With millions of resources available online, how can you distinguish your downloads from the assets your competitors are providing? Show
By making them interactive of course! You can unlock a world of possibilities for creative, useful, downloadable inbound marketing content using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. In this post, I’ll provide three examples and tutorials for creating interactive marketing assets, specifically PDF downloads, that can be downloaded directly from a landing page or be gated to generate leads. These examples can be added to existing PDFs for extra spice, or can be created from scratch. All will be created using the Adobe Acrobat Pro DC software. First, a quick refresher on content marketing so we’re all up to speed. Content marketing provides a clearly defined pool of potential customers with valuable content in the hopes of driving sales for your business or organization. Having a clearly defined audience, a strategic campaign cadence, and high quality downloads to offer to prospects are all key components of content marketing. Today we are going to be focused specifically on the download portion of the equation. We’ll be covering: How to Use Adobe Acrobat Pro DCAdobe Acrobat DC is a collaborative PDF solution that allows you to create and edit PDF documents. There are different packages available, but here at Cypress North we use Adobe Pro DC which costs about $14 USD per month. This is the complete Adobe package, and it includes all tools and functionalities needed to create PDFs on any device or operating system (to an extent). Before we walk through how to use Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, there’s some caveats that we should cover first. For starters, certain features available in Adobe Acrobat PDFs are not compatible with iOS PDF viewers like Apple’s Preview app. This will prevent some form fields from showing in Preview. The best way to get around this is to open the PDF in Adobe Reader or in a web browser. Another caveat is that not all browsers are able to open PDFs. Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Internet Explorer are all able to open PDFs with similar functionality to that of Adobe Reader. Even so, do your research to make sure that your content is accessible for everyone, and provide information on how to open your PDF to ensure that readers can see your content. Now let’s get started with Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. Once you’ve acquired access to the software, you need to upload the file you’re working with by going to File → Open → and then select the correct file from your computer. For the purposes of our tutorials, we’ll be using the “Prepare Form” tool. To download this tool, go to “Tools” in the main nav. Underneath “Forms & Signatures”, select “Add” under “Prepare Form”. (I already have the tool downloaded on my computer so my screenshot says “Open”.) If you already have this tool installed, go to the side bar on the right of your PDF file and select “Prepare Form”. From here Adobe will have to scan your document, so click on the blue “Start” button. Now that you’re using the correct tool, you’ll notice that a second toolbar has appeared with different symbols at the top of the PDF document. The only features we’ll be using are the mouse pointer module and the text field module. The mouse pointer allows you to click/select different PDF elements, and the text field module allows you to add calculated fields which we’ll be covering next. To add a text field onto your PDF, you’ll click on the text field module and then click again to drop the field onto the file in the desired position, similar to adding shapes in Microsoft Word. To edit a text field, you’ll need to go to Text Field Properties by double clicking on the text field. In this tutorial, we’ll be using the General, Appearance, Options, Format, Validate, and Calculate tabs.
