Let’s face it – your customers are bored with the same old repetitive static content. They want to be engaged, educated, inspired, and guided (without being ‘sold to’) and there’s no better way to do it than interactive marketing.
From a business and marketing perspective, interactive content generates 2x more conversions than passive content.
That being said, we at LeadQuizzes have decided to poll marketing professionals and small business owners to find out how they use interactive content in their own marketing strategy, as well as what types of content they use, how they create it, and what are some of their views on the future of interactive marketing.
But, before we present you with some actual interactive marketing examples, let’s first define this increasingly popular form of marketing.
What is Interactive Marketing?
Interactive marketing is a customer-centric, one-to-one approach to marketing. It reacts and changes on the basis of individual customer’s actions and needs.
In other words, interactive marketing is based on marketing initiatives that are triggered by the customers’ preferences and behaviors. This makes it significantly more effective than traditional marketing, thus enabling you to meet their demands and expectations more easily.
Interactive content is the type of content that engages the user and requires their participation. The most common forms include quizzes, calculators, surveys, polls, contests, videos, games, and so on. Interactive content helps marketers profile and segment their leads in order to make it easier to move them further down your sales funnel.
According to a CMI Survey, 81% of marketers agree that interactive content grabs attention more effectively (than static content), while 79% agree that interactive content results in repeat visitors and multiple exposure.
In addition, interactive marketing generates 3x as many leads, while costing 62% less than traditional marketing.
How Interactive Content Fits Your Marketing Strategy (Interactive Marketing Examples)
Marketers worldwide are always on the lookout for new ways to attract traffic, generate leads, and increase conversions. Interactive marketing enables them to engage with customers via dynamic content such as quizzes, calculators, polls, surveys, games, interactive videos and other forms of interactive storytelling.
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That’s why we’ve decided to poll dozens of marketing professionals, hoping to hear some interactive marketing statistics that affected their overall marketing strategy and business success in any significant way.
One of them, Alan Santillan, Content Specialist at G2 Crowd, highlights the importance of high-quality interactive content. In his own words – “Developing clean, high-quality content with no advertisements, and great information can generate noticeable organic online traffic.”
That being said, one of the questions in our survey was “What kind of interactive content do you prefer?” and here are the results:
Most Used Types of Interactive Content
According to the results of the LeadQuizzes survey, the most used types of interactive content in 2018 (by small businesses) are:
- Quizzes
- Calculators
- Polls/Surveys
- Interactive videos/websites
As all of these types of interactive content can be effectively incorporated in the marketing funnel, CMI has analyzed the stages in which each type of interactive content is the most effective. As you can see, quizzes are particularly effective in the early stage (awareness/discovery), while calculators should be used in the middle stage (consideration) of the buyer’s journey.
Quizzes
Online quizzes are one of the most popular types of interactive content, particularly popular among marketers in terms of lead generation, due to their highly engaging and interesting nature.
In fact, an average quiz is shared nearly 2,000 times (Buzzsumo), whereas, in January 2015, 9 of the 10 most shared Facebook publications were quizzes (iProspect). According to LeadQuizzes, the average quiz has a 31.6% lead capture rate.
Karina Dubovik, Product Marketing Manager at GanttPRO, gives an interactive marketing example from their own company, explaining how they use an unmistakable combination of quizzes and compelling offers in their own marketing strategy:
“Cross-promo campaign with 8 partners. All of them gave presents to the participants of a special test for marketers. The test defines what type of marketer are you, gives a description and special prize from the partner associated with this field of market.”
According to our own 2018 LeadQuizzes Interactive Marketing Survey, 80% of respondents said they are very likely to consider using online quizzes as a part of their interactive marketing strategy at some point in the future.
Calculators
Creating an interactive calculator gives your users instant gratification – your content is relevant and demonstrates your product’s benefits or ROI. Calculators can be used both as a lead capture tool and a means of selling your products or services.
Will Blunt, Content Marketer and founder at FlypChart, also uses calculators in his marketing strategy. He emphasizes the difference they saw when they switched from static to interactive content:
“We started using a calculator to capture leads for our content services, the volume, and quality of leads from this approach was significantly better than the static form capture we were using previously.”
Another one of our survey takers said that “[their] team helped build a calculator for macros. It not only drove brand awareness but drove signups, as to get the results they were behind an email gate. Integrated with Sumo, built atop of WP.”
So, these two interactive marketing examples show that using calculators in your marketing campaigns can not only help you generate quality leads and sign-ups but also drive brand awareness.
Polls/Surveys
A poll is a type of interactive content used to obtain people’s opinions on a certain topic. Its main purpose is to provide you with instant results that can help you make more informed decisions. We’ve already written on how to use an online straw poll to gauge public opinion.
