You may not have time to make interactive content, but we do.
Do B2B marketers have a problem?
In 2014, DemandGen Report found that just 5% of buyers would provide detailed contact information in exchange for a PDF white paper [one of the most expensive-to-make content marketing assets]. As prospects become less and less willing to provide their contact information in exchange for content, marketers need new ways to identify, score, nurture and guide their prospects through the buyer’s journey.
That same DemandGen Report study also found that 91% of buyers are looking for more visual and interactive content. Buyers are looking for something new, and it’s up to marketers to provide them with more stimulating content that offers greater value.
The rest of this interactive document introduces how interactive marketing collateral can change the game for buyers, marketers and sales teams.
A Brief History of B2B Marketing Docs
Are marketing documents still engaging your audience?
As B2B marketers, you operate in the shadows of “sold, not bought” categories. You have the responsibility of not only selling your technology, but also selling your category.
At the end of the day, you want to find, reach, and engage your buyers.
A recent study found that large companies cite “creating engaging content” as their biggest marketing challenge.1 With the ever-increasing influence of mobile on content marketing and the digital expectations of buyers growing as quickly as their options are, you might be struggling to engage your audience, measure the impact of your content marketing efforts, and maintain a dynamic resource library that interests your prospects.
Are you finding it difficult to engage your audience with content?
Why do interactive marketing documents work?
The interactive version of a marketing document is all about user value. That means that while there is still a moderate amount of reading required, the user is presented with a unique, personalized result at the end of the experience.
Not only does interactive marketing documents keep the reader interested, but it also taps into people’s natural desire to test their knowledge, share opinions, and benchmark themselves against their peers.2 It creates an opportunity to build a human-to-human relationship rather than to purely educate.
Really, it’s a win-win for both parties. The marketer gets to provide education and collect user data, and the user gets a fun, engaging experience with an interesting solution provided at the conclusion.
What are these marketing documents (white paper, report or e-book) anyway?
You might picture a white paper, e-book, or thought leadership research study as long-form content presented in a PDF.
Although the content and the information shared is more valuable now than ever, static, pre-Internet and pre-mobile PDF is hindering your ability to engage your audience and measure the effectiveness of your content.
The PDF: the Good, the Bad, and the Boring
The Good:
PDF -- an abbreviation for “Portable Document Format” -- is a proprietary format of Adobe Systems. PDFs were initially created to offer consistency in print documents across multiple platforms and devices. But today, the devices — and the way your buyers use them — have changed.
The PDF was created in the early 1990s as a new, platform-independent file format with a simple goal: facilitate printing of documents.
PDFs have evolved somewhat since the 1990 and the latest version supports basic "digitization" of print:
- Easily view and exchange documents electronically
- Optimize documents for viewing on the Web
- Represent text and graphics with consistency in formatting
- Enhance content with interactive links
PDFs also offer security and ease of use for most buyers, with a free reading program (vs. Microsoft Office being required to view Word documents), easy-to-download files, easy-to- attach and share.
PDFs also offer reasonable file sizes for sharing and downloading, compatibility across multiple platforms, and the ability to embed any fonts within the final, read-only document.
The Bad:
Although PDFs were the standard format for more than 20 years, you’re probably seeing a decrease in leads and engagement from standard white papers, reports or e-books thanks to a new trend — content fatigue. 3
Buyers are presented with such an overwhelming amount of content from various sources 4 that another download often requires prior trust in the source or exposure to the brand.
Shorter attention spans 5 are also creating increased interest in animated or interactive formats over the PDF. And without any interactive functionality outside of embedded links, if you’re relying on PDF presentation for your thought leadership resources, you’re missing out on opportunities for engagement. 6
Disadvantages of PDF outsides of print:
- No indexed copy for SEO.
Your thought leadership isn’t helping you get found if it’s not indexable. - Hard to navigate.
Default PDF viewing experience obscure most of the navigation features that we have come to expect from the web. 7 - Difficulty reading and downloading on tablets and mobile devices.
Let’s say your website and landing pages are optimized for mobile. If the end result for a user is to download or view an asset that is not optimized for mobile, the process is broken. 8 - Not updatable.
Once you hit send it's out of date. So you cannot easily fix errors, update information, or remove access. - No context.
PDFs are like isolated islands in the sea of other ideas and documents. - Complete lack of analytics.
Using the standard landing page-to-PDF download process, analytics stop at the download. How would your content creation process be affected if you knew where you lost readers in your content? What if you knew which sections were read or shared the most? Wouldn’t that change everything? We thought so.
