
Establishing a friendly and supportive place is critical for community development. When people remove loneliness from your community, reap friendship, and connect with society through a small interest, like walking, the community is on the path to growth. At the beginning, it took Country Walking about six months to get to a thousand people. But until now, Walk 1000 miles have thirty-one thousand people in that community. And people in here still do a lot of word of mouth marketing for Country Walking. There are five million interactions in that group every year.
“The community was to give me insight on other walk I could do and when I hit a low point and was not walking much there was lot of encouragement to help you,” said Mark Carmody, who is a build technician, has been in this group for around four years and also let his family members join in walk 1000 miles. “There has been a large number of people joining and all so now sub groups for different areas of the country. For example, there is one set up for Wales that I also have joined its helpful if people want to meet up for group walks.”
People in the community show they feel great about themselves. That gets them a lot of positive attention in their own little social network. And then within the community they receive a lot of and support from people who just fully at themselves to kind of pass each other on the back and offer encouragement and help. And it’s kind of a cycle. For example, people are shy when they join a group. They are in a state of not knowing and not willing to ask. Then within a year of entering the group, their attitudes change subtly. They will be the ones who want to answer the new person’s questions in a timely manner. This allows the editorial team some valuable time for better magazine content productions.
“This virtuous circle has led not only to healthy community relationships, but also to considerable business prospects for country walking. Magazines have been cutting advertising budgets in recent years. However, Country Walking gains a group of potential advertisers and partners through the development of community over the years,” said Guy.
So, at a time when the magazine industry was in decline, Country Walking was able to expand its social circle and achieve revenue growth. Moreover, after the development of the community becomes mature, the magazine team also has more energy to spend on the page of the magazine. In 2016, country walking has reversed a decade of decline and achieved 6.7% growth, with its half-year circulation rising from 23,489 in 2015 to 2,5074.
Moreover, with the increase of time and the development of the community, the virtuous circle also extends from the relationship between communities to the production of magazines.
Walk 1000 miles, where members get up to watch the sunrise, take self and a cow, or put on a wig on the top of a mountain, and all sorts of other whimsies combined with walking. But people are willing to pay attention to a variety of new and interesting things and provide inspiration for the magazine in the interaction.
“This creates a kind of fun and finds that it becomes a big virtuous circle between magazines that give them ideas about things they can do. And then their social channel becomes a place where we can get coverage of what’s hot and share it. Then the climax appeared again in the magazine,” said Guy.
In that interaction, Walk 1000 miles has grown over the past five years, boosting sales of Country Walking by 40% and making it Britain’s best-selling outdoor walking magazine. However, building a successful community is no longer easy, how to scale online success to offline subscriptions is another core issue.
“Frankly, it’s already very exhausting, running the community. The challenge is that if no one goes out and pick up the magazine, then all this is useless. No one has any meaning. So, we should spend a third of our time trying to establish this trend to get recruits and emerging readers,” said Guy.
The Internet does bring infinite possibilities to the survival of magazines in the digital age, but it also brings a lot of helplessness, because people’s preferences change so fast in this era. The title of 1000 mileage is attractive, and many members are attracted by its reputation. But it didn’t take long for people to get tired of counting steps.
“I joined with intention of counting my mileage but while I go walking every day, I haven’t counted how much I walk,” said Penny Bowers. “To be honest part of problem was practicalities of actually adding up mileage seemed for me taking away enjoyment of walking. My friend feels same really.”
But Penny admits that the title “Walk 1000 miles” is attractive at the first glance, but it was the community itself that kept her stay. Another member, Sally-Ann Winter, who has finished 1000 miles over the past five years, claimed that the reason she would like to join in the group because she wants to know what walking challenges here are available and she loves walking so much but she never wastes money on magazine.
But it is undeniable that, whether it is Penny or Sally, they still want to stay at walk 1000 miles because the stories of other people in this group are very attractive to them and can also be encouraged. After all, the human landscape is as attractive as the natural landscape.
In addition, the Internet provides people with an interest in tribes, bringing together people with similar interests. The human ability is far more powerful than the objective world. Walk 1000 miles is an online community, but the members here spontaneously establish a local group in the real world. Since then, the community relationship has been further stabilized.
This is one of the reasons why the community established by Country Walking can be successful. It brings people together. It breaks the “sense of sanctity” written by professionals before the digital age. It allows readers to participate in the selection of magazine covers and appear in magazines. It’s a community that makes magazines popular.
“So, in terms of instant market research, it is an incredibly valuable tool because that thousands of people standing there waiting to tell you to give the give you the instant feedback you like and in it. When you give a sense of participation to members of the community, community members become more active in the community. Be aware that the community is money,” said Guy.
