Meet The Knot
Known for its modern fashion sense, socially conscious approach, and incredible resources, The Knot has been a source of support and inspiration for all things wedding-related to more than 25 million couples worldwide. Stemming from the top wedding website and app, The Knot magazine offers everything engaged couples need to plan their wedding: inspiring ideas, thousands of photos, style tips, expert advice, and more.
The Knot specializes in helping people plan their unique weddings, assisting with everything from setting (and sticking to) a budget, finding vendors, announcing their nuptials with invitations, creating a registry, and more. Their goal is to provide couples with everything they need while planning, and they’re there every step of the way to help make their day truly special. What some people may not know, however, is that The Knot is just one brand underneath the larger umbrella of The Knot Worldwide, a global company with brands in 16 counties that help people navigate and enjoy life’s greatest moments. From the proposal to the wedding day, creating a home, and starting a family together, The Knot Worldwide is about celebrating all major milestones.
Growing by Going Digital
The Knot magazine has a team of eight, and everyone wears many hats. They produce high-quality content, requiring a major effort on all ends.
Issues are published quarterly since content takes time to produce, and they focus on in-depth interviews that help their readers. This includes everything from longer lead times, which ensure they have the most impactful interviews, to an extra step at the end where they embed videos from certain interviews straight into their magazine. This allows readers to hear directly from the source, watch the full interview, and read the article. They shoot their cover and typically also have photoshoots for the fashion and accessory features inside the magazine, which requires meticulous planning and thoughtful execution. It’s a pretty constant, ongoing cycle. So as soon as they release an issue, they’re already working on the next one: talking to industry experts, conducting interviews, and planning shoots.
The Knot has been publishing on Issuu for the past nine years, and one of their biggest challenges was reaching a wider audience. Although they weren’t utilizing all of Issuu’s features initially, after attending a platform demo, they learned more about interactive features that could help them reach a wider audience and elevate their content.
Creating Connected Experiences
Their featured stories are clickable on the front cover, which gets readers past the Editor’s Letter and straight to the content they want. The embed feature has also made their digital magazine more engaging than print. In the Spring 2022 issue, they included a behind-the-scenes video from the photo shoot with Sydney McLaughlin, the Olympian. The video lets readers watch the Q&A with Sydney and hear her talk about her relationship, wedding planning, and how the Olympics fit into all that — a cool viewer experience where their readers could feel they were talking to an Olympian.
The Knot has shared that the digital improvements have been a big success, and they are excited about the future of their magazine. Following the Spring issue featuring the video with Sydney McLaughlin, they’re working to incorporate more videos and multimedia into the digital issues; they recently hired an editorial video director to support that vision and make it a reality.
By sharing their digital content on social media and reusing it multiple times in various formats across channels, they’ve reached more viewers and boosted interaction with less effort — a huge win across the board for multiple teams.
It’s also been helpful to analyze statistics – all in the same platform – to see what people are clicking on and what pages they’re going to. These insights massively help inform their content strategy.
Key Results
The Knot utilizes Issuu to effectively broaden its digital reach by generating assets to share across all channels. In doing so, they’ve effectively increased viewer engagement and driven more traffic to their website. This approach improves The Knot’s online presence and helps foster more significant interaction with its audience. Publishing the magazine digitally on Issuu makes it easier for everyone to find what they need to celebrate life’s big moments from all angles.