"It's like you've been in my head for the past two years." - Jenny Barriger, SFM Owner/Publisher
Opening Up New Possibilities with Simply Family Magazine
Simply Family Magazine (SFM), located in Billings, Montana is all things local family life - fun, inspired, and simplified.
With both a print and online presence, SFM helps their readers navigate parenthood from birth through high school and beyond. They provide a comprehensive local calendar of family fun activities, feature easy to make recipes, life hacks, local resources, and highlights of exceptional local kids and families.
Each spring, readers can find the area's most comprehensive list of summer camps and activities.
Before Cardsetter
Simply Family Magazine Owner and Publisher, Jenny Barriger found Cardsetter while she was searching for a better website solution. Feeling restricted by her Wordpress template and frustrated by the process of making changes to it, she was intrigued by Cardsetter's ease of use for non-technical admins.
Jenny realized that Cardsetter's modular card-based approach to content organization would open up new possibilities in serving the Simply Family Magazine audience and advertisers. It would also allow the SFM team to adapt and make changes to the site themselves, whenever the need arises. She knew this would save them time and money, and make the online portion of the business more profitable.
Supercharging SFM's Content
Cardsetter enables SFM to get more longevity out of its large library of content (over 1,600 articles and counting). The site can group related content and display it when and where it's relevant. For example, recipes that are popular during the holidays can be brought back to the homepage when they are relevant and with just a few clicks. There's no need to change the publish date or duplicate the post. As the admins, the SFM team has full flexibility on which articles or recipes show where.
Similarly, family-friendly activities that are popular in the summer, such as all of the places around town to swim, can quickly be grouped in a horizontal scrolling section of content, a deck, within the SFM Summer Guide on their website. Creating a custom page for a "guide" on Cardsetter is incredibly simple for admins. With just a couple of clicks, the team can create the new page and begin adding cards of content to it. They can increase revenue with low effort by adding sponsor logos and ads to this new, useful guide as well.
This makes SFM's existing content useful on an ongoing basis and allows it to place content where and when it is most useful to its audience.
Features, Revenue and Freedom
Simply Family Magazine utilizes Cardsetter's Events feature to bring events off of the magazine pages and into an easy to scroll through, mobile-first experience for their online readers.
SFM's sponsors get noticed too! Cardsetter integrates with the AdPlugg ad server to make serving simple banner ads easy. In addition, SFM chooses to create "cards" for their sponsors that link through to their own sponsor page. SFM is able to quickly add the sponsor's card to any piece of content, and they can also backlink the articles on the sponsor's page.
The SFM team enjoys the freedom that Cardsetter gives them to create and evolve. As the needs of their audience and advertisers change, SFM is able to quickly adapt their website themselves.
