The Shift From Print to Digital Publishing
Feb 17th, 2022 by Stephanie WarnerWe recently shared the top 2022 marketing and digital publishing trends on our blog and in our Issuu 2021 year in review. One of the main trends that we identified is “Digital Content Continues to Grow: the Shift from Print to Digital Publishing.” The shift from printed materials to digital content has been building for years. Over the past two years, the need for digital content has hit an all-time high — especially in light of the global pandemic. This trend will continue and affect businesses and organizations of all types, including start-ups, major brands, universities, non-profits, restaurants, and more.
Digital publishing vs. print
Digital content has the power to connect people, engage readers, and build brands, which is why digital publishing has become so important in the past few years. Previously, the primary way to communicate with customers was through printed materials such as brochures, newspapers, magazines, direct mail, and so many other paper-based items. The process to produce printed materials is time-consuming, expensive, and often requires a lot of lead time to allow for the production of printed materials. Also, if you make a mistake in the original content or want to update a portion of the materials, you have to re-print everything. Producing printed items is expensive, without having any assurance that you will receive a return on your investment. Printing materials will still be useful for some activities, but the shift to digital publishing will only continue to grow this year.
Digital publishing is available at a much lower cost and offers much more flexibility than print! Rather than having to pay per piece for printed items, with digital publishing you will pay a no-to-low cost monthly fee or by publication. Plus, the digital publishing tools are web-based and everything can be accomplished completely in the cloud. Edits or updates are no problem and don’t require additional costs or loss of much production time.
Digital content and digital publishing have been a very welcome solution over the past two years and over the course of the global pandemic. Digital content has enabled organizations to maintain communication with their customers and readers right on their laptops and mobile devices. It also removes the need to have any physical touchpoints. In fact, there is no need for customers to even be in the same geographic location the way a printed material piece might require. Digital publishing is also a sustainable business choice. We recently calculated that digital publishing on Issuu saves over 8.3 billion trees a year!
Distribution and tracking with digital publishing
We’ve described the advantages of the creation and publication process of digital publishing, but it doesn’t stop there. Distribution of digital content is much easier and practically limitless! When you are using digital content to communicate with your customers and readers, you can share your content through a variety of channels including your website, all of your social media channels, email, and text. The ease of distribution means you can reach a much wider audience without needing to produce more materials at an extra cost. The ease of distribution also ensures your digital content is available to meet new and existing customers wherever they might be — whether it’s a visit to your website, through an email campaign or on a Facebook post that gets shared.
Once your digital content has spread far and wide, it’s time to check the content’s analytics to see how it performed. Tracking and evaluating the return on investment is simple and easy when working with digital publishing. You can analyze which of the distribution channels was the most successful and what types of digital content or which pages of your digital publication drew the most engagement. Of course digital content can also link directly back to e-Commerce pages, shopping links, advertisers, and other call-to-actions. Drive sales, website visits, brand engagement, social follows, and even email sign-ups with digital content!
Issuu is your digital publishing solution
The shift from print to digital is not reversing, so now it’s time to set yourself up for success in digital publishing. As we’ve mentioned there are many web-based platforms that are available for no-to-low cost. Digital publishing should be easy, fun, and effective!
Issuu.com is the perfect digital publishing platform to create and distribute your awesome content. Choose the right plan for your publishing needs and start creating and distributing digital content within minutes. Issuu is a cloud-based platform with advanced publishing features that you can use on your own or easily across your team — whether working together in an office or most likely collaborating remotely.
Looking for ideas of the type of digital content to create? Issuu can transform typical marketing materials into a sleek flipbook, social media story, email graphic, and more. Explore a variety of different content types you can create on Issuu, including examples to inspire you and tips for getting started. Here’s an initial list of digital content to create:
Need help with the design phase of the project? Issuu offers easy-to-edit templates to create brochures, magazines, catalogs, portfolios, and more. Log in to your Issuu account and choose from all of the available templates in the publisher workspace. You can download them in PowerPoint, Google Slides, or Keynote formats. Then customize with your own text, photos, headlines, and branding. If you already have your files ready it’s easy to upload files from Adobe and Canva or sync your Google Drive or Dropbox files.
Once you have successfully uploaded your documents to Issuu, it’s time to really utilize all of the powerful digital publishing features available on the Issuu platform. Start by enhancing your publication with interactive features including:
Add one-click shopping links to drive sales from your publication
Embed YouTube and Vimeo videos directly into your digital flipbooks
Immerse your audience in the fullscreen viewing experience of your content
Once your publication is interactive, it’s time to share it with the world! Issuu makes content distribution easy and quick. Embed your content directly onto your website — no engineering skills needed. Grab your publication link and share on social media to reach new readers too.
Issuu also makes developing additional content assets super easy. Transform your flipbooks into social stories to share on Facebook, Instagram, and more. In a few quick steps, our social story creator makes it easy to select images and text from your flipbook to create social stories with multiple screens. Issuu also helps convert your content into engaging GIFs that you can share in email newsletters or on social. With Issuu, asset creation no longer takes hours, only minutes!
Make the shift to digital publishing today
This year, we’ve identified the continued trend of digital publishing and the shift from print to digital content. Ensure you have your digital publishing needs covered by finding the right tools to create beautiful and effective digital content. Issuu makes it easy to create once, share everywhere and build your brand, organization, and business.
Join Issuu today to start digital publishing to promote our business with awesome flipbooks, catalogs, brochures, and much more — no printer or production costs.