Transform your Catalog into a Digital Sales Engine with Issuu

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

IIssuu is redesigning the online shopping experience and making it easier than ever to get a beautiful, shoppable presentation in front of your clients and customers. See how the sales roll in!

Our team is creative too. We live for designers - for your pixels and margins, typography and brand, photographs and illustrations, and the vision of your project.

Our goal is to make sure your catalog designs are transformed into beautiful and valuable digital assets for every marketing channel. We want you to make you look professional, to make sure your brand and design aesthetic is translated correctly to digital formats, to help you engage your audience, inspire your vendors, give your customers the best shopping experience, and generate new ideas for marketing.

If that’s the kind of partnership you were searching for, you’re in the right place – and we’re so glad you found us!

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Table of Contents Issuu is a Digital Publishing Platform for All of Your Content Needs

5

How Multichannel and Omnichannel Marketing with Issuu Can Grow Your E-Commerce and Catalog Business 6 Keeping SEO Top of Mind When Producing Catalogs

8

Use a Content Marketing Program to Promote Your Catalog with Issuu

10

Repurpose Your Catalog into Derivative Assets

12

Create Engaging Flipbooks for Your Brand

14

Embed Customized Content in Your Website

15

Upgrade Your Marketing Assets with Shopping Links

17

Bring Your Designs to Life with Videos

17

Track Your Success and Brainstorm Your Next Data-Driven Campaign

18

Get Inspired! See What the Issuu Community is Creating

19

Create More and Sell More with Issuu

21

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Issuu is a Digital Publishing Platform for All of Your Content Needs Our goal is to help creative, entrepreneurial people like you grow their businesses with the fastest, easiest, and most powerful system to publish and distribute content online.

Millions of retailers, brands, product designers, makers, and ecommerce sites rely on the magic of Issuu to transform their static design files quickly and easily from InDesign or PDF into multiple types of high-performance online content. Our publishing platform enables you to turn your catalog into an engaging and interactive digital masterpiece, with live links straight to your estore or product websites, ready to be shared across any distribution channel.

Easily Repurpose Your Content Within minutes of uploading you content to Issuu, your entire catalog can be reenvisioned into a number of assets suited to your marketing team’s needs: embeddable digital flipbooks for websites and blogs, AMP-optimized mobile articles, stunning full-screen lookbooks, motion-graphic social media stories, email assets, and so much more.

Your product catalog has never been shared in so many unique ways before!

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Issuu eliminates the hassle of converting files to different sizes and formats – all while maintaining your original design aesthetic. We deconstruct your PDF into reusable bits. Select your favorite images and text, then repurpose them into shareable mobile articles, email assets, and even motion-graphic social stories and GIFs. All automatically optimized for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Integrate Your Content Into Different Platforms Issuu integrates with all of your favorite marketing and publishing platforms like InDesign, Dropbox, Google Drive, Mailchimp, Hootsuite, Shopify, and more - creating a seamless bridge between design tools, digital asset management archives, and marketing automation and delivery solutions.

We make it easy to go from creation to consumption in minutes, so you can send your catalog out to the world in just about any digital format you can dream of.

There’s a reason over 20,000 PDFs are uploaded to Issuu every day. We’re the leading solution for content marketers, magazine and catalog publishers, educators, and small businesses.

Together, we can take your catalog to the next level

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

How Multichannel and Omnichannel Marketing with Issuu Can Grow Your E-Commerce and Catalog Business At first glance, “multichannel” and “omnichannel” look like they’re interchangeable, right? Don’t they both mean marketing across various distribution channels?

Technically yes, but there is a key difference between the two.

Multichannel marketing Multichannel marketing is centered around your product and your company. Campaigns on different platforms operate independently of each other, essentially working within a vacuum.

For example, reconfiguring your product catalog in different ways to suit various channels would be a form of multichannel marketing.

Your content is optimized to suit its particular platform, but it doesn’t “talk” to other platforms by changing based on a consumer’s actions.

Omnichannel marketing Omnichannel marketing, on the other hand, breaks down the walls between the platforms and puts the customer – rather than the product – at the center of the process.

This is a consumer-based, not channel-based, approach. Essentially, it takes multichannel to the next level by allowing campaigns to work together across channels, presenting a cohesive and consistent message no matter how the customer is viewing it: email, website, social media, banner ad, et cetera.

For example, product ads on all channels will adapt to show items that the customer previously viewed or abandoned in their cart.

