How PDF Guides Can Attract New Leads

For most businesses—large and small, generating new leads is a top goal. Bringing new leads into your customer acquisition funnel is important to increase your sales and to build an active and engaged customer base. Many forms of advertisement and search engine marketing will help you find potential new customers online. Now you must interest them in your company’s services and products and turn them into a paying customer.

We’ve blogged about the importance of content marketing and developing PDF guides is one way you can use content to generate new leads and bring more people into your sales funnel. PDF guides can range from shorter white papers, case studies, research papers and more. Or perhaps a longer content piece like an Ebook makes sense for your business. The main point is that you are providing information that is relevant to your customers and ties back into your company’s products and services.

You may find it is useful to outline the subject of your PDF guide and make sure you are specific in the content you cover. The more specific the content is, the more qualified the new leads will be that you plan to attract. You may eventually find that you have more topics to cover and will need even more PDF guides, but for now stay focused on your first PDF guide.

Lay a Content Foundation to Build Sales Upon

PDF guides can attract new leads in a few different ways. By offering free content to users, you are building your business’s credibility and authority prior to asking a customer to pay for any services. The PDF guide full of information will demonstrate your expertise and lay a foundation for you to begin to nurture the customer and move them through the sales funnel. PDF guides are a great tool to promote in your advertising, whether it be your search marketing ads, as part of your page titles and more. Encourage customers searching for your type of businesses to “get your free Guide” about the subject they need more information on and of which you are the expert!

Once a new customer has landed on your website or clicked to read the PDF guide, you have many ways to capture their information. You may choose to gate the PDF guide by asking for a user’s name and email before they can access the full information. Or you could include an email sign up after they have opened the PDF. This new audience you have attracted to your PDF content is considered a “qualified lead”, so make sure you have a specific campaign plan to follow up with them through additional emails or targeted marketing messages.

We can’t forget that with all of the great content you are providing in the PDF guide, you want to make sure you get credit for it in your search rankings. Make sure your text is searchable and you have correctly tagged the guide on your website. You will increase your SEO rankings as your PDF guide is discovered, shared and referenced. 

Issuu Makes Your PDF Guides Stand Out

Once you’ve completed the hard part of writing, designing and polishing up a PDF guide for your business, you really want to make sure it shines. Sure, you could keep it in the final PDF format that you saved it in, but that end result is definitely a little flat. Instead, we recommend you turn your guide into a high-quality and eye-catching content piece on Issuu.com. Just upload your PDF and watch as Issuu transforms the PDF into a HTML 5 fullscreen reader that is ready to share with your customers and you can even embed on your website, social channels and landing pages. Take your PDF guides one step further on Issuu by using the assets from the guide to create Stories to share on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. Generate even more leads using Stories to reach a wider audience and then link back to your PDF guide. Issuu is the powerful content marketing platform that will turn your PDF guide into multiple formats for multiple channels and to reach audiences everywhere.