Surveys are used to obtain people’s feedback or information on various topics. They’re especially useful to marketers as they enable them to collect and analyze data and use it to take further action. In order to create a quality survey, you need to make sure you’re using all the right types of survey questions.
Interactive Videos/Websites
Video marketing is not a new thing. But only recently has interactive video become a major component of numerous brands’ content marketing strategies. Interactive video is extremely effective because it grabs your users’ attention and gets them extremely engaged.
Interactive videos and websites can be used to tell many different kinds of stories, which is why they’re such effective marketing tools. Clickable elements enable the viewers to affect what they want to see, in what order, and with which outcome, thus delivering them the personalized experience they crave.
Alessio Rogna, CEO and founder of Langnetwork, points out the importance of interactive video content: “My site video presentation was an excellent way to promote and increase user signups to my newly launched website, showing them a full preview of the available features and also made Langnetwork logo more recognizable by the public.”
Sierra Jones, Marketing Manager at Intradiem, also shares how their company uses interactive videos to engage their users and increase sales: “By customizing account based videos with the company name/logo and their specific challenges learned from initial sales call, we’ve been able to shorten the sales cycle and drive engagement with more key contacts at target accounts.”
These interactive marketing examples perfectly exemplify the huge marketing potential of interactive videos and websites.
Why Use Interactive Marketing?
Our survey has identified 4 most common reasons why small businesses use interactive marketing:
- To drive awareness
- To increase engagement
- To capture (more relevant) leads
- To increase brand loyalty
The table below shows some additional benefits of using interactive content, according to a 2016 CMI research:
How Do Small Businesses Create Interactive Content?
If you’re HBO or Heineken (or any global brand), you can simply hire the best guys in the business to create an outstanding campaign for you (as you’ll be able to see from some of the interactive marketing examples presented below). But how do small business go about their interactive marketing?
The main problem for 60% of content marketers today is creating engaging content. So, we’ve surveyed dozens of marketing professionals and small business owners with the aim to find out how they create interactive content used in their campaigns, and here are some insights:
Karina Dubovik of GanttPRO says that they have their own small team (consisting of 1 designer, 1 front-end developer, 1 content manager, and 1 marketer) dedicated to creating interactive content.
Sierra Jones at Intradiem also has an in-house team that creates videos using tools like VideoScribe and Biteable.
Alan Santillan from G2 Crowd explains the preparation stage behind the creation of their interactive marketing campaigns: “We use software such as Ahrefs to identify trends in online traffic. These trends allow us to produce content that will generate organic online traffic for our site. We optimize our content with keywords that will trigger searches for important topics in a particular niche.”
Will Blunt from FlypChart says: “We create interactive content using 3rd party tools such as Outgrow and ShortStack.”
Big Brands Interactive Marketing Examples
1. Heineken Go Places (Interactive Video)
As a part of their HR campaign in 2016, Heineken came up with an interactive video that was used to introduce the candidates to the company and check their own personality. In the video, the employer asks the potential employees 12 questions, which will help them decide whether a candidate is a good fit for the company and their fun culture.
The Go Places interactive marketing campaign has quickly gone viral and, as a result, the company has received 300% more applications. Also, the engagement numbers for the campaign were outstanding, as 67% of the users completed all of the tests, while spending almost 5.3 minutes watching the video.
2. HBO – The GoT Party (Interactive Website)
Any Game of Thrones fans? In 2016, HBO built up on the momentum of the US elections to promote their own TV show with a fictional interactive election campaign.
The fans could cast their votes for their favorite characters and choose the one to lead the great wars in the upcoming seasons. With a total of 1,666,642 votes and thousands of views on their videos, the GoT Party campaign was a total hit.
3. AnnMarie Gianni Skin Care (Quizzes)
Originally, Annmarie Gianni Skin Care had an opt-in on their website that offered their readers free advice, but the problem was it wasn’t converting well.
So, they created an online quiz titled “What’s Your Skin Score” and placed it on their homepage. The quiz invited people to find out what their skincare score was and if there’s anything they could do to have better skin.
Once takers got to the opt-in they were shown personalized results and were then directed to the compelling offer that included a sample skin care kit (normally worth $50) for $10 and a free ebook The Toxic Free Home Guide.
The result? $200,000 new sales and 20,258 more leads in just 2 months. How? They used LeadQuizzes to create a high-converting quiz.
4. Hubspot Ad Spend Calculator
On their website, Hubspot offers an advertising ROI calculator, which can help their users plan their ad spending by estimating a few key metrics. It also offers users the chance to share the results by simply copying the URL or to schedule a talk with an ads expert from HubSpot.
As can be seen from the interactive marketing examples we presented above, both big brands and small business have recognized the potential and importance of interactive content and will probably continue to use it in the foreseeable future in many different shapes and forms.
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