JavaScript For Adobe Acrobat PDFsTo create our calculated fields, we will be using JavaScript for Adobe Acrobat. However, you do not need to know how to code to follow this tutorial. We’ll primarily be using basic JavaScript fundamentals including:
The scripts we create will be entered into the Validate and Calculate tabs in Text Field Settings. Adobe executes validation scripts first before calculation scripts, which means that it will check to see if the input is valid before running the calculation. JavaScript in Adobe Acrobat DC does differ slightly from using JavaScript in other applications. If you’d like to learn more about using JavaScript in Adobe Acrobat DC, you can view the scripting references guide from Adobe here. Interactive Marketing Download IdeasNow that we’ve covered how to get started with Adobe Acrobat Pro, it’s time for the fun part. Let’s get into our specific examples. Keep in mind, these examples have been oversimplified to make the concepts easier to explain and understand. Focus on the actual process of building the PDFs, not on how improbable (or lame) my fictional companies are. I also recommend that you read through each example instead of skipping around this post. The examples are purposely ordered by difficulty, starting with the easiest example, so you should follow the flow to make sure you don’t miss any information. A. Make An Estimate Calculator with Adobe Acrobat Pro DCProblem:Let’s say you work at a large software company. Your company offers several different types of software packages and custom solutions, so your pricing information is not available on your website. To give prospects a better idea of how much they could be spending on a package, you want to create a downloadable tool that will provide a rough estimate. However, not everyone will pay the same price, so there’s no way to list out all possible price points in one PDF. Criteria:
Tutorial:View the blank PDF file here Formatting:
Validation:
This is what the users Validation JavaScript Editor should look like: Calculations:
This is what the Calculation JavaScript Editor should look like: Yay! We’re finished with this PDF file. Test it out! Download the finished estimate calculator here. B. Cost Savings Calculator with Adobe Acrobat Pro DCProblem:You are hosting a trade show and need to spread the word. To get more companies interested in attending, you decide to create a downloadable PDF highlighting the benefits of attending. You are also offering a discount, and would like these companies to have the ability to calculate their cost savings to encourage them to sign up earlier. Criteria:
Tutorial:View the blank PDF file here Formatting:
Validation:
The first if statement prevents users from entering a value less than 1 by providing a pop-up error message that says “Number of attendees must be between 1 and 50. Please try again.” The second if statement prevents users from entering a value greater than or equal to 51. The same error message will appear if users enter a value greater than 50.
This is what the attendees field looks like after entering our validation scripts: Calculations:
0This is what my script looks like in the JavaScript Editor: Hooray! We’ve finished this example too, onto the next one! C. Calculate & Return Text with Adobe Acrobat Pro DCProblem:You are trying to get companies to sign up for corporate credit cards. To get employees to sign up you are running a promotion where you will give them a certain number of rewards points back for every dollar amount spent. Ideally, you’d like to show them the number of points they’d earn and what membership level they would reach. Criteria:
Tutorial:View the blank PDF file here Formatting:
Validation:
1
Calculations:
2
My calculation looks like this in the JavaScript Editor: Did you enjoy these tutorials? Fill out the form below and have the finished PDF files for Examples B and C sent directly to your inbox!As demonstrated in the above examples, there is a lot you can do with PDFs – and we’re just skimming the surface! Content creation can be difficult for any digital marketer, and B2B marketing has its own set of challenges. We hope this gave you some good marketing content ideas and that you enjoyed learning more about using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, creating JavaScript calculations and validations in PDFs, and building interactive marketing downloads. For help with more B2B marketing challenges, check out our comprehensive guide here. If you’re looking for unique ideas for content creation or Adobe Acrobat help – let us know! We’d love to hear from you. How do I run JavaScript console in Adobe?To run the code, make sure the cursor is on the same line as the text. You can place it anywhere on the line as long as nothing is selected. Either of the two following actions will cause Acrobat to run the code. Press Ctrl+Enter on Windows, or Command+Enter on Macintosh.
How to run JavaScript when opening PDF?Go to Tools>JavaScript>Document JavaScripts and add your Acrobat Javascript script there. They should run at open. If you need to make sure that the PDF is fully loaded before the Acrobat Javascript script starts to execute, you can amend your Acrobat Javascript script accordingly.
How to use JavaScript in PDF file?Adding JavaScript to a PDF Document. Step 1: Loading an Existing PDF Document. Load an existing PDF document using the static method load() of the PDDocument class. ... . Step 2: Creating the PDActionJavaScript Object. ... . Step 3: Embedding Java script in the Document. ... . Step 4: Saving the Document. ... . Step 5: Closing the Document.. Does Adobe use JavaScript?JavaScript support is one of Acrobat's and Adobe Reader's most powerful features, and Adobe provides several controls that enable tuning application behavior so that JavaScript (JS) executes within your desired level of security where unrestricted access to JS APIs is undesirable or workflows do not leverage this ...
|