I’m usually an even-tempered person, but a few topics get me riled up.
The Oxford comma. (It has semantic meaning! Everyone should use it!)
Low-fat baked goods. (Just … no. I’m sorry if you’re on a diet, but that doesn’t give you permission to ruin cookies for the rest of us.)
Firefly. (Why did Fox cancel it? Why? It had such potential!)
The overuse of PDFs in marketing.
The fourth item is the one I’m confident pertains to you, fellow marketer, and the one I want to explore with you here.
Exploring the PDF universe
My first career was in publishing. Science textbook publishing, to be precise. In my six years as an editor, I spent thousands of hours meticulously reviewing PDF book manuscripts and printer proofs.
I learned that PDFs work well for certain applications, like preparing press-ready files that a printer can use to run off 50,000 copies without having them look like cheap Xeroxes. PDFs are also good for showing you exactly how a print piece is going to look in its final format with nifty things like crop marks, spread layouts, and gutters.
Source: 13thirtyone.com
As a marketer, I’ve seen how PDFs also work well for content such as:
Printed brochures and other leave-behind materials
Direct mailers like postcards and one-sheets
Detailed research reports, buyer’s guides, and reference materials
Long-form content for audiences with restricted Internet access
Unfortunately, it seems that many marketers, regardless of use case or audience, rely on PDFs as their default format for all their content, including e-books, white papers, case studies, and infographics. While technology has improved PDF web distribution and display in recent years, the truth is that PDFs aren’t always the best format for your most valuable marketing assets.
To think strategically about your content – to create content that performs as well as possible for your company and your customers – you must consider format as carefully as story. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the medium determines the experience as much as the message.
Limitations of PDF content
PDFs are a great option for readers who want to engage deeply and personally with content. As Michael Andrews notes in his article Learning from PDFs, “For multi-session decisions … people appreciate having the ability to gather and compare information, distill important aspects of it, and apply those findings to decisions on their own terms.”
However, many top-of-funnel content marketing assets have a different goal: to engage a distracted audience with unique, relevant content for immediate, one-time consumption. For this type of content, PDFs can be a limiting format for a number of reasons:
They provide little flexibility.
They give marketers no insight into how viewers interact with their content (or whether they do at all).
They’re cumbersome to update and republish, especially when they’re hosted in multiple places on the web.
They can be difficult to view for smartphone users who don’t have a PDF-reader app.
By using PDFs for every long-form marketing asset you create, without taking time to consider the best format for telling your story, you run the risk of limiting your creativity, reducing viewer engagement, and losing insight into how your content is performing.
Some alternative digital content formats: Pros and cons
PDF content creation falls well within the realm of the familiar for both marketers and designers. What if we want to venture beyond the horizon of the PDF universe? What types of alternatives will we find there? Let’s explore some other popular content formats.
Example: Web Pages
Source: Moz
Pros: Web pages, such as landing pages, blogs, and microsites, provide a variety of metrics you can use to gauge your content’s performance: Referral sources, page views, time spent, pages viewed per session, etc. From a design perspective, web pages are easy to style in a way that aligns with your company’s branding and visual tone. They also play nicely with smartphones and tablets if you implement a responsive design.
Cons: Web pages aren’t good at unique layouts. In today’s web landscape, most single-column web pages follow pretty much the same setup: Hero section, followed by discrete single-column sections or a long column of text. If you want to do anything more radical, you need to enlist the time and talent of a coding wizard or two. You also need to enlist their help if you want to make any future tweaks to the design or functionality of your content, which can often take a while if your developers are working on other projects.
Example: Online Presentations
Source: SlideShare
Pros: Web-based presentation programs like SlideShare allow you to create content in a format that’s more similar to a traditional PDF page. You can pair text and images without having to worry about how your layout might reflow across browsers. You can also break up your story into discrete, bite-sized chunks that are easy to skim. Some presentation-hosting services provide detailed metrics, such as slide views, link click-throughs, and traffic sources.
Cons: Presentations are restrictive in terms of design because your layout is confined to a standard rectangular dimension. If you create text-heavy slides, they often don’t render well on smaller-screen smartphones. And even if you rock some awesome GIFs and videos, it’s difficult to make a presentation that’s innovative or unique.
RECOMMENDED FOR YOU: SlideShare Secrets to Stack the Decks in Your Favor
Example: Mobile Apps
Source: Red Bull
Pros: An app can be a highly engaging format for reimagining your content for mobile devices. With apps, the sky’s the limit in terms of functionality: You can pull in text, images, videos, audio clips, animations, and quizzes. You can also be confident that your content will work across different mobile operating systems because you’re building code specifically for each platform.
Cons: The downside to apps is the time and expense required to build them. You need to develop separate versions for iOS, Android, and Windows (if you’re feeling generous). Most in-house development teams don’t have bandwidth to tackle multiple app versions. Hiring an external development team is always an option, but it adds time and cost. Finally, every time you make a major change to your app, you need to take time to update it, retest it, and resubmit it to the app stores for approval.
Example: Browser-Based Interactive Content
Source: Red Bull
Pros: Web-based interactive content, usually built with HTML5 and/or JavaScript, sits on the format spectrum between a standard web page and a custom mobile app. Interactive content has all the benefits of a standard web page while using text, images, videos, animation effects, and interactions to provide a more flexible, immersive experience.
Common types of web-based interactive content:
Single-page infographics or landing pages
Multipage e-books or magazines
Quizzes and assessments
Calculators and simulations
Cons: Creating interactive content from scratch requires a dedicated development team to code, review, QA, and deploy. This process can take a long time if you’re tapping internal developers, and it can become expensive if you’re working with an external vendor or agency. It’s also difficult to update interactive content after it goes live because every change has to go through the same testing and deployment process as the original code.
The good news is that there are now interactive content creation platforms that circumvent the need for custom coding and cost less than an agency or vendor solution.
Summary: Help expand the future of content marketing
To think strategically about our content, we must consider both the story and the format. As often as possible, we need to look beyond the PDF and explore alternative formats – some new, some well-established – so that we can create more powerful, innovative, and engaging experiences that bring more value to our organizations.
What formats beyond the PDF are working best for your organization and your customers? What challenges have you faced in exploring those alternatives? How do you weigh the pros and cons of all the choices? Please share your insights in a comment below.
Looking to score big points with your target audience? CMI’s 2016 Content Marketing Playbook has tips, insights, and ideas that can help increase your success with 24 of the top content marketing tactics.
Cover image by Viktor Hanacek via picjumbo.com
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