Meredith Corp.’s Better Homes & Gardens magazine is hoping to boost brand engagement with a new widget, launching next week.
The BHG Recipe Saver widget, targeted to the Better Homes reader, a 28- to 55-year-old woman with a family, offers users 7,000 BHG-branded recipes, meal plans and coupons. Consumers can use the widget from any site, without being redirected to the BHG home page, and can search the Recipe Saver database for certain ingredients, coupons or recipes. Once a recipe is selected, the widget creates a printable shopping list, and users also can print off coupons.
“As a publisher, we find ourselves in highly fragmented media environment with really fast-moving consumers who are increasingly in control of their media consumption, so we can’t rely only on branded sites,” said Dan Hickey, VP of digital content for Meredith. “We have to look for innovative ways to extend the reach of the brand, and we have to look at personalized spaces where we know our reader is spending a lot of time.”
On top of building rapport with readers, the Recipe Saver widget is expected to help Meredith with future marketing efforts by requesting user registration when saving recipes.
“We look at this as a brand extension, so we can get scale and monetize that user,” Hickey noted. “In the future, we see our brands more reaching that fragmented audience and if we can distribute content with monetization and register users and create that experience, we see it as a way of reaching scale without relying solely on destination sites. It helps the brand become more portable.”
Recipe Saver will be promoted on BHG.com, as well as through Meredith’s food-focused and BHG-branded e-newsletters. Hickey said he is aiming for 1 million users within Recipe Saver’s first year.
BHG has partnered with Qponix to allow BHG advertising partners in the grocery and consumer packaged goods industry to place coupons and recipes in the Recipe Saver. At least 20 such coupons should be available at the tool’s launch.
An iPhone version of Recipe Saver, which will allow users to scan mobile coupons while inside the grocery store, is slated for release in the first quarter of next year. Meredith also is planning to launch niche versions of Recipe Saver for its other core audience groups, like parents.
