Many B2B sales and marketing leaders regard “interactive video” — if they regard it at all — as an exotic form of communication that won’t interest their buyers. This is surprising. In 2017, 41% of B2B buyers said they prefer interactive content (DemandGen). Recent technology improvements have made interactive content pretty easy to create. And so much of it — e.g., personality quizzes — is surefire clickbait! In other words, interactive video represents an opportunity to make irresistible content that can improve your B2B customer experience.
Facebook recently-announced interactive live and on-demand video features that let creators add quizzes, polls, challenges and gamification. “Video is evolving away from just passive consumption to more interactive two-way formats,” says Facebook’s VP of video product Fidji Simo. Facebook sees this as fitting into the broader trend toward interactive content in general.
Better CTAs (and more of them)
Responses to a CTA (Call To Action) is a much-used “conversion rate” metric, especially among marketers of big-ticket technology solutions. A study by Forrester Research found that putting CTAs inside a video (as opposed to CTA’s outside on the web page where the video resides) increases the conversion rate 5% -12%. As Persephone Rizvi at eLearning Industry points out in Interactive Video Revolutionizes Role-Play Training. with interactive video, there are lots of actions the viewer can take, and every response generates customer data that can help improve your understanding of the customer, and your sales/marketing content.
Interactive video plus
It doesn’t need to be an “interactive video” to take advantage of the richness video brings to sales and marketing communication. Just about any type of interactive content can incorporate video, along with text, graphics, buttons and anything else that can be displayed online. Here are a couple of ideas from SnapApp.
Quizzes like this arouse curiosity to drive home differentiators.
Quizzes. Quizzes let buyers quickly get their bearings, and give the marketer an opportunity to put across some eye-opening differentiators. Here’s a example of an interactive quiz from Boston Scientific. Interactive quizzes can provide the marketer with data on customer interests, messaging appeal, and levels of knowledge. And, being interactive, the quizzes can easily guide users to other content they’ll be interested in.
Example of an interactive maturity assessment.
Maturity Assessments. As pointed out in SnapApp’s blog, maturity assessments gauge your prospect’s readiness for anything from an industry trend to a particular kind of software. Maturity assessments can speed up the sales process by delivering sales qualifying criteria that would ordinarily come from a discovery call. Beyond that, information drawn from a well-constructed maturity assessment can be used to craft better, more personalized, sales letters.
Getting started with “irresistible content”
SnapApp is one of a number of options for raising your sales and marketing game with interactive content. I’ve written previously about H5P open source software. A Google search turns up plenty of other interactive platforms. If you doubt how irresistible interactive content can be, try 20 examples of truly engaging interactive content.
Infographic: Marketing in the Modern Day
Speaking of non-video content, I’m not usually a big fan of infographics, but this marketing in the modern day infographic from UK-based NCC Home Learning contains lots of eye-opening stats covering the basics of the subject: demographics, channels, and platforms.
