Content marketing has proven itself to be a great way to drive education, experience, engagement, and brand preference for B2B marketers. But buying collectives are growing and getting more geographically distributed. Creating a cohesive experience across channels, educating buyers, and building consensus among the group is more challenging than ever, even with great content.
Interactive media is emerging as the preferred way to share this type of content with diverse members of the collective. In this blog, we explore some of the ways that B2B marketers can use interactive media to make their content marketing efforts even more effective in 2022.
What is Interactive Media?
Interactive media helps deliver content in a way that the audience actively consumes the message. In contrast to passive, one-way consumption of content such as an eBook or an email, interactive media captures more attention because it requires the audience to actually do something to move the engagement further.
Interactive media helps meet the three important criteria for B2B marketing success today: education, engagement, and experience. Good educational content creates value for the buyer, and the way it’s delivered can drive higher engagement, ultimately creating an experience that builds brand preference.
In the B2B marketing context, interactive media helps reach business goals because it can:
- Be a more human, even entertaining way to educate buyers about a technical or work-related product
- Draw attention better than one-way content in an increasingly crowded content space
- Lend itself well to a cohesive brand experience across channels (e.g., people can complete a quiz on your website and share their scores on social media)
- Drive engagement over a sustained period of time, versus a one-time content download
- Engage multiple personas in the buying collective by enabling them to “do” something together as a group or even a larger community (across geographies)
- Deliver rich audience insights (almost immediately) to help marketers learn more about the buyer and their preferences to ultimately deliver even more relevant communication
Six Ways Interactive Media Can Deliver Content That Educates and Engages
Interactive media is not new but over the last couple of years, the nature of brand marketing and communications has changed enough to warrant a fresh look at how interactive media can be used best to deliver communications.
Here are six interactive media ideas for B2B marketers to consider in 2022:
- Hybrid events bridge most of the usual gaps we see with in-person events – scale, reach, and post-event engagement. Event platforms today offer marketers multiple opportunities for creative engagement in-person and virtually. For example, extending in-person events to post-event virtual roundtables. Enabling participants to meet event speakers online for follow-up discussions after the in-person event creates value and extends engagement and brand recall. Another idea is allowing one in-person attendee to engage virtually with colleagues back at the office, during the event. For a more fun element, scavenger hunts or point-based activities can be offered both online and offline.
- Interactive quizzes, contests, polls, and calculators: since interactive media can help engage at an individual and group level, marketers can run interactive quizzes and contests across entire buying collectives or by persona. Trusted communities such as Spiceworks, for example, provide a great platform to leverage the power of interactive media. Whether it’s engaging multiple IT decision makers in a community-wide contest, or offering one-to-one quizzes and calculator tools, these options can drive education and engagement with a dash of fun, sharing, and gamification.
- Interactive eBooks and infographics: while eBooks, guides, and infographics with high-quality content are of immense value to the B2B buyer’s self-education, the technical content can get a bit heavy! Interactive eBooks and infographics allow the reader to click and open charts and graphs based on their needs, view videos inside the content, add comments and share with colleagues internally or on social media, work on interactive checklists, and even chat with a company representative from within the content asset. This ability to share and collaborate with colleagues while consuming the content can also help build consensus across an otherwise distributed buying collective.
- Customized resource hubs and microsites: content hubs that are customized to the needs of a specific decision maker are increasingly popular with B2B buyers and marketers. Instead of sending multiple pieces of content via email to various personas of the collective, or directing them to different generic websites, everything can be made available on one interactive microsite, complete with a chatbot to answer questions and client branding. Such a space can deliver a cohesive, convenient, and collaborative brand experience to various members of the buying collective while giving the brand valuable insights on who accesses the content when and how.
- Educational courses: with multiple DIY eCourse platforms available today, more brands are offering educational courses – often concluding with branded certificates for those who complete the program. These self-paced micro-learning courses (with content that’s delivered in small modules to retain attention) marks an evolution in interactive content marketing. Not only can buyers use the educational content to make better purchase decisions, but they can also build their own professional expertise. This approach creates new opportunities for the B2B marketer in terms of customer engagement, retention, and advocacy.
- Interactive display advertising: this is not a new medium for B2B marketers, who often use ad creatives that invite some form of interaction by the marketers. However, options such as native advertising help to seamlessly integrate advertiser content with published content. Site takeovers on trusted and credible sites where buyers go to educate themselves and find peer and expert perspectives can also be a high brand impact tactic.
Time to get started on your interactive media adventure!
While interactive media can help deliver more engaging, educational, and immersive experiences for B2B audiences, it’s important to find the right partner who can help deliver them to the right audiences at scale. A partner like SWZD offers interactive content opportunities via its trusted editorial, research, and community properties, as well as authentic intent data to find the right audiences and better engage in-market accounts through their buyer journey.