PDFs offer several advantages and disadvantages when presenting long-form content:
Advantages
- Document-level security
- Read-only
- Reasonable file compression
- Fully branded design possibilities
- Free readers
- Compatible across multiple platforms
- Controlled branding with endless embeddable fonts
- Printability
Disadvantages
- Download fatigue
- Decreasing leads
- Static file — no animation or interaction
- No embedded video
- Call to actions and links take out of the body of the document
- No default navigation
- Still relatively heavy file size in downloads and email sharing
- No analytics
- Not updatable (brand changes, errors, new information, etc.)
- No personalization
- Difficult reading and download experience on tablets and mobile devices
- No indexed copy for SEO
- Not shareable online or on individual page/slide level
- B2B sales cannot integrate multiple PDFs easily into presentations and email body
Tipping Point for New Document Experience: 7Ms
Where Experience is the Message
Interactive documents deliver a tailored experience for B2B buyers by integrating the best elements of modern media and communications.
Here are the situations when you may need an Interactive Document.
These are the 7 Markers of Interactive Elements and why Interactive Marketing Documents could be right for you:
1. Made by You. Instantly
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How do you rise above the noise in a noisy marketplace of ideas?
Marketing documents have long been a place for creative communications. High production value photography, special printing, and unusual approaches to layout have been important vehicles for expressing corporate ethos and innovation. Interactive is a fundamentally different experience than print, but the technology is finally maturing enough to facilitate a new type of creative documents. Highlighted on the following pages are examples that transform PDFs into interactive experiences.
2. Multimedia & Interactivity
To believe that text, images, and links are all you need to inform, educate, and engage your buyers would be to ignore the fact that we live in a new digital age — one where rich media such as videos, animation, interactive quizzes, social media, and analytics don’t matter. If the performance of your content marketing initiatives seems to be hitting a wall, it may be time to include additional, more engaging media in the mix.
3. Multiple Documents
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To paraphrase John Donne, "No document is an island entire of itself; every document is a piece of the continent, a part of the main."
B2B buyers journey are by definition non-linear and yet interconnected. Yet a convention PDF document even the one peppered with hyperlink is a silo. It typically leads to nowhere. And most document lack low-friction call-to- actions too.
This is a problem.
Complex buying decision have multiple decisions makers and influencers. A stand-alone document is too narrow. Yet assembling a single document to address everyone's needs is unwieldy.
And say you managed to put together a 100-page opus to address all of your stakeholders. The very same buyer "persona" may look for different content depending on their level of familiarity, stage on the buying journey, individual learning style preferences and device they are viewing your content on at a particular point in time.
Moreover, as decision making gets democratized, corporations are seeing their thought leadership move from a narrow focus on lead generation to the much broader stakeholder value. So, interactive marketing content offers a major advantage—it links the interested reader directly from marketing to sales and services.
4. Multi-Chapter Navigation
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Question: What is the difference between a book and a website?
Answer: Narrative structure
The book and its descendant Print/PDF document is essentially a linear structure. The narrative is controlled by the writer. The web is the ultimate "pick and choose" experience which offers limited structure.
Interactive document and multi-chapter publications is a hybrid. It has to have a navigational structure of the web (like MENUs, dynamic TABLE of CONTENTS, SEARCH), but the reader is much more at liberty to wander, and to curate his or her own experience. This makes the marketer's job a bit more cerebral: “what teasers can I put up front that will draw them in? What questions will they bring to the report that I can use as hooks to engage the reader in the story we want to tell? What will drive the right Call-To-Action and how can I make that Call-To-Action Persistent in a larger document?
Brevity vs depth: Hyper media is a two-edged sword. While a printed document gets more expensive with each page to be printed, interactive space costs are negligible. This allows for more depth, but the constraints of expensive space forces printed collaterals to be brief—which encourages buyers to read them— not bail out midway. Smart interactive document needs to combine both quick overview and ability to drill-down into details.
5. Multi-Channel (social media, embeddable, slide & page, etc.)
Despite recent findings that as many as 79 percent of B2B marketers are unsure of the effectiveness of social media, 2014 saw social media take the lead as the most used tactic within B2B marketing departments.
So if you’re like most B2B marketers, you invest time and resources into social media, but you might still consider yourself a bit of a skeptic.
We know B2B marketers are using social media. We know you’re sharing links to your thought leadership and blog posts and maybe engaging with buyers in real time, but if content assets aren’t inherently social, you aren’t seeing the potential positive impact of social media in content marketing.
6. Measurable
The Internet offers and measures more than Adobe could have imagined when the PDF was created.
