Customer story: Australian Institute of Management

How Australian Institute of Management Generates New Leads with FlippingBook

Founded in 1941, Australian Institute of Management (AIM) offers short courses, vocational qualifications, corporate solutions, and workshops. Its Business School allows working professionals to get an MBA degree online or through a blend of in-campus and online classes. AIM is a reliable partner of Australian managers and thought leaders, and it’s part of Scentia, one of the country’s most prominent education providers.

Challenges

With over 100 short courses and qualifications, AIM creates a large number of publications every year. These include course outlines, course dates calendars as well as a Course Directory. Maintaining all of these is a constantly evolving process. According to government regulations, some outlines have to be taken out or updated, and new ones have to be added to the Directory regularly.

AIM previously created all of their documents as PDFs, but updating them wasn’t effective: it was difficult to ascertain whether an obsolete version of a document had been resaved or redistributed. Additionally, downloading PDFs was at times inefficient, and they appeared differently in every browser. AIM needed to optimize and improve the overall user experience.

In education, compliance is always front of mind, so the ability to ensure users are viewing the most up‑to‑date version is absolutely vital. This simply wasn’t possible to do with the traditional model of having users download PDFs. There had to be a way to provide users with a seamless and, hopefully, enjoyable experience.

Considering the number of course outlines across a range of subject areas, AIM had to find a tool that would allow them to publish and update numerous online documents at no extra charge.

Search for Solution

During their search for a publication provider, AIM initially chose digital publishing software called Zmags. The product was acceptable and looked professional, however, its performance wasn’t always great. Plus, it was quite expensive and only allowed limited document hosting: just 10 publications a year.

When you upload a document in Zmags, you have to go in and scan for links again to ensure they work — sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t work.

The product worked adequately for them for a while, but once it was time to renew their subscription, AIM decided to look for better options.

Solution

AIM did a trial version of FlippingBook: each publication was accessible on any device and looked professional, with custom design and branding. Plus, updating documents was simple and fast, and the price was moderate.

FlippingBook offers everything Zmags does, but you do it better and for much, much less cost. It was really a no‑brainer.

After the switch, AIM started moving their documents online and embedding them to their website. They also disabled SEO indexing on their course outlines. By doing that, they made their documents accessible only via a form on their website, and then AIM could track viewer interaction and analyze which courses interested their leads most.

We frequently review how users are navigating through the publication and which pages are seeing the most traffic. This has lead us to optimise our content and undertake A/B testing to optimise the content and resulting click throughs to our website.

The publications AIM creates today are professional and engaging, with high quality pictures and written content, links to relevant sources, and a logo that leads to their website. If a course outline needs to be updated, it’s done in a few simple steps, without breaking the link to the document.

Results

Now AIM enjoys unlimited document hosting with FlippingBook. Transforming all of the course outlines into online publications is a big step up: it makes accessing information easier for their current and prospective clients. The organization doesn’t need to print documents or upload PDFs on their website. Even AIM’s 200‑page Course Directory can be viewed quickly on any device.

Because we no longer have the need to print the Course Directory, we save over $20K per year in printing costs.

FlippingBook allows the organization to track how many people view the Directory. AIM also integrates a special lead capture form into the software, so they regularly get new leads. And with Advanced Analytics, they can explore how exactly those leads interact with their content.

In the six months from June to December 2017, we had over 18,000 unique views of our Course Directory — this equates to over 18,000 leads!

Being a well‑known education provider, AIM has to apply progressive strategies in their marketing, and digital publications are an efficient way to generate new leads and engage their existing clients.