No matter how ubiquitous the Web becomes, there will always be a need for brand communications materials to appear in the printed, tangible form. At Maricich, we’ve found that this is especially true in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and medical device categories, where brochures remain an important sales tool, and in hospitals, where printed newsletters remain a vital part of the marketing mix. These materials can also play double-duty by being posted on company websites in the form of PDFs, but Web-based PDF documents aren’t always user friendly, and the emotional connection one experiences when flipping through the pages of the actual printed piece can be lost in the electronic form. However, now there is a free and simple solution at Issuu.com (beta) ?a slick “flip-page” solution to presenting publications online.
Creating an Issuu account is easy, and once you have, you can simply upload your brochures, newsletters, catalogs and magazines into the flip-page format, and all documents will be hosted on Issuu’s servers. The size of any one file is limited up to 100mb and/or 500 pages, which is more than enough capacity for most marketing materials. Once your document has been uploaded, the file’s searchability settings can be set at either public or private, and a handy measurement tool is available for tracking downloads. Also, there are a number of options for embedding your Issuu document into your own web site. The whole application and ease of use makes Issuu essentially the YouTube of online document hosting.
The following are a couple of example links for reference, which show two items we’ve uploaded to Issuu, including our Maricich agency profile and a white paper on establishing marketing budgets.
In addition to Issuu, there are several other similar options for posting documents online, including Scribd, DocStoc (no flip page option) and Turn-Page (just offers the flip page, but for a fee). But for us, we’ve found that Issuu is the best overall solution for meeting our needs and those of our healthcare, medical, pharmaceutical, medical device, hospital and biotech clients.