Content Marketing: Creating PDF Checklists and Guides for Your Customers

If content marketing isn’t part of your business already, then it probably should be. Producing valuable content that is useful to your customers and relevant to your business is a great way to generate leads and sales. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and you’ll see why content marketing makes perfect sense.

We buy from companies who give away quality content for two reasons:

1. The Trust Factor: If a company is able to produce content that is informative, educational, and useful, we naturally tend to trust that company. It has demonstrated that it has expertise in our area of interest.
2. The Tip of the Value Iceberg: We understand that if a company is willing to give away valuable content for free, then it means that the goods and services they are charging for are probably well worth it, too.

We’ve discussed content marketing in terms of blogging before, but you can add to your blog in many ways without committing a lot of money or time to production. One simple way is to offer resources like checklists as PDFs on your site. You can create these types of documents easily. Chances are you already have the necessary information in your head or in your previous blog posts. Just think about what content you can package that your customers and target customers could use.

In the video below, small business tech expert and pbSmart Essentials contributor Phil Simon shows you how to use online tools like Scribd to publish useful content for your customers. Phil specifically demonstrates how to publish a checklist, but you could use the same process to create any type of document that would provide value to your customers, like planning sheets, pocket guides, or special calendars, for instance.

The idea is to provide free resources your customers and target customers can actually use. Offering PDF documents on your website can also be a great lead generation tool — just require a simple registration from your customer in order to download the document.

Have you offered your customers any kind of resource or guide through your blog or website?

What Next?

After you create great content for your customers, you’ll need to let people know about it. One of the best ways is to promote your content across the social Web.