Businesses utilizing omnichannel customer engagement retain an average of 89% of their customers, compared to 33% for businesses that have weak or nonexistent omnichannel engagement.

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Whether you’re relying on a multichannel or omnichannel approach, expanding your marketing campaign across several different platforms has the potential to make your targeted campaigns drastically more successful by: Diversifying your audience reach Expanding your marketing initiatives to multiple platforms opens many more opportunities to connect with clients and customers that you wouldn’t have reached if your efforts were solely focused on a single channel.

Increasing brand awareness.

The more visible you are – especially if you have a strong brand theme that keeps your content consistent with tone, graphics, colors, and the like – the more recognizable your brand will become.

Offering more conversion avenues.

Consumers rarely make a purchase after their first interaction with your content. By reaching them on various platforms, you’re getting the repeated exposure you need to finally secure the sale while offering multiple different opportunities for a customer to make a purchase when they’re ready, no matter what channel they’re currently browsing.

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Consistency across channels is important. Your Facebook content should have the same look and feel as your web content, email newsletter, Instagram campaign, and anything else you have branded.

This is where we bring our specialty to the table.

By taking your long-form content and optimizing it for any platform, your design aesthetic and branding remains the same, while your content is tailored to seamlessly fit any platform on any device.

The result is a clean, professional, cohesive collection of assets at your disposal, ready to spread your brand across multichannel and omnichannel platforms and start gaining attention.

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Keeping SEO Top of Mind When Producing Catalogs Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a critical component of any modernday online marketing strategy. But with eCommerce and product catalogs and lookbooks, it is a competitive advantage.

Utilizing good SEO practices in everything you do can help to improve your visibility in search engines and attract organic traffic, while poor SEO practices can have a negative impact by making it harder for people to find your business.

When you enhance your website with catalog flipbooks, it’s important to know how those file types are going to impact your site’s SEO and ensure that your updates are actually improving, not hurting, your website ranking.

That’s why we stay up to date with Google’s latest updates and algorithms to ensure our file formats are optimized to provide our clients with the best possible tools to help with SEO visibility:

Article Stories are AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) optimized to help with SEO. Large graphics and slow webpage load times can negatively impact your SEO standing. For mobile readers, create Issuu Article Stories to engage your readers and have improved discoverability. AMP is an open-source, Google-supported project guaranteed to make sure your pages load quickly and look stunning.

Transforming your content with beautiful, interactive, and visually pleasing assets, so you can engage with your audience.

SEO is tied to user experience (UX).

As search engines continue to evolve and become more sophisticated, more and more emphasis is being placed on good UX.

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Our format is embeddable into your website or blog.

You can optimize the page it is embedded on and, through your other marketing campaigns, send people to your own website instead of a thirdparty hosting solution.

You provide the content you know is going to be exciting and engaging with your audience, and we’ll help you transform it into an even more powerful SEO tool so people can discover your brand and your business will grow.

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Use a Content Marketing Program to Promote Your Catalog with Issuu Issuu is an all-in-one digital publishing solution. We don’t just make your content marketing ideas possible — we make them a breeze! Although no two marketing campaigns are exactly the same, they all rely on a set of basic characteristics to determine the strategy and metrics for success: Audience You know your demographic and target audience. We help you engage them with creative, interactive assets to showcase your products.

Content Your words and graphics are brought to life and optimized for a perfect layout on every platform you need.

Offer You have something worth buying.

We want to help you sell it by bringing your catalog to the next level for e-commerce.

Method We’re ready no matter which type of campaign you choose and where you plan to publish your assets. Our quick and easy process will give you ready-

to-post graphics in minutes, saving you precious time and effort so you can focus on making your omnichannel campaign a success.

Follow-up We have the tools to see your campaign through to the finish line, including analytical data so you can track results, see how well content performed, and strategize future campaigns. Issuu makes it easy and affordable to transform your catalog into beautiful catalogs, digital lookbooks and powerful online sales tools that will fit flawlessly into your brand’s unique content marketing program.

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Add shopping links to connect a catalog directly to your online store or Shopify site, and then track your conversions. We offer an ideal solution for introducing new product lines while telling the brand story of your company.

Digitizing your catalog shopping experience can be done in five simple steps: 1. Upload your catalog as a PDF, .doc, .docx, or .ppt file or import directly from Dropbox or Google Drive.

2. Enhance your listings with embedded videos.

3. Add product links to make shopping as simple as possible.

4. Publish and distribute your digital catalog on Issuu, then create beautiful visual stories to be used as Instagram or Facebook Stories, and to enhance your email.

