How to Use PDFs in Your Online Marketing

At Resource Center, we love PDFs. We have to or we wouldn’t have made this tool, would we? PDFs have been a staple for online communication. They are a great way to communicate information and thus are excellent sources for marketing and sales. 

Why choose a PDF for Marketing?

Here are some key reasons why PDFs are great for online marketing:

• Professional format – PDFs maintain branding, formatting, layouts, images etc in a consistent way across devices. This makes them look polished and authoritative.
• Shareable – PDFs are a universal file format that can easily be shared via email, social media, embedded in websites, etc. They allow content to be distributed at scale.
• Discoverable – Search engines pick up PDF files, allowing them to be found organically. Specific documents can be optimized for SEO.
• Downloadable – PDFs can be downloaded by readers for offline access and consumption. This allows marketing content to be accessed even without an internet connection.
• Trustworthy – PDFs build credibility as they cannot be easily edited like other formats. Brands can reinforce authenticity with PDF documents.
• Comprehensive – Long-form content like ebooks, research papers, manuals etc are well-suited for multi-page PDF format. This allows in-depth information.
• Analyzable – Marketers can track PDF downloads, views, shares and engagement. This provides quantifiable data on content performance.
• Cost-effective – PDFs are relatively inexpensive to create using common desktop publishing tools. They provide value without high production costs.
• Multimedia – PDFs can integrate text, images, video, hyperlinks and interactive elements for engaging, multi-format content.

In summary, PDFs’ versatility, professional appearance, and shareability make them a strategic marketing asset for brand visibility and content distribution.

Marketing With PDFs

So how can you use our tool for your own effective marketing? Here are 10 ideas for using Resource Center for online marketing purposes:

1. Create an ebook library – Upload and categorize free ebooks, whitepapers, and other long-form content into Resource Center. Add the search widget to your website so visitors can easily find and download relevant content. Promote your ebook library as a value-add for potential customers.
2. Curate industry research – Compile and organize studies, statistics, surveys, and other research PDFs related to your industry. Allow website visitors to access and search this content to position your company as an expert information source.
3. Share product manuals/guides – Use Resource Center as a centralized database for all product manuals, user guides, spec sheets, and other documentation. Embed the search on your product pages so customers can easily find answers to questions. Resource Center has email gating to ensure you see who views your guides.
4. Host press releases – Maintain an online press room by uploading all your press releases over time into categorized folders in Resource Center. Add the search bar to your Press/Newsroom page.
5. Create how-to articles/videos – Upload step-by-step PDF tutorials, cheat sheets, and transcripts of video content. Optimize with targeted keywords so your how-tos can be more easily discovered in Resource Center search.
6. Promote case studies – Curate and organize all customer success stories and case studies. Allow website visitors to search this content directly to learn about real-world applications of your product/service. You can require an email before they view the PDF.
7. Share company updates – Maintain searchable archives of announcements, newsletters, memos, reports, and other updates published by your company over time. Enable customers and media to self-serve these assets.
8. Host embargoed content – Upload press releases, reports, speaker decks, and other assets before public release date. Share private access links with journalists so they can search and access this content under embargo. Our tool allows you to gate access via email submission.
9. Compile product reviews/awards – Flaunt positive reviews, analyst reports, and awards won by compiling all this content into categorized, searchable folders in Resource Center. Promote access via your website.
10. Create media kits – Build online press kits by organizing branding assets, executive bios, fact sheets, images, and other relevant content that journalists may request. Share access with media contacts as needed.

Concerns about PDFs

If you were to Google why PDFs are NOT good for marketing, ere are some potential weaknesses or limitations you might see cited:

1. Not editable – PDFs are designed to maintain fixed formatting and prevent changes. This lack of flexibility can be problematic if you need to update or customize content.
2. Not readable on all devices – While PDFs work on most desktop/laptop screens, they may not display or function well on smaller mobile devices. This limits accessibility.
3. Can be overwhelming – Lengthy PDFs with dozens or hundreds of pages can feel too long for online readers. Breaking content into smaller chunks may be more effective.
4. Difficult to update – Any changes to a PDF require re-uploading the entire document. This makes iteratively updating them cumbersome compared to webpages.
5. Not optimized for web – PDFs are print-centric and lack built-in tools for SEO optimization, internal linking, conversion focused design etc. Significant effort is needed to optimize them.
6. Less interactive – The static, print-style nature of PDFs allows for only limited interactivity and multimedia content compared to webpages.
7. Can’t track engagement – Unlike webpages, there is no way to track scroll depth, click-throughs, time-on-page and other user engagement metrics within a PDF.
8. Limited brand control – Once shared, you lose control over where your PDFs end up online. They may be reused without permission.

