What’s the earliest form of animation you can remember? One can still watch children drawing inter-related images on different pages and flip them all to create motion. This simulated movement technique goes back to the 19th century when John Linnett patented his kineograph. Today, it’s still popular as the Finnish passport design (2012) used a walking moose as its flipbook illustration. But what does a childish plaything has to do with content marketing? Digital flipbooks have produced positive results since they’re more interactive than a normal PDF. Many small businesses successfully created these documents to provide their customers with a more pleasant reading experience.
Business Advantages Brought by Flipbooks
What’s exactly a digitally-produced Flip Book? It’s just an ebook (electronic booklet) with pages you can flip and turn. How does this feature help a company? It gives your audience the experience of going through an actual manuscript. That’s why we can call flipbooks virtual booklets in the true sense. And that’s just a beginning! You can also include links and navigation tools in your flipbooks, making readers more responsible while going through these digital pages. Therefore, companies prefer easy-to-use, video-optimized, secure, shareable, and visually-enhanced ebooks over good old PDFs. Now, let’s discuss in depth the advantages of utilizing flipbooks to improve your marketing efforts.
What’s Wrong with PDF?
Let’s begin with an obvious question. Why a Flip Book is a preferable option to traditional formats? The primary purpose of producing PDFs was portable printing. That’s why they have a higher resolution and a longer loading time. Moreover, readers must wait for the entire PDF to load before it can be scanned/downloaded. People can’t tolerate watching an ebook taking 10 seconds to appear. Therefore, you should switch to a less bulky option, i.e., flipbooks.
They Serve as Gated Content
Gated content means readers are required to provide their contact details if they wish to access a product, e.g., ebooks. Flipbooks give you the option to make the first few pages publicly accessible while gating the remaining content. If readers have found the product attractive, they’ll unlock the hidden pages via filling integrated forms. If you’re confused about how to create flip books, tech tools offer you these services. You can upload a PDF and convert it into the desired form.
They Are Massively Accessible
This point deals with the benefit of creating digital content in general. Around 3.4 billion people around the world had internet access back in 2016. This number has now exceeded 4.6 billion and will continue growing. So, creating a flipbook means exposing yourself to a variety of individuals across the planet. You can target customers who are interested in your products/services. Then you can distribute your content among this target audience to generate high-quality leads.
These Products Are Interactive
Interactivity is a distinctive feature of flipbooks. You can include an extensive array of multimedia options inside this product; these include audio, video, hyperlinks, and other attention-seeking widgets. These digital documents might feel like something alive has appeared out of Harry Potter novels. And that’s the kind of stuff that attracts customers’ attention nowadays and helps them focus on your content since plain text bores modern readers.
They Support Embedded Videos
Our brain processes visual information faster than it comprehends textual content. Unlike PDFs, flipbooks let you directly embed a video to provide additional information to your consumers. Visual content enhances the product’s saleability by making the ebook more engaging. Just upload a video on YouTube, DailyMotion, or Vimeo. Now you only need to embed it into your flipbook, and it’ll become available to a reader who has dependable internet access.
They Have Better Shareability
Flipbooks also provide better shareability than other ebook formats. Distributing these products is cost-effective thereby market-friendly. You can copy/paste the link to your flipbook and share it on any social media platform. People will click on the link and access it. No upload/download time exhausts a consumer’s attentivity. This sharability makes flipbooks superior to PDFs since the latter consume a noticeable amount of time in downloading.
They Allow Hyperlinking
In PDFs, hyperlinks can divert the reader’s attention from the original content. But flipbooks don’t allow these links to seem out-of-place. Instead, a flipbook reader will find these links to be a welcome addition to his/her reading experience. These links can lead a reader to relevant websites or your landing page. You can also add links to advertisements. These hyperlinks can provide authority to your domain since flipbooks are SEO-optimized.
They Are Responsive
Mobile searches have taken the lead since 2015; that’s why mobile-optimization is necessary to attract more traffic. Flipbooks utilize technology such as HTML5, so these documents are responsive across all devices. Readers won’t have any problem navigating through a flipbook as they please. So, you don’t have to worry about customers accessing this ebook on their tablets/smartphones. Flipbooks can detect the sort of device use and show properly-optimized content.
They Provide Intuitive Control
Though PDFs allow zooming into the content, flipbooks offer better navigation opportunities. They let customers zoom into detailed pictures (such as maps or infographics). That’s why companies prefer converting their PDFs into flipbooks first before distribution. Viable search options also allow customers a seamless reading experience. Flipbooks don’t waste a reader’s time. He/she can read small text and search easily without waiting for content to load onto the screen.
They Have a Nicer Layout
Last but not least, a Flip Book’s layout makes it more valuable than PDFs. We’ve already mentioned how flipbooks are any-device-optimized. Image-heavy ebooks can also become more trusty and appealing once converted to flipbooks. No matter if you’re product is a magazine, journal, or comic book, turning it into a flipbook retains the original quality. This conversion also enhances the visual appeal of your product with no page limitations.
Conclusion
We’ve seen a quick transition from old-fashioned paper to digital documents since the ‘90s. Now the world has experienced another upgrade from traditional and much-appreciated PDF to human-friendly flipbooks. The constantly-declining human attention span stands responsible for this upgrade. It was 12 seconds back in 2000 but dropped to 8 seconds in 2015, making goldfish more attentive than our modern reader. That’s how soon your average consumer can lose concentration! Digital flipbooks retain the touch and feel of the ancient paperback. But its superior design and interactive features act as attention-grabbing weapons; these creative tools are the future of digital content marketing.
