Every day, marketers face new challenges that are unique to their companies and customers.
However, it’s safe to say most can bond over a few of the more common marketing problems: Things like lagging website conversion rates, sales funnel underperformance, and poor lead conversion. We’ve all been there.
The good news is that, for the most part, interactive content can help solve these problems across the board. With its versatility and engaging format, an element of interactivity presents a variety of opportunities for marketers to make improvements and reach their goals.
Let’s look at some of the common marketing problems and how interactive content can play a role in problem-solving.
1. Dormant Database Leads
If you’ve got dormant database leads that have gone cold, you can work on warming them back up with an automated drip campaign that educates, entices, and strives to re-engage.
But don’t lean solely on email. Take these efforts a step further by tying in some interactive content that removes the “hard sell” angle and creates a low-stakes, no-pressure environment in which your leads can engage in an interactive video, learn from an interactive infographic, or complete a light-topic quiz.
Example: Influitive Vain Marketing Assessment:
Tactic: In switching up the typical nurture cadence with a more unique experience that focuses delivering a personal result, you can grab attention with more playful email subject lines and compelling CTAs for click action.
In doing this, you can gather new lead insights that can help you tailor future marketing and sales efforts down the road and convert those customers you thought you’d lost for good.
2. Poor MQL to SQL Conversion and Sales Enablement Material
If your MQLs aren’t converting and your sales team is struggling with the leads you’re sending their way, you have a problem: The bottom of your funnel is leaking.
One way to fix this is to create interactive content geared specifically toward bottom-of-the-funnel leads, which is sometimes called sales enablement content.
Content formats like virtual tours, product pickers, and interactive video overviews speak more directly to your solution and connect the dots of the prospect and the product. This content isn’t aimed at attracting new leads, but better engaging and educating current ones.
3. Website Lead Generation
With 78% of B2B marketers indicating that lead generation is the biggest challenge they are currently facing, it’s no surprise that marketing teams of all sizes are trying to find ways to increase lead generation through a core brand asset – the company website.
Interactive content is helping them do that with value-exchange oriented calls to action. The above example from Runzheimer shows how to promote a quick and personal experience directly upon landing on the website.
There’s actually two different interactive CTAs in this example: the the main focal point with “Start the Quiz” and “Free Assessment” in the navigation bar area. Instead of just scanning through the website, a user is prompted to take immediate action.
Because interactive assessments, quizzes, and calculators (to name a few) are fun and informative for the user, this form of content has high completion rates – and they help the marketing team generate leads that they can then score and send to the sales team.
4. Landing Page Conversion
If your landing page conversion rate is low, the user experience is probably suffering from design. You may have too much going on with multiple CTAs, an uninspiring design, a status-quo copy layout, or lead form asking for too much information.
There are several paths to go down for improving this very common marketing problem.
Animation
Adding animation to a landing page can greatly aid design quality and direct user attention. Landing pages have become so standard in layout and use that prospects can be turned off simply by the ordinariness of them.
Animation can grab attention and stand out from the crowd. See a variety of animated elements in the below example landing page.
No Lead Form
Well, not exactly no lead form. Instead, of the standard copy on the left, lead form on the right get rid of all that and embed an interactive infographic or quiz that previews the lead-gated asset.
In the case of the quiz (short 3-5 questions), the lead form comes right before the results page so the user gets the gated content assets as well as their answer results.
Image source: autopilot.com
Interactive Video
Of course there’s also video. Some marketers have found that video is highly effective when incorporated into a landing page, so consider paring down the non-essential elements of the page and instead working in an interactive explainer video that communicates your value proposition in three minutes or less.
Making it an interactive video allows for more participation in questions or hot spots, plus you can include a lead form right during the video.
Not only will this help you share your message more quickly and effectively, but it allows you to collect more lead data on your landing page without adding clutter.
5. Producing Better MQLs
When your B2B lead scoring efforts are broken, your sales team will become frustrated with the marketing team for sending them unqualified leads. Time will be wasted on low-quality leads that don’t convert.
This is when you may want to consider more specific lead scoring efforts. By introducing varied qualifying criteria within your content expereinces, you can get a more complete picture of leads for much improved scoring.
Interactive content can help you collect the in-depth lead data you need for both types of efforts – and rather than adding more form fields on an opt-in page, you can design the experience to be less brusque with the questions you’re asking.
Let’s take a look at this interactive infographic below that askas a qualifying question as part of the experience:
6. Lead Funnel Efficiency
Lead funnel efficiency is the measure of how effectively you are qualifying the leads that you’re sending over to sales. When your funnel is inefficient, you’ve created a self-defeating cycle that never really results in leads converting to customers. Things slowly fizzle out.
Instead, you should focus on constructing a lead funnel for Super MQLs – and that means putting quality over quantity. An easy way to do that: Use target specific results-based content for funnel areas and varying personas who will be at each stage. These content types could be calculators, quizzes, and product pickers to streamline the sales cycle – showing the right content to the right people at the right time.
This way, you have better qualified leads from the beginning – and your whole funnel becomes much more efficient.
7. Low Social Media Engagement
Lagging social media engagement? Tired of investing time and energy into channels that underperform? You can still harness the power of social media – but you should try a different approach.
On top of using cats (always a good tactic) in your imagery, think about the Buzzfeed-esque quizzes you see shared (and completed) on social media on a regular basis.
Creating a fun poll or quiz that ties into your marketing objectives can make your engagement rate skyrocket because it’s not static content–it lets the user participate, too.
8. Boosting Email Opens and Clicks
By itself, email can be a little…well…boring. Text and images don’t always inspire and excite readers, and sometimes you need a little extra something to get your emails opened and clicked on. Adding elements of interactivity (things like videos, infographics, and more) makes your content more engaging and interesting–and it drives clicks in the inbox. Think about what types of interactive content would best serve your objectives, and then split test to see what works best.
9. Attracting New Visitors
If you’re struggling to draw in new website visitors, keep this in mind: You have to give people a reason to come to your site. A standard whitepaper isn’t going to cut it–today, people want stellar online experiences. That’s where interactive content can help. It’ leverages a curiosity gap and intrigues…all without the hard sales angle.
Paycor, for example, used a cross-channel distribution plan paired with interactive content to attract new visitors – and the results were beyond impressive.
Overall, the interactive experiences Paycor created received over 3,700 responses in 90 days. Those responses led to 226 FTAs (first time appointments), many of which converted into revenue, and they attributed 23% of revenue from all digital marketing activities between May and July to interactive campaigns.
Not bad, right?
Common Marketing Problems Solved
A strong dose of interactive content spread across your marketing mix can solve a lot of the common problems your fellow marketers are wrestling with. As this post has covered, not one single type or interactive asset can solve all the problems. However, by identifying your most urgent struggles, you can start to chip away and mix interactive throughout your whole strategy, making your content efforts more engaging and ROI more impressive.
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