Storydoc vs. PDFs: a smarter alternative for 2023

PDFs are killing your growth: choose a modern-day alternative

In today’s business, everyone uses PDFs. Period. They’re so popular that most people simply take them for granted. No matter the format or the exact use case: be it a sales deck, a case study, or an outbound onepager—all B2B collateral somehow ends up as a PDF sent to the customer. Now, here’s the thing: PDFs were invented in 1993 and haven’t evolved much since.

In your day-to-day work, would you like to use computers, phones, screens, or cars created almost 30 years ago? We didn’t think so. In that same manner, you should reconsider your go-to PDF format and pick something that, well, doesn’t kill your conversion rates and bore your prospects to death. Something that will actually give you an advantage and make customers excited about working with you. Something like…

Storydoc.

Conversion rates

Tested time and time again and optimized for helping you engage customers and close deals, not just “looking nice.”

Compared to static PDF decks, Storydocs brought our clients a 70% boost in new customers, 2x increase in demos booked, and slashed closing time by 30%.

Yes, we have more data to support those claims. Read our case studies or see our research of 100,000+ sales and marketing presentations to learn more.

Your prospects can read them, if they’re really into it. And that’s pretty much it. And even that doesn't really hold when PDFs are opened on mobile.

Difficult to include a clear CTA and impossible to integrate a calendar to make booking a demo simple.

Presenting complex information
in a digestible format

Lets you eat the cake and have it, too. Each document can serve as a “bird’s eye view” providing your audience with a flawless, scroll-based viewing experience AND let them dive deeper into items of data they find relevant.

Built-in data visualization templates letting you present complex sets of data in a clear, engaging way.

Complex information requires complex form. Highly technical decks will end up as walls of text and indecipherable data sets. And don’t get us started with these gimmicky diagrams no one can understand

No option to organize content in tabs or add collapsible elements: this means more and more scrolling in order to find what’s relevant to a given reader.

Enabling your champions
to sell internally

Storydocs go viral inside organizations. Your champions will be excited to show them to their bosses or peers. Storydoc decks are shared internally 2.3x more often than standard, static pieces of content.

The scroll-based structure and an interactive narrative make it easy for customers to understand exactly what your solution is and what it brings to the table.

Your lead’s boss views dozens of those every week and hates them. In fact, on average, they will spend less than 15 seconds browsing through before deciding if it’s worthy of their time.

Incapable of generating engagement, looks like a printed piece of paper cast on your screen.

REAL interactive prospect experience

Your customers can play around with the deck: click through tabs, fill out an interactive ROI calculator, play embedded videos, and choose what they want to learn more about.

Providing an actual interactive experience (as opposed to simply animating an element here and there) boosts engagement metrics: 41% more decks read in full, 21% boost in average reading time vs. static content.

The best thing you can do is add links to external resources.

Your reader has no sense of control over the information they consume: it just gets thrown at them in a textbook-like format.

You can’t tailor the reading experience to the exact, specific use case: PDFs are one-size-fits-all. And one-size-fits-all, in fact, fits no one.

Personalization at scale

Use yourCRM integration and can create 1,000s of versions, each tailored to a specific prospect, with a single click.

Personalizing your deck is the single most valuable thing you can do to increase the impact of your collateral. In fact, our data shows that personalizing your decks to specific prospects achieves:

68% more people reading the deck in full.
41% boost in average reading time.
2.3x increase in the frequency of sharing the deck internally.

Personalization takes a lot of time at best. In most cases, it’s actually impossible as teams are using pre-designed PDFs that can’t be modified.

You have to create each customized version manually.

Design on autopilot

Layout is automatically adjusted, the design will always look right.

Every visual component you add, be that an icon, piece of copy, or a data item, will automatically match the size, color, and font to the overall deck design and your brand.

Each slide adjusts to the type and amount of content you add. All slides look balanced and proportional, even if you wanted to, you can’t create a frankendeck.

Professional design skills are required to make a good-looking document.

Making tweaks and adjustments can derail the layout completely.

Full control over your information

Can be easily updated at any time (even after you’ve sent the deck).

At any time, you can take outdated decks off air or tweak embarrassing typos.

In the end, you’re always 100% sure your customers see the freshest version.

Impossible to change once the document is sent.

Difficult to keep up-to-date.

Full insights into the selling process

Tracking and analytics let you get insights about the buying process on your client’s end

You get information and real-time alerts about who opened the deck, where they churned, how it was shared internally.

Presentation analytics allows you to keep optimizing your content, making sure you deliver decks that are what your customers want. Based on science, not guesswork.

The only information you have is whether or not someone opened your email with the PDF deck attached.

You’re completely blind when it comes to improving your future decks, as you can’t tell which parts were interesting and which were skipped.

Integrating your tech and marketing stack

You can enhance your collateral with additional touch points for your leads or customers: integrate live chat, sign-up forms, or data collection points.

Integrate it with your CRM: push data gathered from Storydoc directly to the system you use or pull data from your CRM to create thousands of personalized decks with a click.

Re-marketing tracking to chase only the leads who have shown real interest in you, not just opened your attachment and closed it seconds later.

There’s literally too much to cover. Read about it on our Integrations Page.

No way to automate data collection or the creation of personalized versions.

Impossible to integrate live chat, a demo calendar or any kinds of forms, you’d have to include links to external platforms. Yes, links that nobody will bother clicking when they are on a static PDF.

Adding videos to maximize engagement

You can easily add videos in any format you choose: YouTube, Vimeo, Loom, Vidyard, or your own mp4 file.

Adding videos further increases engagement. Decks with videos in them benefited from:

37% longer average reading time.
17% increase in the CTA click-through rate.

The only way to add videos is through links to external sources. And if a lead clicked to watch an external video that’s it, they just left your deck to never return…

You can’t have the video autoplay within the document.

Flawless mobile performance

100% mobile-responsive, with each element separately designed for mobile performance.

Why does it matter so much? 32% of decks are opened on mobile, including a whooping 47% of outreach decks!

A nightmare to read on mobile devices, requiring constant zooming in and out.

According to numerous studies, PDF files should never be read online at all, let alone on mobile devices. PDF layouts are optimized for a printed sheet of paper, which never aligns with the size and scale of the user's mobile browser window.