The Marketing Society + Turtl | Case study | Turtl
How The Marketing Society moved from a 20-year-old print journal that needed an army to a digital publication created by one man alone.
*The Marketing Society + Turtl* Going paperless delivers
How The Marketing Society boosted engagement by 50% and moved from print to digital
*The challenge*The problem<br> with print
A static medium for an increasingly globalized audience
Revaluating a print-led strategy for a global audience
The Marketing Society's quarterly print journal "Market Leader" ran for 20 years. The Society decided to retire it a year and a half ago over their doubts on the future of print for a global audience. They then began to focus on relaunching a more modern website, but this prompted the question: can their move to be more digital go beyond just the website?
We started to wonder whether it was possible to have a digital publication that would not only showcase our long-form content, but also make sense from a strategic viewpoint for the business
Michael Piggott, Editor, The Marketing Society
Complex workflows
Creating a print publication involves a huge amount of design involvement and the printing and binding process itself is both costly and time-consuming.
Difficult distribution
As the digital age opens up new audiences around the globe, your capacity to reach everyone interested in your content is limited if it's hosted in a physical paper copy.
No analytics
Content that isn't informed by data is guesswork. Paper publications have no analytics, which means content performance can't be measured beyond what people tell you, which can be subject to bias.
*The solution*Going digital
How Turtl empowers one person to create, publish, and distribute a digital publication
1. Design at speed
Michael Piggot was the only person who would work on the new publication. Turtl's drag-and-drop feature and locked branding are designed for people with minimal design skills and limited time to create great-looking content at speed.
2. Digital distribution
To make sure The Marketing Society's widespread audience could access their publication, they needed something easily shareable. Once a Turtl Doc is published, a simple link is all someone needs to access it. And in case you don't want just anyone to view it, you can set various access permissions.
3. Granular analytics
Market Leader was consumed by readers for 20 years without any performance data - it was time for change. The analytics capabilities of Turtl can reveal exactly which sections of a piece of content are getting read, and which are not. This lets you both improve existing content and inform future issues. Individual reader tracking also allows you to see who is reading what for how long.
Turtl works so well for an editorial publication because its page-turning format simulates the magazine reading experience. It's also something I can create on my own with virtually no external help.
Michael Piggott, Editor, The Marketing Society
*The results*50% more engagement in Turtl vs webpages
Plus reader insights, glowing feedback, and a surprising discovery
Enter Empower
Empower is The Marketing Society's digital publication created with Turtl. Here's what happened when they joined the digital revolution.
1. New insights
The new digital publication created in Turtl didn't just entertain readers, it also gave The Marketing Society new insights into their audience. They could suddenly see where their most active readers lived across the world, revealing geographical growth opportunities for membership. Individual reader tracking also revealed the unique content interests of their members, an insight that has helped their account managers nurture existing relationships.
2. Faster production times
The print journal Market Leader needed an editor, a designer, and an entire publishing company to produce one issue. By comparison, Michael Piggott, the editor of Empower, can create, publish, and distribute each monthly issue on his own using Turtl.
3. Glowing feedback
Reactions to Empower have been really positive, highlighting the navigation, visuals, and reading experience. It's opened up conversations with The Marketing Society's members on the outdatedness of the PDF for content distribution and set them apart as an innovative marketing thought leader.
I sent the latest issue to one of our global agency contacts and they thought it was fantastic. They were really keen to find out how we'd created it.
Michael Piggott, Editor, The Marketing Society
Putting Turtl to the test
As print has no analytics or engagement data to compare with Turtl's performance metrics, Michael wanted to run his own experiment. He posted the same content pieces from Empower on the new website in a standard scroll-to-read format to truly test the impact of Turtl. Here's what he found:
6 minutes
average read time in Turtl
4 minutes
average read time on the website
When people engage with content on websites, they often visit, read one thing, and bounce. Turtl's format brings content to life and encourages readers to stick around for longer.
Michael Piggott, Editor, The Marketing Society