What is the purpose
These days your website can be your 24/7 salesman. A good way of facilitating this is by making top of funnel PDF’s. This is the marketing term for making downloadable files for the broadest potential customer. These potential customers are somewhere on the buying journey, even if they are nowhere near actually purchasing yet. Your top of funnel PDF’s can be used to give your company exposure to those customers.
Seen as expert
First and foremost, these top of funnel PDF’s should be showing you off as an expert. So referencing any articles you are in is a great idea. If you won some awards, put them in too! Have specific qualifications or licenses, make sure they are in there. Think: how can I show off my expertise.
Information
These top of funnel PDF’s should be full of useful information for people. Remember to not get stuck into giving them specifics about your exact products or services. They should really be more of an overview. Think more of a “why” piece. Why should they care about what you do. Why is their problem valid.
Using top of funnel PDF’s to drive sales
Of course, your website should have many different pieces of content for customers throughout the buying journey. Those who are unaware they have a problem through to those who are currently shortlisting options and checking out specifications. Each content piece should be very targeted for that type of buyer at that part of the journey. Don’t worry about excluding people. These top of funnel PDF’s should be very broad. In order to help drive sales, see if your content feels as though there is some step that immediately comes next. You can even be explicit and say something like: “see samples on our website” and put in a link!
Branding your top of tunnel PDF’s
It should be obvious. You need to brand your PDFs so they look and feel like your company. For example: if you are an information reporter, then make it look like a report. Or, if you’re more aspirational and lifestyle based, than make them look like a magazine. If you teach/are educational then make it look like it. And always use your brand palette, imagery and fonts. Super important.
Make sure the document look likes your brand
If you don’t know what this means. Hire someone to make it happen for you. The difference between doing it yourself and hiring a professional to catch attention can be the difference between success and failure. The main things to make sure happen are your branding being applied to the document. It makes no sense to use a stock template using someone else’s brand pallet and fonts. So, if you do buy a template, at the very least, change the colours and fonts to match your brand. Make it more custom. Best case scenario is you hire someone to make you a file from scratch. Everything custom for your individual brand. And then if you are wanting to make multiple top of funnel PDFs (which yes, you should consider) then you can reuse that document’s design. Ask for a template you can edit yourself.
Putting on your website (Based on your goals)
You need to really consider what are your goals with the PDF. These are varied and can include clicks, sign ups, downloads, sales. Know what your KPI’s are and make sure you track them. You can do this with Google Analytics.
Either link to it directly
You can put the PDF directly on your website. Anyone with the URL can download it. This is nice if you want to just get the information out there. The PDF can be found in search engines. This is a good option for a spec sheet, brochure or price list. Because you want to get that information out there.
Ask for their email address with a form and set up an automation that sends out the top of funnel PDF’s
Better still, is to get an email address in exchange for the PDF. Your PDF must be of value to your potential customer. After they sign up, you can have a pre-set up funnel that automatically sends them the PDF and a series of emails. Remember to not overdo it. Nobody wants to get spammed.
Don’t forget to follow up
You want to follow up with potential customers. And having them sign up for the PDF is a great way to learn who they are. Your automated email sales funnel can do a little bit to help keep you top of mind. Or to at least bring the potential customer further down the journey toward buying your company’s offering. If possible, send them out an email with an option to book a call or to get a free quote from you.
