Growing a business – BBC Gardeners’ World MD on the magazine’s digital transformation
For over 30 years, Gardeners’ World has been one of the UK’s top gardening titles – an indispensable guide that appeals to green-fingered experts and novice gardeners alike. As gardening needs have changed, so has the magazine – branching out online in 2007 and adding podcasts and live events to go with the Gardeners’ World BBC programme that started it all.
Tasked with keeping the evergreen brand from wilting is Catriona Bolger, Managing Director of Gardeners’ World at Immediate Media, which has a licensing agreement with the BBC to bring out the magazine. It’s a position that requires splicing the old with the new – the comfort of a print magazine, with the huge potential that comes with digital transformation.
“We are still driven in terms of revenue by print, but we have massive growth around digital and massive ambitions to build out from that,” Bolger recently told FIPP President and CEO James Hewes as they sat down at the Publishing Show in London for a talk about the digital transformation of media businesses.
“We are very proud of our magazine – we have a real commitment to quality and moving and reflecting the needs of audiences. But clearly, we can’t stand still in that space, we have to keep moving. It’s really exciting for new recruits to join our team. Even if we have nominally put them in a digital role, they have a desire and interest to appear in print. It’s something we foster because it helps us with cross-content creation, which is what we are working towards all the time.”
Planting a digital seed
Gardeners’ World’s digital journey started with the 2007 launch of GardenersWorld.com, initially a reference site featuring a large database of plant profiles acquired from the BBC. The website soon became a popular online destination for gardeners, featuring gardening advice, step-by-step projects, a ‘What To Do Now’ calendar, video clips and reviews of tools and gardening kits.
GardenersWorld.com received a huge boost during Covid when people, confined to their homes during lockdown, turned to gardening in their droves. “We saw a dramatic step change in our digital engagement,” recalled Bolger. “Before Covid we might have had 1.5m uniques in May during high season, while during the pandemic we went up to 5.5m.
“People turned to gardening and they turned to us as a trusted authority. That allowed us to invest further in our content creation team and really push down on that opportunity and build out new areas of content on the site.”
A part of the website that’s evolved is the section featuring paid content, with Gardeners’ World refreshing is exclusive online space for magazine subscribers, called Secret Garden, and renaming it Premium.
“We have a premium content area which is locked down and builds out from the Secret Garden area we’ve had for six or seven years,” said Bolger. “Unashamedly our first objective was to offer added value to our print subscribers in the digital space so Secret Garden, at the time of its launch, was trailblazing and was bespoke content only accessible to print subscribers.
“Over time it just became a slightly clunky plug-in. The technical side of it wasn’t great and the journey for print subscribers was a bit painful. We also had a policy that made sense at the time – we published first in Secret Garden, and we released content after a certain amount of time to the open access site. What that meant was that you just had more of the same.
“So, when we launched our premium digital subs MVP last year, we wanted to have an improved mechanic for people to access. The business as a whole invested in Piano – it transfers our print subscribers over much simpler in an automated process. We wanted to create new and bespoke content formats that linked into the print content and the print audience’s wants and needs but gave them something different and special as well.”
The move has proved extremely successful for Gardeners’ World. “We’ve always teetered at the sort of 45% of print subscribers activating their digital – it never got beyond that point. But with the launch of Premium – restating that value, making the mechanics simpler – we’re closer to 60% of print subscriber activating and they are engaged with that content.
Gardeners’ World has also seen an 8% improvement rate in retention when people have engaged with Premium.
“It’s a great way for us deliver the other already existing benefits that we have for subscribers,” said Bolger. “Once they have activated, they are on the CRM newsletter list as well so we can remind them of the other multiple benefits of our subscriber club which we have invested in over time.”
Soothing the pain of ad revenue loss
Gardeners’ World has two strands to its ecommerce offering that are both delivered digitally. “With the traditional reader offers commerce, all of our partners – as well as being present in the magazine with underwritten pages – have a dedicated offers section on the website,” explained Bolger. “So, they are direct relationships with partners where we have strong commission terms, and we work to create really bespoke genuine content, often linked to offers.
“Then we also have typical affiliate ecommerce play. A lot of that affiliate is driven by reviews content so we have great expertise and trust and authority in the review space with a reviews editor who will work with central reviews writers.”
The fact that Gardeners’ World has several revenue streams has enabled the brand to ride out risk and offset tough times in the ad market with a better ecommerce performance.
“During Covid the demand in gardening commerce went through the roof and that offsets some of the downturn in advertising that we are seeing,” says Bolger. “Having those established platforms and the connectivity with our audience also allowed us to move into the learning space.
“We have established ways to create great learning content through video. We can resurface that learning content as either registration drive or premium content on the website.”
Finding the right horse to back
While Gardeners’ World has done well to digitally transform, Bolger stressed that there is still a lot of work to be done.
“If you look at sister brands and other businesses, people have backed certain horses – whether that’s a commerce play or an eyeballs play or subscription play. Our challenge is that we are backing all the horses and I’m not sure it’s the wrong thing.
“It’s something we’ve had to do because we don’t know which horse is going to win yet and which horse is going to be right for our audiences. The challenge with that is that it stretches our teams very thinly and what is significant is the requirement to train and reskill our team because we are asking them to do more.
“So it is that constant prioritisation and recognising that I have a finite team which requires training and that requires investment. There are some structural business challenges that people in my role have to communicate and fund to allow us to move forward because the potential is clear.”
