Case Study

Service Dealer Magazine

Producing the UK’s market leading magazine for the groundcare and agricultural machinery trade

TAP was appointed as publisher of Service Dealer Magazine in September 2013. The publication is highly respected and distributed bi-monthly to all the dealers who sell and service equipment as well as the manufacturers and distributors.

Looking good and sounding great

TAP started with a redesign and improved the magazine’s look and navigation. A plan was then put in place to evolve the Service Dealer brand and reach.

Case Study - Publishing - Service Dealer

Targeting the right people in greater numbers

By working strategically with manufacturers and distributors, we worked on the circulation list stripping out wastage and adding recipients from the target audience, taking the circulation from 1,800 to 3,300 in just 12 months.

Getting a louder voice in today's market

We used social media to help with awareness as well as interaction with key manufacturers and events, underpinning the Service Dealer strapline “The Voice Of The Industry”.

Digital platforms

The Service Dealer Weekly Update is also emailed out every Friday from an interactive publishing platform and is read on average by 50% of the recipients.

Onwards and upwards

As with all ongoing projects, we continually evaluate the success of our strategies – for Service Dealer we conducted reader research to identify areas of possible improvement.

With our input, the magazine and Weekly Update have taken significant steps forward in design, navigation, pagination and revenues.

We have also developed the brand through design, events, social media and reciprocal sponsorship.

Service Dealer Conference & Awards

TAP introduced an annual conference to complement an evening awards ceremony which was first introduced in 2015 and is still running successfully today.

TAP is responsible for all aspects of the event from recruiting sponsors and attendees, to the conference theme and its execution.

"From the very start, TAP demonstrated that it understood our relatively niche sector. It brought fresh ideas, new stimulus and professional design that has considerably improved the quality of the title, accelerated revenues and grown the circulation. It also added its expertise in new media to bolt-on to the already strong print offering. In summary, TAP has added a solid ‘backbone’ to the titles, without ever compromising those original ideals of trust and confidence in the editorial values and aims – and has taken a loyal and growing readership along with them."

Chris Biddle - Founder of Service Dealer Magazine