PDFs work best for formal marketing assets like reports, spec sheets, and manuals. But their lack of flexibility, interactivity, and customization can make PDFs less suited for content that requires frequent changes or updates.

However, we are solving these marketing issues!

We are aware that the above concerns are a repeating pattern on the internet. For that reason, we see many companies shy away from using PDFs. We aren’t a 100% fix for all concerns, but correlating to the concern, here’s how we solve these issues.

1. Editability – While Resource Center does not allow direct editing PDF content (Adobe has great tools for that), it does provide tools to organize, update, replace, or remove PDFs within categorized folders. This makes iteratively managing a collection of PDFs simpler through easy version control.
2. Accessibility – The javascript search widget seamlessly displays on any device and platform. This makes the PDF content indexed by Resource Center universally discoverable. You could even create Accessibility widgets that have easier to read PDFs in the collection.
3. Length of Document – The search functionality lets users easily find specific sections within large PDF documents. You can also split up lengthy content into multiple, logically organized PDFs. If you are concerned that your reader won’t read, maybe you need a new audience…
4. Updates – With Resource Center, updating a PDF is as simple as replacing it within the relevant folder. The platform handles updates smoothly and the widget does not need a new code.
5. Optimized for Web – Resource Center’s javascript widget allows embedding search functionality directly on webpages. The PDF contents can be indexed and optimized for discoverability by search engines. It’s up to you if your PDFs kept mobile in mind. If you have seperate mobile versions, you can create a separate mobile widget that only appears on smaller devices. Our categorization features can help with that.
6. Interactivity – The search widget adds a layer of user interactivity otherwise lacking in PDFs. Website visitors can efficiently self-serve the documents. PDFs can be quite interactive if built properly and, when downloaded, do not require internet access.
7. Engagement Tracking – Resource Center provides analytics on search usage and PDF downloads to quantify engagement. Along with gating content with email requirements, this data can inform efforts to refine what your users want from your PDFs. This kind of data is very unique to our toolset.

Our Search, Content Gating, and PDF Analytics

As a further deep dive into what makes Resource Center live up to its name, let’s review 3 of our key product features.

PDF Search

Feel free to email us if we are wrong but we believe we are the only PDF-centric SaaS platform that allows you to create search functions across multiple PDFs. 

For example, if you are a promotional company and want to upload all of your Tshirt vendor PDFs, you likely gave up trying to add each one. Within our system, they can be categorized into a single widget and then the search bar accesses every marked PDF.

We have search results pages, not just highlighting the document. We’ve been told that even internal teams prefer to use the widget rather than searching the computer that hosts the documents!

Content Gating

Once believed to be magic that only companies like Hubspot could afford to create, we make it easy to ask for an email before accessing a document. The information is available for export in each widget that you activate this feature. Contact our support if you want to send this information to another source.

PDF Analytics

On the home page of our Analytics, a graph will show you 3 major metrics over the last month: Documents Opened, Total Print Requests, and Document Downloads. Opened helps you see how many PDFs were actually clicked on in your widget. Total Print Requests show you that a PDF was important enough to someone to print. Downloads shows you that a PDF was important enough to save. This kind of information helps you evaluate what people care about the most and what kind of content to add in the future.

Underneath are some additional metrics: Top Successful Search Term, Total Document Interactions, and Top Unsuccessful Search Term. If you go to the Document Activity, you can see further sub-metrics in each of these. Finding your most popular search terms highlights what users want the most and informs your future PDF design. 

Within interactions you can see when and what documents were viewed, even the most popular pages in a document. Unsuccessful search is a great metric to show how your content lacks the resources that others are looking for and tells you exactly what kind of content you need to create. All of this data is available for download if you really want to crunch numbers.

PDFs Belong in Marketing!

As you can tell, we have a lot of faith in the medium. PDFs can actually live in a lot more websites: important client onboarding, private financial data, research libraries, and more! We know that with technology like Resource Center, the usage of PDF can grow into all sectors of business!