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Bauer brings its women’s lifestyle titles together under Now to Love hub

Following on from Homes to Love, Food to Love and Noted, Bauer this week consolidated its plethora of women’s lifestyle content under the Now to Love hub.

The new hub will host content from New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, Woman’s Day, Good Health Choices, The Australian Women’s Weekly NZ, Simply You Style and Next in a single online location.

As has been the case with previous major launches, Bauer is throwing some marketing budget at the intiative, rolling out a campaign across radio, outdoor and digital in a bid to generate some hype.   

Bauer digital director Michael Fuyala says the latest move was largely made because the disparate online titles didn’t attract the kind of scale advertisers are looking for.

“If you take Homes To Love as an example we launched 18 months ago and since then have had more than 2.1 million unique visits, very strong engagement and commercial results for our advertisers,” says Fuyala. “It would have been very difficult to execute that with three different individually branded websites, with different commercial offers and teams that competed rather than collaborated.”

Fuyala is now hoping to replicate this with Now to Love and has set some lofty targets for the team.

“We want to deliver more than 500,000 unique sessions in month one,” says Fuyala.  “After less than one week we are on track with more than 17,000 unique visits yesterday alone. Longer term, we expect more than 850,000 unique visits per month.”

Should the site reach these numbers, Fuyala says it will be the largest lifestyle and entertainment site dedicated to New Zealand women.

Charged with the responsibility of making this happen is editor Bridget Jones, who along with a dedicated editorial team will publish a combination of original stories and content repurposed from the titles.

While the content of the publications will be brought together on the website, the titles will still exist as independent entities on social media. 

“Having branded pages within Now To Love means each magazine brand can continue to grow its social, email and search audience, but their content also reaches new larger audiences that Now To Love will build,” says Fuyala.

Titles such as Woman’s Day and New Zealand Woman’s Weekly already have significant social media offerings, which will now be used to funnel traffic into the new hub.

“We get the scale and context required to deliver on digital only and eventually TV briefs, but we also retain and grow strong connections with our existing brand audiences,” says Fuyala.

He says this strategy is modelled on the approach being applied on Bauer’s most recently launched Hub, Noted.

“In the four months since launch that site [Noted] has had more than 1 million unique visits and is growing every month,” he says. “The social engagement of all of the contributing brands has never been stronger and the different brands share one another’s stories when they deem them interesting and relevant to their audiences.”

Fuyala adds that Noted has also played an important role in introducing new readers to the Bauer’s titles.

“The encouraging thing about that is we are finding the Noted audiences younger than the existing magazine subscribers,” he says.

Fuyala says Homes to Love and Food to Love have also been performing well, consistently meeting audience targets and continuing to grow.

He says that the combination of Bauer’s four hubs alongside standalone brands completes the “brand architecture” of Bauer’s digital strategy.

“Locally our focus is now building number one positions in each of our target categories, and continuing to quickly grow our video capability across the whole business, an area where the team have already made very strong inroads.”

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