4 Types of Quick Interactive Content Wins

Interactive content has become a go-to tactic for marketers in today’s over-crowded digital sphere, where vying for the attention of prospects has become increasingly difficult.

Today, savvy marketers are using interactive content to engage their audiences, activate buyers, and create dynamic experiences for their prospects that offer content customized to user preferences. And that’s because buyers prefer it — the Demand Gen Report found that 91 percent of buyers prefer content that is visual and interactive.

Interactive content is founded on a mutual value exchange: The audience gets hyper-personalized, relevant results in an engaging context; the marketer gets to see user preferences and contact information. And audiences are more than willing to make this exchange. Take, for example, the BuzzFeed quiz that was shared over 22 million times and has millions of likes on Facebook.

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Whether you want to find out what city you should live in or help move your buyers down the funnel, interactive content can help you meet your goals — and it doesn’t have to be hard. Here are four examples of fairly simple interactive content that you can get going with quickly.

Maturity Assessments

Maturity assessments are interactive quizzes that center around a specific topic, like an industry trend or a critical area of your business. Users answer questions to map their progress in relation to that topic or business area.

They’re also a marketer’s best friend.

Why?

They not only offer the benefit of displaying thought leadership around important issues within your field; they also provide an opportunity for prospects to benchmark themselves around issues that matter to them.

This type of assessment frequently drives users to personalized content based on their level of maturity around the subject matter. The assessment, like this example from Scribble LIVE that explores content marketing maturity, does all the thinking for them.

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This content could easily exist as a PDF or longer blog post waxing poetic about the value Scribble LIVE provides, but the interactivity allows for better engagement and personalized answers from the audience.

Why use maturity assessments?

Maturity assessments are great for middle-of-the-funnel engagement, when your prospects are already aware of the pain point that your company solves for, and you are working to paint yourself as the clear solution to their challenges. Your maturity assessment can function like a one-pager or high-level PDF, helping your audience explore options for solving a problem, but will do it from a buyer-centric perspective.

ROI Calculators

ROI calculators are a fan favorite of marketers because they put your audience in the driver’s seat and empower them to make decisions that work for them. ROI calculators are a type of interactive content that allow users to project the return on their investment: the impact a product or service stands to have on their bottom line, based on information they input.

This type of content can make a powerful business case for your product or service when leveraged effectively, because they are user-driven — and we all know numbers don’t lie! This example from CompuCom lets buyers test the company’s messaging against their own numbers, and makes a strong case for how much the audience stands to save by switching to their services.

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Notice their clear call-to-action here: “Answer these six questions to find out.” This kind of short, snackable content simplifies complicated decisions that can overwhelm buyers and gives them data-driven answers.

Why use an ROI calculator?

This interactive content type easily supports middle- or bottom-of-the-funnel marketing, letting your audience essentially fact check all of your marketing messaging. It also offers the added benefit of helping champions of a cause prove the business case for using your product or service to other key stakeholders.

Personality Quizzes

Personality tests are perhaps the most inherently shareable type of interactive content — their clear benefit being that they center completely around your audience’s experience. Users answer questions around a particular subject and then get to be the star of their own story as their answers assign them into one of several pre-defined categories.

While wildly successful personality assessments often live clearly within the domain of B2C marketers and millennial news powerhouses like Buzzfeed, B2B marketers are also seeing results with these engagement magnets.

Take, for example, this marketing spirit animal quiz from MarketingProfs.

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Every marketer is curious about what their marketing spirit animal is. But this quiz didn’t stop at top-of-the-funnel engagement — it was connected to content produced to support buyers throughout their funnel. Whether you ended up as the lead-gen giraffe or the email elephant, MarketingProfs delivered personalized follow-on content and separate webinars for each personality result, effectively moving prospects down the funnel.

By connecting their personality quiz to their other marketing efforts, this top-of-the-funnel quiz became a lead nurturing tool that set them apart from other B2B marketers relying on traditional content types.

Why use a personality quiz?

While a personality test can feel like throw-away content that couldn’t possibly have an impact on your bottom line, when connected to your broader marketing strategy, it can be a powerful way to drive top-of-funnel engagement that means more leads to nurture into customers.

Solution Finders

Solution finders are an interactive content type that help differentiate between multiple solutions your business offers.

Marketers often turn to solution finders to empower buyers to find a solution that works for them and fact-check information they receive within a sales process. It also enables marketers to gather demographic and other information about buyers in the late stages of the buying process.

By offering a personalized recommendation based on your audience’s needs, you as the marketer also get a unique window into the situation of your prospect, as they are incentivized to provide additional information about themselves for a trustworthy solution recommendation.

This solution finder from Blackbaud differentiates between two of their fundraising software solutions.

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By helping the audience make the choice that is best for them, Blackbaud builds trust. Think about it: We are all more willing to trust a company or salesperson who presents us with all the options, instead of funneling us exclusively towards the option that supports their bottom line.

Why use a solution finder?

According to an Accenture study, 94 percent of B2B buyers conduct online research during the buying process and they are, on average, 57 percent of the way through the decision-making process before they are willing to speak to a sales person.

Solution finders solve for the lack of trust and sales-person avoidance. Buyers can find out for themselves what solution fits their needs and they can fact-check the recommendations your sales team is giving them. Regardless of whether your audience is using a solution finder on their own or with a sales rep, this bottom-of-the-funnel content can help you push them over the finish line.

Let’s Get Started

Interactive content can support your current marketing efforts at every stage of the buyer journey and give you a clear competitive advantage over static content alone. And it’s really not hard to get started and see results.

Want to add interactive content to your marketing efforts? We can help.

About Yvonne Lyons:

Yvonne Lyons is Right Source’s vice president of creative services, overseeing content and design for all of our clients. She ensures that all creative produced at Right Source is of the highest quality and is aligned with our clients’ business strategy and goals. Yvonne received a bachelor’s degree from the Johns Hopkins University in writing and literature and has more than 20 years of experience in marketing, branding, and communications.