Stop Using PDFs in Your Marketing and Sales Content

I’ll admit it. PDFs are a pet peeve of mine.

They were cool in the early 2000s. And they were handy.

But the PDF is dead as a marketing tool. They’re about as chic and practical as MySpace.

If you want to be a digital-first company, be inclusive and accessible, and always keep your brand up-to-date, PDFs aren’t the way to go.  They’re just a sh*tty marketing tool.

Here’s why (and what you should be doing).

You should prioritize mobile-friendly content.

PDFs aren’t mobile friendly.

They don’t scale on a phone which makes it extremely difficult to read any text or navigate through content. Images are not responsive and while you can include links in PDFs, there’s no link interaction, which results in a poor user experience.

When 60% of users open email on phones and 90% of people use the internet on their phones, it makes sense to create responsive assets. A few years ago websites felt the pressure to build for mobile first to ensure the best user experience and search rankings. Now it’s time for marketing and sales assets to embrace that same mindset.

While PDFs have long been a staple of sales enablement tools, why not use video or Google Slides as sales tools instead? There are powerful video tools out there like Tella, Loom, and Drift, to help you personalize your outreach. You can then design a piece of content in Photoshop or Google Slides and share it in a video.

That’s digital first and mobile-friendly.

Your assets should be editable.

Once a PDF is exported and sent, it cannot be changed. It’s frozen in time.

Compare that to a digital landing page or case study. If something needs to be updated (pricing, logos, content), it can very quickly be changed. Anyone who has been given that link will also see that update. So with sales, content will remain fresh if there is a longer sales cycle.

An example: if prospects save a PDF to their desktops and refers to it later in a sales cycle, you may have to tell them on a new call, “that’s an old sales doc. here’s the new info.” Why not avoid that all together?

I’ll bet your messaging and sales approach has changed over time. That’s part of growing any business. How nice would it be to have documents that grow and change with you, compared to being stuck in one moment in time? You can easily do just that with a no-code tool like Webflow.

That’s the user experience you should strive for.

To be inclusive, your content should be accessible.

Most PDFs aren’t accessible. That means they can’t be used by those with disabilities. That’s ~26% of Americans.

If you’re serious about inclusivity, you should strive to consider the needs of everyone. A piece of content could be the first interaction someone has with your brand, so it’s important to consider the medium as much as the message.

On top of that, if you’re sending PDFs as email attachments, you’re increasing the likelihood that your email will get caught in a spam filter. It may never even reach your intended recipient.

It’s self sabotage. You’re shooting yourself in the foot if you keep using PDFs.

Your content should be dynamic.

We live in an age of video, GIFs, and dynamic media. So your marketing and sales content should include your best media content.

Want testimonial or case study videos for pitches? Want to embed a TikTok from your brand account in a piece of content? Want to delight your users with motion and dynamic interactions with your content?

These are all great ideas. But they aren’t possible with PDFs.

Your content should move prospects down the funnel.

If a user clicks into your PDF, where do they go from there? There’s no nav, no way to learn more about your brand. Why limit their user experience?

Why not present them with a way to choose their own adventure by exploring your digital ecosystem vs. looking at a static document.

PDFs don’t help you introduce other brand touch points to users.

Your content should be trackable and measurable.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see how much traffic a landing page has received? Wouldn’t it be nice to attribute an inbound sign up to a sales email or digital interaction?

While it’s possible to track some opens of PDFs, you can’t get more granular metrics to track engagements like link clicks.

When you build a no code landing page, you can include a clear CTA button and track conversions to understand the ROI of a campaign.

When should you use PDFs?

When you need print assets. Full stop. That’s the only scenario where I believe you need to design a PDF document.

If you’re pitching to a prospective client, of course a slide deck makes sense. But I believe you should send prospects a digital file of that presentation vs. sending it as a PDF. You can use the Google Drive ‘view-only’ share link for this reason as well. They can’t edit the docs but they can access it digitally. And again, you can update the content as needed and it will auto update.

There’s huge value to that.

Say Goodbye to PDFs.

It’s time to say goodbye to PDFs in your marketing and sales content and say hello to using digital video tools, cloud-based document tools, and no code website and landing page builders. There’s just too much downside to PDFs.

❌ Not mobile-friendly

❌ Not editable

❌ Not ADA accessible

❌ Not dynamic

❌ Not engaging or actionable

❌ Not trackable

Marketers – stop using PDFs, I’m begging you.