When planning your content strategy, it isn’t enough to just write blog posts. To keep your audience interested and engaged, you need videos, infographics, podcasts, eBooks and other unique ways to deliver your brand message. Every individual learns information differently, so offering various types of content will attract and engage different segments of your audience.
The more types of content you create, the wider your potential reach online.
This is especially true with interactive content. Interactive content for business is special in that audiences don’t passively consume it, which makes it a powerful content type for generating and nurturing leads.
What Is Interactive Content?
Interactive content is content that requires your audience to actively engage in order to receive information. The reader takes action and makes choices that impact the content experience. Some examples of interactive content include:
- Games
- Quizzes
- Personality tests & assessments
- Polls
- Assessments
- Cost or ROI calculators
- Interactive webinars
- Interactive eBooks
Interactive content for business is typically an underused content type despite the many benefits this type of content offers both brands and their audiences.
Benefits of Interactive Content for Business
One of the main benefits of interactive content is delivering a message while offering entertainment value. It offers a break from the passive content consumption that dominates how people surf the web today. Mini-games and quizzes are great examples of this.
Part of what makes Buzzfeed content so popular and relevant are the many quizzes they create to engage their audience:
Interactive content can also serve as a tool to educate audiences about their needs and and how your business can help solve your problems. For example, Quicksprout’s homepage features a free site assessment so users can learn how to grow their business using the platform:
Creating interactive content can also offer your business a competitive advantage. Because most businesses don’t bother creating interactive content for their digital marketing strategy, investing in creating quizzes, assessments or calculators can help you attract more traffic.
The main benefit of interactive content for business purposes is the amount of valuable information you can gather about individual leads. Not only are you capturing their email addresses, but you’re also able to gain valuable insights that will help you segment and market to those leads through email.
Why Use Interactive Content for Lead Capture?
Interactive content is a valuable tool to help marketers turn prospects into active, qualified leads. Interactive content offers genuine value to audiences, while enticing interaction through a sense of curiosity. If you create a quiz or assessment directly targeted at your audience personas and their needs, your audiences will want to know their results and any light you can shed on their situation. In order to make this content generate leads, businesses can request users to provide their email address in order to access the results of their interactive content.
Getting audiences to visit your website and passively consume content is easy. Getting them to take action that qualifies them as a lead, such as filling out a form or signing up for a newsletter, is more challenging. With interactive content, your users will be incentivized to take action, making it easier to gather the information you need to make them part of your marketing automation efforts.
Qualifying leads through interactive content helps move them further down the sales funnel and also makes it easier to gather demographic insights.
For example, this tax filing service offers an income tax calculator that collects valuable information about their audience’s demographic information, income, and potential deductions. They can use this information to send out marketing emails that are ultra-relevant to each person’s tax needs:
How to Create Interactive Content
If the main goal of your interactive content to capture leads, then you need a solid plan to collect lead information before creating and publishing your content. You can integrate a lead form into your interactive content, but carefully consider where to place it to encourage the most conversions. If you are too aggressive in asking for information, audiences are likely to abandon your content.
Some strategies you can use include:
- Placing your form at the beginning of your content and offering multiple.
- Gate the results completely so users can’t access them without filling out your form.
- Show partial results on-page and ask users to convert to receive their full result.
- Place an optional form before or alongside the results, giving users the option to sign up to receive additional information.
- Email results — Give users the option to receive an email copy of their results, capturing their contact information in the process.
When you’re ready to create your content, there are a variety of available tools. Here are some good options:
- Apester: Create quizzes, interactive videos, personality tests, polls, and more.
- Outgrow: Create calculators, quizzes, assessments, recommendations, and polls.
- Content Tools: Publish interactive content including quizzes, contests, interactive maps, microsites and more to help businesses generate leads and engage customers.
- Calculoid: Create custom calculators to demonstrate value to users, capture leads and accept payments.
- SnapApp: Create a variety of interactive content assets including interactive white papers, infographics, contests & sweepstakes, galleries and more.
- Ceros: Create your own interactive HTML5 content from scratch using Ceros software.
Whatever tool you use, the most critical aspect of interactive content for business lead generation is ensuring that your interactive content tool integrates with your marketing automation platform. A good marketing automation tool will have direct integrations with leading content tools. If a direct link isn’t available, an integration tool like Zapier can create the connection without requiring any coding.For example, Zapier can connect SharpSpring and Outgrow to automate contact importation from interactive content.
Create Goal-Oriented Interactive Content
Interactive content can improve your marketing strategy by helping you stand out from the competition, engage and entertain audiences and easily convert them into qualified leads. Like all other marketing efforts, make sure you have a goal in mind when creating interactive content. Your end goal will inform the kind of content you create, which tools you use, and how effective your interactive content will ultimately be for your business.
