You’re all about content marketing. You rock blog posts, videos, and social media like a pro. But your secret sauce (especially when it comes to content) is your ability to create amazing eBooks and white papers.

Premium content like eBooks and white papers have proven to be an effective way to generate qualified leads. But most marketers have very little visibility into how these eBooks and white papers are performing beyond the number of downloads. 

The lack of visibility stems from the content format. Most marketers use PDFs to showcase their premium content. Unfortunately, letting premium content live as a PDF means that you’re sacrificing insight and key metrics that can help you leverage these assets even more.

By turning PDFs into interactive Flipbooks, you’ll not only be able to make your content more engaging, but also gain key insights into how your content is performing and pass this data to your marketing automation tool. 

First, what’s a Flipbook?

A Flipbook is an interactive piece of content. It can be used to create eBooks, white papers, magazines, newsletters, and so forth. Anything that typically lives as a PDF can be converted into an interactive Flipbook. What are the advantages of using a Flipbook over a PDF? Here are a few:

• It’s interactive. You can add video, photo galleries, and audio to make a richer content experience. 
• It’s social. You can add social widgets to boost your followers and encourage people to share your content. 
• It’s manageable. You’re able to replace pages or entire PDFs without changing the URL that you’ve been sharing. 
• It’s measurable. You (finally) have insight into which aspects of your eBook or white paper people are most interested in. 

While the interactive and social aspects of Uberflip Flipbooks provide a ton of value on the content creation side, the metrics component provides the nuggets of information you need in order to better understand what’s working. Here’s a look at just some of the metrics that you can gain insight into by converting a PDF into a Flipbook:

With each of these, you can drill down into more comprehensive reports. For example, if you click on Page Widget Interactions, you’ll be able to see how each widget (i.e. a YouTube video or Flickr gallery, etc.) performed. 

How It Works With Marketing Automation 

If you’re using Uberflip Flipbooks, you also have the option to turn on Flipbooks tracking, which means that each page viewed will show up as an event in your marketing automation tool for that particular contact. In addition to the page view, we’ll also tell you the page number, the name of the Flipbook that is being viewed, and additional data that will provide more context to their experience. 

With this information, you have better insight into a lead or customer’s content consumption — data that would be otherwise missed if you were to rely on a traditional PDF.

So what can you do with this information? Here are a few examples of how some Uberflippers are using Flipbooks metrics with their marketing automation tools:

1. Trigger Workflows

Trigger a workflow like an email or lead nurture campaign based on the number of pages a contact has consumed within a given Flipbook. The more pages they have consumed, the more engaged they are, so you can be sure to connect with the right people at the right time. 

2. Update Lead Score

Increase lead scoring based on specific pages that are consumed within a relevant eBook or white paper. This is a great way to separate the more engaged leads so you can filter them to your sales team. 

3. Segment Your Audience

Segment your audience based on Flipbook consumption. If, for example, you have an eBook about email marketing, create a segment of your contacts based on this topic. From there, you can create and send additional content about this topic and better tailor your messaging to their interests. 

4. Insight for Sales 

In many organizations, sales teams also have partial access to marketing automation tools. For example, at Uberflip we use Salesforce and HubSpot together. Within Salesforce, our sales team can see the history of a contact’s activity in HubSpot. Having additional data around the types of eBooks and white papers a contact has consumed can help your sales team better understand their needs and tailor their conversations.