5. Share your catalog using Issuu’s full-screen flipbook, or embed it directly on your website.

Whether you’re creating a product lookbook or a full online catalog with pricing and order details, we have the tools you’ll need in our catalog creator to quickly and easily craft a digital masterpiece.

The most popular types of catalogs on Issuu include: » Product catalogs

» Sale contracts

» Designer lookbooks

» Spec sheets / brochures

» New launch brochures

Once you publish your catalog to Issuu, it’s ready to be discovered by 100+ million readers monthly. A new, untapped audience, beyond your normal spheres, is waiting to see your content and find your brand.

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Repurpose Your Catalog into Derivative Assets Virtual catalogs have come a long way from what they used to be. Full-length catalogs and lookbooks are great resources for consumers viewing on a desktop or laptop – but for readers on the go, a more digestible mobile medium is a better option, whether it’s a social media story or mobile-optimized article.

Social Media

Product Catalog

Social media has redefined the marketing process

Meanwhile, your customers and fans can browse

over the last decade. And yet, it still remains an

your newest product releases through attractive

underutilized tool for promoting catalogs. An

flippable online catalogs with trackable shopping

aesthetically striking lookbook promoted on social

links, giving you an analytical look at how well

media can provide an impressive first glimpse at

your campaigns are performing.

your brand as new customers discover what you have to offer.

Normally, recreating your lookbook to fit social media stories or breaking it up into categories for

Email Email campaigns can also be enhanced using assets created through Issuu. Your full catalog, complete with pricing and order details, can be easily shared with wholesalers in a much more professional format than the traditional scrolling style of a PDF.

articles and emails would be a tedious and timeconsuming task. That’s where we come in!

All of that work is done in a matter of minutes.

The Issuu Story Cloud makes it quick and simple to edit, change, and create customized content designed specifically to fit its intended medium, all while maintaining your unique branding.

Issuu deconstructs your PDF into reusable bits, so you can easily select your favorite images and text, then remix them into shareable mobile articles (Google AMP enabled!), email banners, and even motion-graphic social stories. All automatically optimized for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

To create an article story: 1. Log in to your Issuu account. Select “Article Stories” from the navigation.

2. Click on “Create New Article Story.”

3. Choose the pages from your uploaded content.

4. For SEO purposes, add a title and short description, then click “Next.”

5. Edit as necessary. Your mobile articles are automatically populated from the content you selected, so with a bit of fine-tuning, you have an attractive and interesting article ready to post.

To create a visual story on mobile (iOS/Android): 1. Download the Issuu app and log in to your account.

2. Select “Create a Visual Story” at the top.

3. Choose which assets you would like to use.

4. Browse our visual story templates and select the one that best fits your brand or specifications.

5. Edit your story, which has already been automatically generated into the template. You can rearrange and tweak until it’s just right.

6. Share with the world! You have the option to download and post your story to Facebook or Instagram, link directly to Instagram, or save your project to your mobile device and share it at a later time.

To create a visual story on desktop: 1. Log in to your Issuu account. Click on “Visual Stories” in the navigation.

2. Select “Create New Visual Story.”

3. Choose the pages you want to convert from your uploaded content, then click “Next.”

4. Pick your favorite template that matches your brand.

5. Make any necessary edits.

Visual stories are saved in your account, which means you can access them anywhere on desktop or mobile. You can also leverage text and images from your flipbook and create separate visual stories with ease.

One original design.

Limitless ways to reimagine it without starting from scratch.

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Create Engaging Flipbooks for Your Brand When it comes to digital lookbooks, Issuu is the unchallenged leader.

There’s just something special about the tactile feeling and the elegant page flips. Our software engineers have built a remarkable system to reconstruct your PDFs into web- and mobile-ready formats while retaining your beautiful designs.

Lookbooks reformatted into lustrous digital flipbooks are powerful assets, especially in the fashion, architecture, furniture, and home goods product spheres. They also work exceptionally well with B2B sales.

But there’s really no limit to what they can accomplish! A well-crafted and imaginative lookbook, optimized with page turns that feel as close to a print book as possible, can enhance your

content for just about any business type. It’s simply the easiest way to immerse your readers.

SEO too — maximize reach and increase your website’s visibility with Issuu. Flipbooks are naturally engaging and improve your website’s user experience, which is always a plus when considering search engine rankings.

Issuu automatically optimizes content for search engines and mobile. Your flipbooks are sleek and fluid, ready to load instantly onto your blog or website. Make sure you also add links from your content to your top strategic web pages to maximize your SEO.

