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PDF Documents: Online Marketing 2.0

After staying static for many decades and consisting mainly of annoying magazine blow-in cards and junk mail, direct marketing’s taken a whirlwind ride through the last 15 years as the Internet changes the way we all view media.

While some markets still rely heavily on paper means of reaching sales leads, the costs associated with printing, mailing, and data entry—especially in a down economy—are too much for many companies to bear. That, and restrictions set by the Federal Trade Commission’s CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 have businesses rebuilding their marketing efforts by using PDF documents.

PDF files offer many upsides and great potential over traditional paper, Web and email marketing:
• Well-planned layouts remain preserved and make the same impact in the end-user’s viewer application—as opposed to Web browsers, which can remix colors and type at the user’s whim.
• PDFs cost little, if anything, to distribute.
• Most computers connected to the Internet have a means of viewing PDFs—a good share of them standardized on Adobe Reader.
• A “gatekeeper” script can request email addresses of recipients who are interested in reading white-paper, catalog, or research report content contained within a PDF.

That’s the beauty of PDF marketing: If someone’s so interested in reading what’s beyond the cover page of a document that they’re willing to submit their email address to the host, that’s a much higher-quality lead than an email blast to a questionable address list a company purchases. Or, worse yet, poorly targeted leads harvested from a web page that in some cases run afoul of CAN-SPAM regs and make a company liable for fines and costly legal proceedings.

Yet, up to now, technical complexities of lead generation prevented most companies from tapping into the potential of PDF marketing, because while the technology has been available for years, the technical barriers (JavaScript, forms setup, database servers) seemed to outstrip the value proposition.

Most companies experimenting with PDF marketing run an end-around these technical issues by simply posting a web form a reader needed to fill out before receiving a PDF download—losing valuable leads from email pass-along circulation (and reposting to internal web sites) in the process. That’s when a person fills out a web form truthfully in the first place.

This week, Vitrium is releasing PDF Sales Leads, a robust service that harnesses the power of PDF marketing for small-to-medium sized business through dynamic web forms embedded inside PDFs.

Because it’s hosted by Vitrium using the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, businesses that just couldn’t afford the software infrastructure—and consultants to build it and train employees—can start putting quality content they own into attractive PDF files and start leveraging the power of this web-based “marketing 2.0″ tool. A simple, straightforward setup walks even non-IT staffers through the process in a few minutes.

“PDFSalesLeads gets one more costly business process off a company’s server and into the cloud, and that’s where it should be,” says Vitrium Systems CEO Peter Nieforth. “It saves dollars over traditional paper sales-lead generation, but more importantly, saves trees and gives our clients a win-win without the huge financial ramp-up PDF marketing traditionally requires.”

PDF Content + Tracking the Next Big Thing for Publishers

The flagging economy launched torpedoes at the grand old-media Condé Nast fleet yesterday, sinking Gourmet, Cookie, Modern Bride and Elegant Bride. The moves—including a rumored 180 layoffs connected to those magazines—come as the publishing industry struggles to invent new models to derive income from its content, one of them rumored to be a Hulu-type digital store.

Help is on the way, and indeed it may already be here for some beleaguered publishers.

Interactive PDFs are an emerging format for porting paper publications to electronic editions. Not only do PDFs incur zero printing and shipping costs, they also lock down layouts for advertisers and magazine designers frustrated with graphic-design limitations posed by the user-controllable look and feel of web browsers. Their main drawback? They tend to be money losers or zero-gainers.

We’re guessing Adobe plans to put the ability to track content, inside PDFs as a way to make ads in PDF editions more valuable. It took a huge step toward accomplishing that when it announced intentions to acquire web-metrics aggregator Omniture for $1.2 billion last month.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen didn’t come out and say point-blank that his company plans to bring web-style metrics tracking to PDFs. He did, however, say in the company’s Sept. 15 financial analyst call that “our customers have been asking us to help them deliver more effective solutions for assembling and delivering targeted web content…that can be measured and optimized.” That, he said, and monetizing web content.

Publishers looking for a head start on PDF metrics tracking don’t have to wait and see how Adobe will integrate Omniture’s code into its applications a year or three down the line. Right now they can check out Vitrium’s docmetrics, which can be tested on a single document and used to measure how readers use their PDFs as well as collect leads for subscriptions and advertisers.

Putting in trackable ads just might be the missing link that could give publishers the ability to port the financial model driving print-ad revenue to PDF editions. It’s still going to be tough to get readers to pay the same cover price they would for a print magazine, especially given all the free content available on the web. Less printing costs and more ad revenues, invariably, will bring down cover prices for electronic editions.

As more and more print publications teeter on the brink of insolvency and there’s less and less competition, someone’s going to come up with a winning model that will work. Looks like Adobe’s betting a billion that it will involve PDF. Vitrium’s here, now.