PROBLEM:
So many PDFs. You have a seemingly endless number of datasheets, brochures, case studies, technical documents, and more. You need an easy way to make them available to customers and prospects on your public website. But obviously, uploading PDFs manually isn’t an option because there are too many and they change too often.
Some PDF documents – including those for distributors, brokers, and sales reps – aren’t for public consumption. For these non-customer audiences (sales reps, for example), you probably have a large collection of PDFs sitting in your intranet, extranet, sales portal, or SharePoint. If like many marketers, you have hundreds or thousands of PDFs, the last thing you want is sales reps sifting through marketing assets located in two or more spots.
Double posting the same files to two different systems is also a pain for your marketing team. Each time a PDF changes, you have to update your website. If you produce a lot of documents and revise in a typical manner, you’re looking at an ongoing headache.
SOLUTION:
A more productive approach is to have your PDFs directly published to your public website from a marketing asset management system. So you have one place to manage all your content and automatically make it available to the right audiences at the right time. Users simply search or click, and the information instantly gets delivered to them from your marketing asset management system via an integration.
One of our RevBase customers (an instrumentation company) traditionally put PDFs on their public website. The approach worked for a while. But as the volume of documents reached into the thousands, it became painfully clear their public website wasn’t designed to manage a large number of PDFs. They wanted to provide a better search experience for busy users and knew it was no fun for customers to scroll through PDFs relating to irrelevant products. Without the right system, they were constrained in their ability to offer an advanced search structure.
This customer asked if they could have their PDFs stored in their RevBase marketing asset management system, with an interface between RevBase and their public website. Our response: “Absolutely.” They then asked how easy it would be to make it happen. Our answer: “Very.” Like many of our customers, this RevBase customer was busy and didn’t have staff available to implement the integration. So we handled it.
Now this company’s customers simply type in a product code on their web page, choose a language, do a search, and a call is made to the RevBase system for all relevant documents. The company has a single place to manage and track utilization of all those PDFs.
AUTOMATION INSTEAD OF FRUSTRATION
Why endure PDF insanity by manually updating your website with all those documents when a system can automatically do it? With RevBase, when you have a new document you want to make available on your public website, just add it to your marketing asset management system and check a box that says you want it offered on your website. Then it will be made available whenever there’s a relevant search.
If your needs are more complex and you have multiple websites or applications that need your PDFs – or a customer that needs you to supply a stream of these documents – that’s an even better argument for a marketing asset management system that acts as a hub and makes this content available every time it’s needed.
Want to find out more? Give us a little information on your needs here, and let’s talk about possibilities.