Being a marketer in the education space comes with its own set of challenges. Education marketing goes far beyond building brand awareness: institutions must maintain enrollment numbers, clearly communicate value to prospective students and their parents, and deliver engaging, informative content throughout the entire decision-making journey.
To attract more students, marketers need to stay on top of EdTech trends, explore AI-powered tools, and continuously refine their strategies. And in a crowded landscape, content has to stand out—while still feeling credible and human.
In this article, we explore how flipbooks, as an educational content format, drive student engagement, share data-backed insights from our analysis of educational marketing materials, and highlight inspiring examples.
What Is Education Marketing?
Education marketing is about communicating the value of educational institutions and their academic programs to prospective students, their families, and other key stakeholders. It encompasses a wide range of activities, combining traditional marketing tactics with approaches tailored to the education sector.
Effective education marketing goes beyond promotion. It focuses on building trust in the institution, highlighting what makes it unique, and fostering a sense of community among students, alumni, and staff—while also meeting the evolving expectations of today’s audiences.
Why Content Is Key to Success in Education Marketing?
Content plays a central role in education marketing. For prospective students and their families, it is often the primary way they explore institutions, compare programs, and evaluate if an organization is the right fit.
Whether through an institution’s website, social media, or other marketing channels, content serves as a major touchpoint throughout the decision-making process. It typically covers essential information such as:
- academic programs;
- admission requirements;
- enrollment processes;
- campus life;
- alumni stories.
Each of these elements matters, as even a single piece of content can influence a student’s final choice.
Unlike many other industries, education is not driven by impulse. Prospective students don’t choose an institution the way they might purchase a product after seeing a compelling advertisement. Instead, they take time to research, compare options, and make thoughtful, long-term decisions.
This makes high-quality content essential. From brochures and digital handbooks to the website and social media, content is often the first, and most frequent, point of contact between an institution and its audience.
That’s why improving education marketing often starts with enhancing the content itself: how it is structured, how engaging it is, and how effectively it connects with your audience.
Five Strategies to Improve Education Content Marketing
1. Create content for every stage of the student journey
Choosing a university is a thoughtful process—prospective students typically engage with institutions multiple times as they research programs, compare options, and evaluate long-term outcomes.
It’s important to support each stage of the student journey with relevant content. Early on, this may include program overviews, campus guides, virtual tours, and informational brochures. As students move closer to making a decision, testimonials, alumni stories, and detailed program guides become increasingly important.
Providing the right content at the right moment helps students feel informed, confident, and supported throughout their journey.
💡Best practices for creating educational content:
- Focus on storytelling to humanize your institution.
- Highlight student success stories, faculty achievements, and community impact.
- Ensure content is easy to navigate and clearly structured.
2. Use interactive content to increase student engagement
Interactive content is increasingly important in education marketing. Compared to static formats, it captures attention, encourages exploration, and keeps users engaged longer. There are many interactive formats, including:
- polls and quizzes
- infographics
- virtual tours
- online calculators
- virtual events
- digital flipbooks
💡 Best practices for interactive educational content:
- Publish interactive program guides and university brochures.
- Make virtual tours of your university and campus life.
- Create digital guides with quizzes or polls to encourage deeper engagement and gather feedback.
📚Explore this interactive flipbook: flip through the pages, open pop-up images, and see how dynamic GIFs bring content to life.
3. Maintain consistent branding across all marketing channels
Prospective students often compare multiple institutions before making a decision. Consistent branding helps your university stand out and builds recognition across all channels. From your website and digital brochures to printed materials and on-campus events, visual identity and messaging should feel cohesive.
💡Best practices for brand consistency:
- Use a unified visual identity across all materials.
- Maintain a consistent tone of voice.
- Apply branding to both digital and printed content.
4. Optimize the website for discoverability and usability
Your website is the primary touchpoint for prospective students. They explore programs, read articles, watch videos, and search for essential information—often across multiple visits. To ensure your content reaches the right audience, it needs to be both searchable and user-friendly.
💡Best practices for website optimization:
- Use relevant keywords while keeping content natural and people-focused.
- Optimize for mobile devices, as many students browse on their phones.
- Ensure intuitive navigation so visitors can easily find important information.
5. Promote your university through social media
Social media remains a powerful channel for building connections. It helps showcase campus life, academic culture, and community in a more personal and visual way. Through video interviews with students and professors, behind-the-scenes content, and event highlights, universities can bring their story to life.
💡Best practices for social media promotion:
- Create virtual campus and classroom tours.
- Share alumni video testimonials and success stories.
- Highlight upcoming events, cultural activities, and student initiatives.
We’ve explored key strategies for improving education content marketing and engaging prospective students more effectively. Next, let’s take a closer look at how interactive educational content performs in practice and what the data reveals about its impact in the education sector.
Flipbooks in Education
A flipbook is a dynamic online publication converted from a PDF and enriched with videos, images, GIFs, and other interactive elements.
📚Here is an example of an education flipbook. Just flip through the pages to enjoy the realistic flipping effect and explore the embedded videos.
Swansea University Postgraduate Prospectus
Flipbooks have become a powerful tool in education content marketing, helping present information in a more engaging, accessible, and measurable way.
⭐Unlike static PDFs, flipbooks combine multiple interactive formats in one place. You can embed videos, quizzes, polls, GIFs, and links directly into the flipbook, increasing reading time and encouraging deeper interaction.
