By Dan Shea, PlanetPDF

Vitrium Systems has today launched PDFSalesLeads, a web-based application that allows organizations to generate sales leads from their PDF content. Learn how to start turning your PDFs into interactive, lead generating tools.

Read the full article – Vitrium Systems Launches PDFSalesLeads

After staying static for many decades and consisting mainly of annoying magazine blow-in cards and junk mail, direct marketing’s taken a whirlwind ride through the last 15 years as the Internet changes the way we all view media.

While some markets still rely heavily on paper means of reaching sales leads, the costs associated with printing, mailing, and data entry—especially in a down economy—are too much for many companies to bear. That, and restrictions set by the Federal Trade Commission’s CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 have businesses rebuilding their marketing efforts by using PDF documents.

PDF files offer many upsides and great potential over traditional paper, Web and email marketing:
• Well-planned layouts remain preserved and make the same impact in the end-user’s viewer application—as opposed to Web browsers, which can remix colors and type at the user’s whim.
• PDFs cost little, if anything, to distribute.
• Most computers connected to the Internet have a means of viewing PDFs—a good share of them standardized on Adobe Reader.
• A “gatekeeper” script can request email addresses of recipients who are interested in reading white-paper, catalog, or research report content contained within a PDF.

That’s the beauty of PDF marketing: If someone’s so interested in reading what’s beyond the cover page of a document that they’re willing to submit their email address to the host, that’s a much higher-quality lead than an email blast to a questionable address list a company purchases. Or, worse yet, poorly targeted leads harvested from a web page that in some cases run afoul of CAN-SPAM regs and make a company liable for fines and costly legal proceedings.

Yet, up to now, technical complexities of lead generation prevented most companies from tapping into the potential of PDF marketing, because while the technology has been available for years, the technical barriers (JavaScript, forms setup, database servers) seemed to outstrip the value proposition.

Most companies experimenting with PDF marketing run an end-around these technical issues by simply posting a web form a reader needed to fill out before receiving a PDF download—losing valuable leads from email pass-along circulation (and reposting to internal web sites) in the process. That’s when a person fills out a web form truthfully in the first place.

This week, Vitrium is releasing PDF Sales Leads, a robust service that harnesses the power of PDF marketing for small-to-medium sized business through dynamic web forms embedded inside PDFs.

Because it’s hosted by Vitrium using the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, businesses that just couldn’t afford the software infrastructure—and consultants to build it and train employees—can start putting quality content they own into attractive PDF files and start leveraging the power of this web-based “marketing 2.0″ tool. A simple, straightforward setup walks even non-IT staffers through the process in a few minutes.

“PDFSalesLeads gets one more costly business process off a company’s server and into the cloud, and that’s where it should be,” says Vitrium Systems CEO Peter Nieforth. “It saves dollars over traditional paper sales-lead generation, but more importantly, saves trees and gives our clients a win-win without the huge financial ramp-up PDF marketing traditionally requires.”

Where does this leave PDF? Well, when streaming video, blogs and so forth started to take hold, some  commentators predicted the death of the white paper. In spite of this, PDF documents like white papers, case studies and data sheets remain vital tools for many B2B marketers, especially in the technology sector.

The fact is that, by allowing marketers to distribute traditional print-style materials online, PDF offers something very valuable that no other format can match. Furthermore, with today’s enhanced PDF technology, there’s no reason why electronic documents can’t engage prospects in a Web 2.0-style interactive experience.

There are great things that can be done, using Flash technologies, to turn PDF into an interactive document format. If marketers can get access to simple tools that leverage these technologies, they won’t have to choose between traditional techniques and interactive media – they’ll have the best of both worlds.

Phil Leggiere interviews Pat  Weilmeier, Director of Marketing at Vitrium Systems, about how the ubiquitous PDF can be used to analyze reader engagement and provide insight on how readers engage with PDF content.

Read the full interview: Realizing the Potential of PDF