SWAGGER Magazine: Standing out in a Sea of Content

(Part 1 of 4)

SWAGGER Magazine is North America's leading, digital-first, modern men's luxury lifestyle magazine. They help build their readers' confidence by providing them a pulse on the latest trends in fashion, grooming, entertainment, travel, culture, automotive, and more. They are a Toronto-born publication with teams across the US and Canada with growing audiences in key urban North American cities. 

In 2021, SWAGGER Magazine is hyper-focused on differentiation—as standing out becomes increasingly more difficult. SWAGGER’s strategy for differentiation relies on the partnership with their customers for capturing and acting on Voice of the Customer (VoC) to make important decisions on relevant content and to provide additional value to their advertisers. As a digital first magazine, SWAGGER’s projects are always based on improving the digital customer experience. Why? Because organizations that provide great customer experiences outperform their competitors! SWAGGER did not want feedback collection to interrupt their customers' digital experiences so they needed a solution to capture in-moment VoC sentiments on a wide range of topics relating to the top content preferences. 

"Being a bootstrapped startup, we quickly learned the cost of a bad decision or producing content that did not resonate with our audience. Missing the mark means lost revenue, stagnant audience growth and unhappy/non-recurring advertisers".

— Drew Williams, Founder of SWAGGER

So what does success look like? 

Perfecting differentiation through their content strategy contributes to some larger, overarching goals for SWAGGER. 

SWAGGER’s goals:  

1. Increase returning audience per month

2. Increase unique readers per month

3. Gain a deeper understanding of who their audience is to help secure higher and more persona targeted advertising revenue 

While SWAGGER had a firm grasp of what they needed to do to be successful, the next step was finding the right tool to help them get there. SWAGGER was looking for an expert CXM partner that would allow them to make decisions with their customers and not for them. They needed a way to collect actionable feedback across digital customer journeys to drive business impact. 

"As the day to day operations manager, I was tasked with evaluating a few different suppliers, QualMedMonkey were the usual suspects. We required a solution that would be nimble and cost-effective and not require a small army to implement. 

Alida's Touchpoint solution was the only vendor that met those requirements and we were able to get up and running within days, not weeks or months." 

— Kristen Anzelc, Operations Manager at SWAGGER

A path forward with Alida Touchpoint 

SWAGGER chose Alida Touchpoint to meet their customer-obsessed goals. Touchpoint is a microsurvey solution designed to boost customer engagement and capture VoC through short, timely, visually appealing interactions across digital customer journeys. With Touchpoint, SWAGGER interacts with audiences directly on their site to collect context-rich feedback that infuses the VoC into their content strategy while maintaining a great digital experience.

Touchpoint allows SWAGGER to: 

1. Collect insights in a branded, seamless, consistent way

2. Action the feedback gathered on content preferences to move the needle on increased audience size and unique readers 

3. Develop audience persona data that informs their advertising strategy 

Implement & Launch for SWAGGER 

This all sounds great and looks super cool, but what is the implementation experience actually like? Time-to-launch and ease-of-use were important factors for SWAGGER. So let’s break it down: 

27 day → 9 day→  2 day

Procurement cycle          Implementation             Launch        

That's 38 days from project inception to project execution. After a few weeks to launch their program, SWAGGER is able to run Touchpoint surveys in a matter of hours. SWAGGER has taken the important first step in their plan to stand out in a sea of content—ensuring they are infusing the voice of their customers in every step of their content strategy. 

SWAGGER was able to integrate Alida Touchpoint with their website in minutes. The nature of the magazine is to keep every piece of content that a reader might see as sophisticated, on brand, and visually appealing as possible so it was incredible to see the beautifully crafted activity ready to be deployed within a day!

*Follow along SWAGGER’s journey with Alida Touchpoint and see results in real time. This blog is part 1 of a 4-part series where we will show key metrics and performance indicators for SWAGGER.