Marketing Your Journal 101

Author: Penny Freedman

There are many jobs to juggle as an editor running a successful journal – everything from soliciting articles, building a strong board, and navigating publishing ethics. This month we’re highlighting the various components of running a journal, with an eye on providing tips and advice.

Marketing your journal may seem like a step you can save for your publisher, but having a clear marketing and promotion plan can help make the rest of the work of running your journal easier. Read on below for highlights on how to best market your journal.

Then find more information from our Springer brand on how we promote your journal and how else you can help, here.

Set an Action Plan

1. Determine your goal for the year. This will help you zero in on what the focus of your message needs to be. Do you want to increase submissions? Grow your impact factor? Recruit new board members?
2. With your goal in mind consider the audiences you have access to that might be interested in your journal. Fellow colleagues? Conference members you meet at an upcoming conference? Students? Members of a professional organization you belong to?
3. With your goal and audience in mind, determine the best tools to reach these individuals. Social media, e-mail, and in-person communication are some of easiest resources to utilize.

Use Tools to Convey Your Message

1. With your goal, message, and audience in mind share relevant content on your journal’s social media accounts. If your journal isn’t active on social media yet, this is the perfect time to start. If you don’t have the time to dedicate to it, see if there is an Editorial Board member up to taking on the task.
2. Do you utilize social media personally and/or professionally? People enjoy following influential individuals in their field of study/relevant to their interests. Set your Twitter and/or Facebook account as public, and be sure to include a link to your journal in your bio. Aim to post something daily. Discover more tips for social media use as a journal editor.
3. Your journal homepage is the first place people will find out more about your journal. Make sure the information on it is up-to-date (journal description, editorial board members, calls for papers). If anything needs to be refreshed, contact your publishing editor.
4. Conferences are a great place to promote your journal. Be prepared with your journal’s flyer and/or mini-flyers, business cards that we distribute with your journal’s name, scope, and contact information
5. Utilize the table-of-content alerts to share newsworthy items and information via e-mail widely.

Share Content in New Ways

1. Try using the SharedIt links of journal articles on social media that are relevant to items in the news cycle. Catch on to relevant trending hashtags and include them in your posts.
2. Include calls for papers in your e-mail signature and via social media accounts.
3. Check out information on your journal’s author makeup on Authormapper. Share interesting pieces of data on social media, and use the information to better understand the scope of your journal’s authors.
4. Stay up-to-date with the performance of your journal’s articles on Springer Nature Citations. Give researcher’s an encouraging nod with the stats that they might like to hear about via an e-mail or social media shout-out.