Sparks Fly for ARC Print Magazine

ArcMagSpring2015What makes a forward-thinking global manufacturer debut a print magazine in 2015?

There’s one marketing strategy that is fairly immune to all the angst of the imminent digital ad disruption. For one forward thinking global manufacturer, the solution to telling your story is print, according to Pam Kozelka of the Content Marketing Institute.

For Lincoln Electric, a global manufacturer of welding equipment, their new printed magazine ARC is the perfect additional to their multi-channel sales and marketing strategy.

“In my gut, I think print is still important, but the real reason is we wanted something physical that customers who visit distributors could touch and page through while they waited. It’s a differentiator versus sales collateral that was too easy to ignore,” says Lincoln’s Craig Coffey who serves as the magazine’s publisher.

“Lincoln Electric takes a subtle approach to incorporating its brand into the editorial. Consider its July cover story – a feature on the celebrity duo from Gas Monkey Garage who brought their business of refurbishing and selling old cars onto the small screen in Discovery Channel’s Fast N’ Loud series,” explains Kozelka.

“The story definitely brings the cool factor to welding. Though the story doesn’t promote Lincoln Electric – it’s a natural fit because Lincoln Electric provides much of the equipment used on the show,” she continues.

That’s the beauty of this kind of editorial content; it matters to the audience in ways that sales pitches alone just don’t. And it’s delivered to the audience in whatever way works best for them.

“ARC Magazine’s content is distributed in whatever way readers prefer to receive it – print, web-based, or tablet (accessible through the Lincoln Library App in Google Play and the Apple App Store),” says Kozelka.

For the marketing team, “to say ARC is just print would be a misrepresentation; it can’t stand alone that way. It has to be digital too. It has to have a web presence. It has to have a standalone social presence. It has to be mobile-friendly. We wanted to deliver a multimedia experience,” Coffey says.

So far, it’s working. With 7,000 print subscriptions and increasing demand from distributors, the title seems to be resonating. And we’re pretty sure nobody’s blocking those ads, a huge bonus of using printed magazines to get your message across.

Everybody likes a good story. Lincoln Electric is doing a great job telling theirs.