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Embed Customized Content in Your Website Forget building and updating endless web pages.

Take your brochure or catalog, or any other piece of marketing content and add it to your website or blog in minutes — no coding skills needed. It’s also super easy to swap out versions to keep your content updated on the fly.

Plus, with Issuu your content will always stay on brand. Customize our flipbook reader with your logo and background colors for a seamless look and feel that matches your website, whether you’re using Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, or another type of e-commerce site.

Your Issuu content will look like a native section of your website rather than a third-party addition, instantly elevating the user experience in ways a basic PDF could never accomplish.

No extra coding. No additional plugins. No stress!

All it takes is four easy steps to embed compelling content with a native experience on your webpages: 1. Log in to Issuu and select “Publications” from the navigation.

2. Choose the uploaded content you want to embed, then click “Enhance” in the left navigation and select “Embed on Website.”

3. Customize your new Issuu Embed Reader to match your brand. Adjust the colors, logo, and size to seamlessly integrate with your website.

4. Click “Get Embed Code” for your customized iframe code, which can be copied and pasted into any web editor.

Your website has acquired beautiful content that looks like it was made within the native theme.

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Upgrade Your Marketing Assets with Shopping Links Go from static to dramatic with live links.

Live links make it easy for readers to navigate within your content — or to your website, eStore, blog, or even advertisers.

If your PDF already contains links, Issuu will automatically detect and activate them in your flipbook. Or, you can add new links after your content has been uploaded.

For product guides and catalogs, Issuu’s shopping links add a small shopping cart icon, signaling that the link is shoppable.

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Bring Your Designs to Life with Videos Videos are an engaging way to provide context and narration.

brief downtime rather than take ten minutes to read the same information.

Videos featuring people can help consumers put a face to a brand on a more human level, while informational videos that rely on graphics can be both beautiful and educational.

And let’s just admit it — a good video can make your brand look next-level!

Either way, videos are great at keeping people on your page, which is good news because search engines love longer page views.

Issuu makes it easy to feature products, educate with instructional how-to videos, introduce your team, show footage behind the scenes, show off your best presentations, and include any other type of video that will connect with your audience. Videos have been shown to drastically boost conversion rates, build credibility, and encourage social shares.

Many consumers, especially those who have hectic lifestyles and are constantly on the go, would prefer to watch a short two-minute video during

Even with all of those benefits, videos are still underutilized in the marketing world, despite the fact that nearly 50% of web users search for videos related to a service or product before making a purchase.

Issuu allows you to embed YouTube and Vimeo videos directly into your design. Set to auto-play to instantly engage readers and create a narration-driven experience, or create a pop-out video window.

Use video to add editorial or instructional context to your content, or place and sell video ads.

Embedded video is a fan-favorite – readers will love it!

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Track Your Success and Brainstorm Your Next Data-Driven Campaign Great content and beautiful digital assets are wonderful, but successful businesses know there’s a lot more to multichannel and omnichannel marketing.

You need the numbers.

Issuu Statistics provides a complete breakdown of how your content is performing and who is consuming it, allowing marketers to make informed decisions about their next campaigns and PR to see the full scope of their reach and impact.

All of these analytical aspects are important to help your business succeed, which is why we go further than simply being a digital publishing platform and catalog maker.

The data Issuu provides can become an instrumental tool for your business to optimize sales, study demographics and market trends, and determine the best market niche for your brand.

The trackable shopping links in your catalog can also provide a full-scope picture to gauge which products are connecting the most with your audience and bringing them to your website, thereby helping you identify opportunities for promoting best-sellers and designing your next product line.

All of this relevant information is critical to understanding your customers’ browsing habits and conversion rates.

With the right data, your team can make strategic decisions that will propel your business to success.

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Data analytics typically occur in three stages: »

Past reports can provide valuable insight into which projects had higher success rates than others. Success or failure doesn’t necessarily have to be measured in revenue. You can also look at overall engagement, reach, conversions, and other metrics.

Hindsight is 20/20.

»

Current market analysis can give you a real-time look at whether your audience is responding to your content. This can also help you determine whether you’re using your resources effectively with the multichannel platforms you decided to target, or if maybe you need to cut back on some of the channels that aren’t performing so your marketing budget can shift toward those that are.

»

Future predictions look at trends and forecasts to make informed decisions about your next short-term and long-term marketing priorities and strategies.

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Get Inspired!

See What the Issuu Community is Creating The community that has grown around the desire and need for stunning digital content is composed of some of the most talented creators in the marketplace.