⭐Each flipbook also includes built-in analytics, so you can see how students engage with content: which pages receive the most views, how long readers stay, and where drop-offs occur. These insights help continuously improve educational content.
⭐Flipbooks can also be indexed by search engines when shared publicly, making program guides and brochures discoverable in organic search. At the same time, you can choose private sharing options for sensitive materials.
⭐Whether used as an interactive university brochure, a digital course catalog, or a centralized content hub with multiple publications organized into bookshelves, flipbooks offer flexibility for a wide range of education marketing needs.
How Institutions Benefit from Flipbooks: Key Insights and Numbers
To better understand how flipbooks support education marketing efforts, we conducted an anonymous internal study analyzing usage, engagement, SEO visibility, branding, mobile accessibility, content sharing, and more. Let’s take a closer look at the key numbers and the real benefits flipbooks bring to educational institutions.
🔗 Effortless content sharing and updating
Flipbooks are available via direct links, making them easy to share across any channel. Content updates take just one click—no need to redistribute files or worry about outdated versions. Everyone with the link automatically sees the latest publication. This makes it easier to keep program information, schedules, and brochures up to date at all times.
✨Higher engagement rates
Interactive content consistently outperforms static formats. Industry research shows that interactive content generates 2–3 times higher engagement than traditional content.
Flipbooks allow you to add campus videos, welcome messages from directors, student testimonials, quizzes, and polls via Typeform, Google, or Microsoft Forms, encouraging readers to spend more time exploring materials.
Our internal data confirms this trend:
- 44% of flipbooks with interactive educational content are viewed for more than one minute, compared to 30% without interactivity.
- 54% of interactive flipbooks are viewed beyond the halfway point.
A publication basically gives people information about the types of programs we have, allows them to see video testimonials from students who took the programs previously, it allows them to link up to our website, where they can register or call for more information.
🌱Reduced printing costs
Today, many organizations aim to be more sustainable and reduce their environmental impact wherever possible. Moving educational materials to digital formats is one practical way to support these efforts. Also, printed materials remain expensive to produce and distribute, and any update often requires a full reprint.
Based on an average of 30 documents per month and standard printing estimates, our research shows that institutions can save approximately $2,600 per month by switching to digital flipbooks.
Because we no longer have the need to print the Course Directory, we save over $20K per year in printing costs.
🌏Improved SEO visibility
Flipbooks offer a wide range of sharing options from public documents to private and access-restricted modes, giving flexibility in how you distribute content. When shared publicly, flipbooks are indexed by Google and other search engines, making educational materials searchable online. This helps institutions increase visibility and reach prospective students earlier in their decision-making journey.
Our research shows that 67% of public flipbooks rank #1 on Google when searched by their title.
📊Insightful content statistics
Do you know how many people viewed your guide? Do prospective students actually read your program overview? Which page attracts more attention—the course list or alumni testimonials?
Flipbooks help answer these questions by providing in-depth content analytics. You can see how your audience interacts with your materials, which pages perform best, and where readers drop off, allowing you to refine your content strategy based on real data.
Our study shows that 62% of our clients use flipbook statistics on a regular basis.
🎨Consistent branding across materials
Brand consistency plays a key role in education marketing. Our data shows that 67% of educational flipbooks are branded. You can add logos, customize backgrounds, create branded links, and set up custom domains. All of this will help maintain brand identity across your website, social media channels, and digital publications, strengthening recognition and building trust with prospective students.
📚Take a look at this branded magazine by the University of Wisconsin-Superior.
University of Wisconsin Superior Magazine
Ready to convert your magazine into an engaging flipbook?
📄Accessible educational materials
The education sector is governed by many guidelines and regulations, one of which is providing accessible content. Creating an ADA-compliant PDF can be tricky and time-consuming. With flipbooks, you can offer your readers interactive yet accessible documents. Each flipbook can include a specially designed accessible PDF for download. An Accessibility icon appears at the top of the document, making it easy for screen readers to recognize and navigate the content.
Our statistics showed that the flipbook version outpaced the PDF by a great margin. The flipbook gets thousands of views daily.
📱Mobile-optimized content
Today, mobile devices account for 62.5% of global internet traffic, especially among younger audiences. Traditional PDFs can be inconvenient to download and difficult to navigate on mobile devices, often requiring zooming, scrolling, and local storage. Flipbooks, on the other hand, are instantly accessible via a simple link and automatically adapt to different screen sizes, making content easy to read on smartphones, tablets, and desktops.
Overall, we have five prospectuses. We also have things like our Apprenticeship Guides, which are just little books on the side. And we are basically in the process of converting them all over to FlippingBook to make them all accessible on mobile and easy to read.
🔐Content protection options
Some of your materials might require protection, such as internal data, sensitive information, or private employee contacts. With multiple access control options, you can choose the right protection mode for each flipbook and ensure your content isn’t indexed or viewed by unauthorized users.
Using Flippingbook to host our books has proven to be extremely effective, since it allows us to present the materials in accordance with our brand and host them in a variety of places with full confidence in the security of our resources.
Improve Your Education Marketing With Flipbooks
Educational content comes in many forms: program guides, course catalogs, campus brochures, schedules, and more. Instead of managing these materials as static PDFs or printed documents, you can transform them into an interactive digital experience. By implementing flipbooks in your education marketing, you gain a flexible, all-in-one solution that drives engagement, strengthens branding, provides analytics, and ensures accessibility.
