How good is your content? Or perhaps the appropriate question would be, how converting is your content?
Because, if you’re a marketer, that is your objective with posting content isn’t it? Doesn’t matter if you’re posting on social media or if you’re blogging; the reason we do it, is to establish our brand identity and then get leads which finally convert. But if we’re generating leads that don’t convert, what would be the reason for our online content? No matter when your content is published or who you are writing for, poor content is not going to be well received.
It’s understandable. We hear content marketing and then we decide to write something up and push it online. But due to deadlines and other aspects, we look at a few blog posts and then whatever we write usually is just excerpts we get from here and there. But that doesn’t work does it? Now, not only do you have bad content with no impressions associated to your brand, but you’ve also managed to piss off your boss with a spent budget and no results.
Well, so what is it that we do? What is content that will convert?
The internet is crowded with white papers, webinars, ebooks, and infographics. Ask yourself, how many white papers have you downloaded and only briefly scanned? Or how many webinars have you signed up for and never attended?
How do you stand out? How do you grab and hold the attention of an audience?
“The only way to win at content marketing is for the reader to say, “This was written specifically for me.” – Jamie Turner
Content is no longer content as we know it. Content is as much the interactivity you add to it as it is the basic content you would normally create without adding the interactivity. Interactive content supplies an attractive arsenal for content marketers to battle the flood of basic and unattractive passive content.
Imagine a face-to-face conversation or dialogue with your prospect or customer. Just so, interactive content is dynamic, so it makes your content come alive. Besides, your content stands in for you so you don’t have to be present. Your time, money, and resources are freed up and you can scale your communications and content consumption since you can embed your interactive content on as many sites and pages as you want.
Technically speaking, interactive content is a digital experience designed for engaging your audience. It’s designed to be something that your reader participates in instead of just reading or watching. It is intended to be a two-way exchange and often includes a feedback loop in which the outcome of the experience is directly impacted by the interaction of the user with the content itself.
According to Ceros, 93% of marketers say interactive content is effective at educating buyers. This is your ultimate objective as a marketer: to educate buyers so well that the sales team can convert those leads. Your content is the conduit by which you drive engagement, affinity, leads and sales. Your interactive experiences are measurable, providing rich audience and individual insights into content consumption, engagement and conversion.
You can transform your static content into an engaging, effective, measurable interactive experience in the form of a quiz, assessment, poll, survey or perhaps even a calculator. My personal favorite is a calculator, as it has helped me as well a lot of my fellow entrepreneurs in generating positive leads way faster than white papers or ebooks. Crew.co has a calculator that tells you how much it would cost you to build an app, while salesforce helps you calculate your CRM benefit. And it doesn’t just stop there. You have ROI calculators with banks, mortgage calculators with loan providers, scholarship calculators with universities and so on. We, at Outgrow.co, have developed a lot of these calculators and the feedback is remarkable on the increase in lead generation that our clients have had. There are endless number of calculators that you can use as content on your site to generate leads by educating your audience how you can solve their problem. Best part? It’s curated to their specific requirements.
As a marketer, you can use the data that you gain from the responses to drive targeted marketing campaigns as well as create peer benchmarking. In the age of the digital world, users are now able to access detailed information regarding their requirements. So why should you lack content that can support the buyers’ exploration and consideration.
Interactive content is a marketing imperative. Interactivity will add far more certainty about every aspect of content — from leads and sales, to measurement and insights. Besides an increase in quality engagement, you’ll also see meaningful sales alignment with higher conversion rates. You will be getting higher engagement and consumption, lower bounce rates, a better user experience and far richer audience insights.