Inevitably, this change in focus meant big changes from a print-focused team to a digital one, with the focus switching to "an ability to rapidly grow digital traffic," according to Newman.
"This was a really hard decision, and not one that I would like to repeat again," she emphasised, referring to redundancies that many publishers have had to make at some point in the last few years.
Despite the many tough decisions that had to be made, there were indisputably a huge number of opportunities for a magazine brand like Glamour to gear up and go digital-first.
Opportunities in the market...and how to get there
It's never been a better time for a beauty brand to be online. With the rise of influencers dominating social media, how-to tutorials exploding on YouTube, and Instagram establishing itself as an ecommerce player, the beauty market in the UK is in good shape, allegedly worth £15.5 million with a forecasted 21% growth over the next five years.
It's a space Glamour already arguably has a good grounding in, with an established beauty festival and "DNA that was really wedded in female empowerment." But Newman believed that there was no one really owning the digital beauty space in the UK in the same way that US brand Allure does, and saw an opportunity for Glamour.
The first task was to make sure that "every single platform across the Glamour portfolio was instantly recognisable," and so Newman, alongside new Editor-in-Chief Deborah Joseph, redesigned the website and social presence so that "every single touchpoint screamed Glamour".
They also redefined the brand, so although it was beauty-first, it wouldn't ignore fashion, entertainment or other core pillars. "We wanted to be more than just lipstick and powder," Newman explained. "We wanted to be inclusive, non-judgmental, inspiring and empowering."
From some of the team's social media challenges, they launched a campaign called 'Blend out bullying', where celebrities and influencers painted insults that they had been targeted with on their faces, and then blended it out with makeup brushes. This gave Glamour the chance to experiment with multiple platforms around the campaign and the influencers involved.
"[The campaign] quickly gained traction, it turned into live events with panel talks, it turned into articles in print, and really showed us that everything we did had a 360 approach and that we could really gain traction in this place."
The campaign also influenced their latest Spring/Summer '19 issue, with model Charli Howard. The cover shows "her body completely untouched, stretch marks, cellulite and all...as another example of how we're embracing this message across platforms," said Newman.
The challenges of going digital-first
With the amount of publicity around the closure of the magazine, Newman admitted that it hadn't been an easy ride convincing everyone that their change of direction was for the best. "What people heard was, 'Glamour is closing,'" she said. "It wasn't closing, we were just refocusing, and going in a different direction."
"We had PRs who didn't want to send their products to our editorial shoots, and we had advertisers deciding to take a 'wait and see' approach...it's taken a good year of dialogue and proof to show that we weren't closing."
The team also made mistakes when it came to their presence on social brands, going in hard on Facebook just before their infamous pivot in early 2018. "We were putting resources [into Facebook], we were pulling people in, we've had a fantastic reputation for going through [links on] Facebook, with the likes of LadBible and Pretty52 exploding onto our feed."
But it was a good early lesson to learn in platform dependency, with Newman acknowledging that "we had to be really agile, and pivot constantly" in the early days of building their digital brand up to full strength.
A greater focus on digital also meant that the team had to be much more aware of the language used online, as the feedback is instantaneous - and public.
"When you're talking about appearance with no judgment, you have to remove words like waistline, like diet from your commentary, or you're going to get trolled. And we know about this because we did get trolled."
The publisher has missed the PR spike from having major print cover stars, given the reduction from a monthly publishing schedule to just twice a year. But the team have adapted, and now to a monthly digital cover shot on a mobile phone, as well as a digital 'issue'.
"This meant that our time with the talent was really condensed, so all of [our cover shots] took less than an hour each time," Newman explained.
"It also means that the celebrities are in charge of the way they want to be portrayed; a lot of them will take these images themselves and then send them through to us to design."
Getting into the traffic game
It's no surprise that beauty-obsessed Instagram has proven to be the top traffic driver for Glamour. The publisher has gone all-in on Instagram's 'Stories' functionality, developing a daily programme of TV-style episodic viewing that their audience regularly tunes in to.
Each day's Story has a different theme, from Monday's 'GlamDrop' exploring launches and new beauty products that have 'dropped' on the team's desk throughout the week, to 'Wellness Wednesday' focusing on nutrition, yoga and more. The highest engagement unsurprisingly is at the weekend, when their core audience has more time to browse and relax on Instagram.
The results so far have been impressive. Instagram traffic is up 249%, and the completion rate on Stories is 95%; a clear sign of an engaged audience.
The increase in brand awareness has also led to notable increases in UK traffic, and organic search traffic around key beauty terms.