We invite you to explore the possibilities and be inspired by some of the designers who have taken their content to the next level with Issuu.

Issuu + Etsy = A Perfect Match!

Regional Etsy markets have been relying on Issuu to create shoppable digital event programs featuring products and information about each participating seller.

Individual Etsy shops can also take advantage of Issuu’s digital catalog maker and content publishing platform to showcase their products and reach new customers in the ecommerce market.

Minimalistic Catalogs Minimalistic catalog designs have an elegant simplicity to them, powerful in both print and digital form.

Peacock Alley is a master of minimalism. Their beautiful designs utilize white space, simple patterns, muted color schemes, and fullpage graphics to give their brand a sophisticated feel.

Complete Catalogs Complete catalogs with hundreds of product pages are no problem for Issuu. While all those pages are likely to become tedious in the scroll format of a PDF, the tactile nature of on-screen page flips will make your Issuu digital catalog feel more like the perfect hybrid between print and virtual.

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Coaster is a great source of inspiration to see just how many features a digital catalog can have. Complete with how-to CAD drawings, product index, full-page and even full-spread photography, and all the necessary product information you would expect to find in a print catalog, Coaster proves that virtual catalogs are an asset worth creating.

Gran Habano took a wholesome approach and used their catalog to present the company’s origins and history, an interview with the founder, and an in-depth look at each individual product on a full spread featuring striking photography in a warm, relaxed setting.

The combinations and possibilities for your catalog are limited only by your imagination. If you can dream it, we can help you create it.

Online Magazines Online magazines are on the rise.

Readers who don’t want or remember to carry reading material with them, when they know they’ll be sitting around and waiting for a while, can easily access a digital magazine instead.

Tesco saw the potential of digital magazine publishing well before COVID changed our lives. Publishing with Issuu has allowed Tesco to build an impressive reservoir of fun, colorful digital magazines and a dedicated follower base waiting for the next release.

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Digital Portfolios

Create Content in All Formats

Digital portfolios have never looked better.

For some, one medium isn’t enough.

And we love to see that!

In a world of remote work and Zoom interviews, it’s no surprise that people are looking for creative ways to build a portfolio.

We have so many tools and features available to make sure your creativity is satisfied, no matter how you want to present it for any specific project parameters.

For some, a flipbook with a shareable link is all you need to send your finished work to a potential client or employer. For others, Issuu’s ability to embed content directly into a portfolio website is guaranteed to elevate your presentation to a whole new level, without dealing with the hassle of adding code or new plugins.

Virtual portfolios can be extensive lookbooks or a quick sample of past work, such as Tattoos by Libby Wells.

Attractive graphics can tell a story in only a few pages for a quick presentation of your skills.

Stella & Dot leverage their Issuu content in a variety of ways, from training guides, to quarterly planners, to reports, to lookbooks, to product and ambassador guides.

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

Create More and Sell More with Issuu Our community of creators continues to amaze us! We love connecting with, learning from, and educating the ambitious people ready to tackle digital content creation and omnichannel marketing.

We even offer weekly workshops and free webinars to help make sure you have all the right tools and know how to use them to their full potential.

Issuu is an all-encompassing digital content publishing solution for: » Designers — Having all of the necessary tools available in one place dramatically reduces production time. » Marketers — We’re here to help you maximize your digital efforts and track your campaigns. » Social media managers — Improve your presence on social media with assets designed to fit seamlessly into any platform. » PR / Corp Comm — Get your message out quickly and effectively to your target audiences. » Educators — Promote your institution and create engaging presentations. » Students — Bring your projects to life in the classroom. » Business owners — Reimagine your customers’ online user experience and explore new ways to reach prospects. » Freelancers — Showcase your work so potential clients can see what you have to offer in a sleek and professional digital portfolio. » Creatives — No matter what the project or purpose, if you have a vision, we can help you enhance it into a work of art ready for any digital medium.

How to Create a Successful Online Catalog with Issuu

We know you’re passionate. Creativity is in your blood, and it’s in ours, too.

That’s why we wanted to be more than just a digital publishing platform.

We wanted to build a community and forge connections between people and brands who are making extraordinary content and raising the marketing bar.

We have a feeling you’ll fit in well here.

You inspire us, and we hope that our full toolkit of possibilities and network of talented creators will in turn inspire you, too.

Send us your creative vision. We’ll bring it to life with an interactive, shareable, SEO-ready experience that’s going to wow your audience.

Sell more with Issuu.