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For many years marketers have relied on PDFs to store and distribute documents. As a platform-independent format with a universal support that preserves the layout and formatting of the document, it is perfect for marketing materials.
Creating marketing materials in PDF works well for a variety of content, including brochures, one-sheets, reports, eBooks, whitepapers, and so on. By creating these materials in PDF, you can ensure they will appear exactly the way that you intend when leads open them – regardless of the device or platform they’re using.
Before you start to create marketing PDFs of your own, however, there are a few tips that you should keep in mind so that you’re able to truly take advantage of what the format has to offer:
Make sure the PDF is text-based
If you’re creating a PDF document, you should try to make sure that as much of it is text-based as possible. Not only do text-based PDFs have a smaller file size, but they are also searchable and can be indexed more effectively by search engines if you upload them online.
The good news is that even if you’re creating a PDF by scanning materials, you can convert it into a text-based PDF. There are lots of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools for PDFs that will help you to accomplish that.
Save PDFs in older versions for compatibility
Because you’re going to be distributing your marketing materials to a wide range of people, compatibility is key. While you may be using the latest version of Adobe Acrobat and have a reader that is up to date, it wouldn’t be a good idea to assume that everyone you send the marketing PDF to will as well.
As a rule of thumb, it is best to save your PDF in a slightly older version to ensure its compatibility. Typically it is best to use PDF 1.5 or 1.6 (Acrobat 6 or 7), as most people won’t have any problems viewing them and no elements will be lost.
Optimize the PDF to minimize its file size
As a format PDFs tend to have small file sizes due to the compression that it uses, and optimizing it will allow you to fully take advantage of that. Nowadays there are many PDF optimization tools that are available that could help you to do that during or after you’re done creating your PDF.
Typically optimizing a PDF involves identifying areas that are consuming the most space and finding ways to minimize that usage. For example, images can be compressed, fewer fonts can be used, and transparencies can be flattened. If you want you could optimize your PDF manually, but it is much more time-consuming.
Try to ensure it is mobile-friendly
The one drawback of PDFs is that they often suffer when displayed on mobile devices because of the smaller screen sizes. As such, you need to take steps to make it as mobile-friendly as possible.
Creating text-based PDFs is a good start as mobile readers will be able to wrap the text so viewers don’t need to scroll horizontally and can peruse the PDFs by scrolling vertically instead. However images are not so easy to deal with, and you should carefully consider their placement and size when you add them to your marketing PDF.
Assuming you follow these tips, you should be able to create PDFs that are much more effective. However, it may help to have a basic PDF editor that you can use to make alterations and manage your PDF marketing materials as well, such as Movavi PDF Editor.
At the end of the day, your goal should be to create marketing PDFs that are widely-compatible, mobile-friendly, and have as small a file size as possible. That should enable you to store and distribute them more easily, while also ensuring that they’re able to fulfill their objectives.
Considering the popularity of PDF as a format, it is unlikely to be replaced anytime soon – especially not in marketing. In fact, if anything PDF has grown in popularity in recent years, making it all the more useful to know how to create effective marketing PDFs that take advantage of its potential.
- Like
- Digg
- Del
- Tumblr
- VKontakte
- Buffer
- Love This
- Odnoklassniki
- Meneame
- Blogger
- Amazon
- Yahoo Mail
- Gmail
- AOL
- Newsvine
- HackerNews
- Evernote
- MySpace
- Mail.ru
- Viadeo
- Line
- Comments
- Yummly
- SMS
- Viber
- Telegram
- Subscribe
- Skype
- Facebook Messenger
- Kakao
- LiveJournal
- Yammer
- Edgar
- Fintel
- Mix
- Instapaper
- Copy Link