News
Build or Buy? Lessons from Beverage Digest on Modernizing their Publishing Platform
November 18, 2024
Recently, we spoke to Beverage Digest co-owner Duane Stanford. Beverage Digest is a well-respected publication focused on the global beverage industry.
The Beverage Digest team partnered with ePublishing after embarking on a strategy to modernize and better monetize their business.
We spoke with Stanford about the challenges of modernizing an existing brand.
ePublishing: Tell us about Beverage Digest.
Duane Stanford: Beverage Digest is a 41-year-old publisher focused on the global beverage industry. Our key products include the Beverage Digest Newsletter; the Fact Book, an annual compendium of all-channel retail data; Map Books, which show Coke and Pepsi franchise territories; our annual conference Future Smarts; awards; and sponsorships.
Before ePublishing, we sent a PDF newsletter by email to subscribers. ePublishing’s integrated content management system allowed us to create a site that delivered content behind a paywall. The platform also enabled us to provide our designed and paginated PDF publication by downloading it from the same website. So, readers have two options for consuming our content. Important, as well, is that both formats are mobile-friendly.
ePublishing: Who reads your publication?
Stanford: Pretty much anybody who makes their bones on beverages in one way or another, finds value in our content. So, you have everyone from the leaders of Coke, Pepsi, and Dr. Pepper, marketing people, PR people, communications, government relations, various associations, private and institutional investors, Wall Street analysts, distributors, and suppliers. We cut across the board of people who need to understand this industry from the inside.
ePublishing: What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced in recent years?
Stanford: Our key challenge is always expanding our customer base and figuring out how to reach people we know would find value in our product. First – make sure they know we exist, and second – understand the offering and the value we provide.
This is an ongoing challenge as we have a small staff. We're building capability, but we don't have many of the resources that some of the larger specialized publishers might have. We’re learning and creating a lot of the capability to be more efficient and reach new customers.
ePublishing: You've significantly upgraded from the prior site to a more modern integrated platform. Tell us about that journey.
Stanford: Keep in mind that Beverage Digest didn't have a content site — it was a webpage shell with a link to another e-commerce site. We were starting from scratch.
We started with the standard question: Do we build or buy? We lacked the in-house developer expertise, time, and budget, but we realized that a few pre-built third-party vendor platforms could take us where we wanted to go.
I was on a mission early on to know what I didn't know. I just started talking to as many people as possible and learning everything I could. It became very clear. I already knew going in we had a pretty antiquated website. I knew there was way more available than what we were using. We didn't have good integrations when it came to ecommerce and content management.
My inclination was to buy something out of the box because we were small; we knew we didn't have the resources to go and figure out a lot of it. If we could find someone who's already figured out all the hard stuff and deliver something reliable, that would be best for us.
ePublishing has already thought through many of the issues publishers have; they understand the businesses, the integrations we need, and the workflows. They’ve created something to answer the very questions that I had.
ePublishing: What business benefits would you say other companies should take note of?
Stanford: One of the significant benefits for us is that ePublishing integrates our content management, e-commerce, and marketing. With this solution, we can do all three, which are the nuts and bolts of our business.
Another benefit is that we don't worry about downtime. The site just runs. It works. While that seems like a basic thing, it isn’t because you don't always know you're going to get that. And if little things come up, they get resolved quickly. As a result, we can have confidence in our business continuity. That's important.
Secondly, content. Being out in the world through Google search and in many other ways with our content is critical. So, our content is paywalled yet visible enough for people to find out we exist when they need information.
Then, having an e-commerce platform that works seamlessly with the rest of the platform is essential. Our mantra from the beginning has been that we want to make it easy for people to compensate us for our services. We do not want any barriers to people giving us their hard-earned money for the value we're delivering. We want that to be easy. So, it was essential to have a platform that made it easy for customers to transact business with us.
ePublishing: Do you have any recommendations for other content publishers seeking to modernize their technology stack?
Stanford: My one takeaway from the past few years has been the debate about building your own or buying out of the box. I discovered it doesn't need to be either/or. What we've found to be successful — and every business must decide this for themselves — is laying the baseline by buying something, a core product that does the things you can't do yourself, and then adapting it.
Buying an out-of-the-box program makes sense, but it’s also important to have the capability to customize it the way we want. It’s a great combination for us.