In the past, to deliver a publishing experience such as the one you are looking at, you would have created a website with 20 pages, a content management system for updates, a mobile and desktop version, and, after all of that, you would still have limited analytics capabilities.
But today’s B2B buyers are two-thirds of the way through their buying journey before they ever reach out to a vendor. 11 That means they’re devouring your content, researching on their own, and taking the opinions of peers and influencers into account before your sales team even knows who they are.
What if you could know how many pages of your marketing documents were actually read, see visual heatmaps of how they were read, and understand which parts are inherently social?
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. The opportunities for measuring the effectiveness of your content are endless with today’s increased analytics capabilities.
B2B marketers measure every pixel on their web content and A/B test campaigns. But ironically - even though documents are some of the most expensive content marketing assets - they are also the least analyzed.
Ongoing management
One of the outcomes of measurement is opportunities for improvement. PDFs are easy to create and post. However, when corrections or enhancement must be made, a web based interactive experience is easier to maintain. PDFs of course can be edited and reposted for download, but those already downloaded can’t be updated.
7. Mobile-Ready & Responsive
Since the term RESPONSIVE DESIGN was coined in 2010, B2B vendors have only scratched the surface. A recent study found that 40 percent of people abandoned pages that took more than three seconds to load. 10 The influence of responsive design in B2B marketing is just now becoming pervasive, and only 26 percent of marketers say they’re ahead of the mobile curve.
With more than 6 billion smartphones in the world and mobile traffic increasing every day, don’t you wish there was a better way to reach, engage, and measure mobile users? There is — and with true platform diversity, your content will really sing.
But.... Interactive Documents Require Resources
Content created for multiple channels (print or PDF and variety of digitals platforms) is often inconsistent and the process time consuming and challenging. Creating separate templates and interactive content for multiple devices takes too much time and slows down the publishing process for your clients.
Imagine you could take your design for PRINT and PDF and instantly transform it into interactive content that looks amazing on any device in just minutes. What if you could save time and money by producing that content more efficiently? What if you could have non-designers and non-developers use WISYWIG interface to bring it to life? What if you could shrink the distance/time from idea to audience? And, ultimately, put your effort into what really counts: the message itself.
Introducing RELAYTO
What is RELAYTO
RELAYTO is a new content marketing format that hosts your content on indexable, searchable, interactive online experiences.
It enhances PDF delivery of popular B2B content marketing resources such as white papers, e-books, articles, and infographics. Imagine all the money, time and headache saved if you could reuse your print and PDF content on digital channels as a native experience. This is what RELAYTO/ does, in two ways:
1/ RELAYTO can import your existing PDF assets and bring them to life
2/ Or it can help you create original digital content from scratch in RELAYTO, or with support of the tools you use from InDesign to Photoshop or Powerpoint.
RELAYTO is built with all-in-one-publishing software that allows you to complement your content management system and build interactive, engaging, and visually stunning digital experiences. Fast and efficient content creation shortens time to market. And cloud-based system offers consistent and always-up-to-date corporate identity by using brand style guides by default.
Now you can incorporate rich features into your content in a format that provides in-depth analytics capabilities, social sharing options, and engagement, all without sacrificing the ability to easily print your resources.
Here are just a few of the features you can include in your interactive content using the RELAYTO/ delivery method:
- Video
- Images
- Documents and files like PDF, PPT, Word, etc
- 300+ web services including polls, surveys, youtube, vimeo, slideshare, etc.
- Animations and interactive layers
- E-Books and other documents
- Interactive infographics
- More
Why Do I Need RELAYTO?
As the landscape of devices changes for consumers, so does the opportunity for platform innovation. The pervasiveness of mobile devices (there are now more than 6 billion smartphones worldwide) has led to a need for progress in content marketing. Mobile now makes up 51 percent of email opens.12 RELAYTO/ provides an elegant and interactive content experience on every device.
The increased pressure on B2B marketers to prove the return on investment for content marketing is another growing problem that PDFs can’t solve. RELAYTO/ offers in-depth analytics capabilities that will prepare you for your next board meeting with jaw-dropping, intuitive metrics.
Add those benefits to increased social sharing and measurement functionality, smarter forms and gates that can be placed anywhere within your content, and the ability to meet the interactive demands of today’s content marketing best practices, and you’ve got one hell of an offer on your hands.
Things can’t stay the same forever. This is what progress looks like.
Welcome to the future of content delivery.
How Does RELAYTO Work?
Samples of Interactive B2B Marketing Collateral
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The fastest way to build digital experiences. We empower businesses to convert PDFs, presentations and other content into interactive experiences & webpages with instant branding, analytics & more
