Did you know that 91% of B2B buyers say they prefer interactive and visual content to static content? The age of passive content is slowly waning away to usher in one where prospects interact with content and participate actively in content consumption.
If you’re planning your content calendar or are looking to breathe some new life into your existing one, interactive content can offer a great option. What’s more, you don’t have to look far to understand how to begin.
Here, you find everything there is to know about interactive content in SaaS marketing, including some actionable tips that will ensure you get the most out of it.
What is Interactive Content?
Interactive content is a content type that prompts an action from the user. This could be as easy as clicking a button to slightly more advanced as answering questions. It essentially encourages user participation to transform the content experience from a passive activity to an active one.
This brings us to the other side of the coin- passive content. This is content that incites little to no engagement from the buyer. Examples of this include static blog posts, fixed landing pages, .pdf forms, and the like.
Now, with the average user’s attention span weaker than a goldfish’s, interactive content has never been more important. Marketers must grab and hold user attention long enough for their audience to notice them. And what better way to do this than by asking them to contribute?
Why Should You Consider Interactive Content for SaaS Marketing?
Interactive content brings some hard-to-ignore benefits to the table. Here’s a look at these:
1. Combines Information and Experience
Interactive marketing helps make regular content more digestible and interesting. It does the job of educating and informing the viewer while also adding a fun element.
For instance, you could ask the user to choose an emoji that represents their satisfaction level with their current tech stack or ask them to take a quiz to gain an answer to a question.
Such interactive content forces customers to stop scrolling and actually notice your content.
2. Drives Engagement
There is no dearth of content out there. Users are swimming in ads and marketing campaigns without even realizing it. But with interactive content, they are forced to grab the paddle and reach the shore.
Interactive content demands action from them, forcing them to notice and engage with your content. In fact, 81% of marketers agree that interactive content can gain audience attention more effectively than passive content.
Let’s take the example of quizzes. These can be highly influential in making a customer realize they have a need for a solution like yours. By asking them questions about their pain points and objectives, you can leverage interactive content to steer customers towards your product.
3. Helps Collect Rich First-Party Data
Google’s all set to phase out third-party cookies by the third quarter of 2024. This makes collecting first-party data even more important. After all, if you don’t know your audience, how can you hope to personalize your marketing campaigns?
Interactive content helps with this. Users who interact with your content usually have to share their personal information, giving you first-party audience data that you can leverage to design campaigns that better resonate with your audience.
4. Helps Drive Conversion Rates
Interactive content offers users dynamic content with visual appeal, making their experiences even richer. And this can be instrumental in encouraging consumer interest in your offering.
If you structure it strategically, i.e. plan it as per your sales funnel, it can help you get prospects and convert them into paying customers. And not by a small margin at that. Research finds that Interactive content can double your conversion rate.
Types of Interactive Content to Integrate into Your SaaS Marketing Strategy
Interactive content comes in many shapes and sizes. Your task lies in identifying which one furthers your specific marketing goals most.
To help get the ball rolling, here are the top types of interactive content for SaaS businesses:
1. Quizzes
When you think of interactive content, you think of quizzes. These timeless content types are a great way to not only engage your prospects, but also learn a truckload about them.
But what makes these content formats especially great for B2B marketing is to do with the length of the buying cycles. You see, B2B buying cycles are usually lengthier because of the number of prospects on the buying committee, company budgets, existing tech stack, etc. And through this period, it’s natural for prospects to question their decisions.
Quizzes can help put their doubts to rest and make them more confident about buying your offering. Remember to keep them short and to the point.
A great use case of this is Paychex. This human resource services provider offers its prospects interactive quizzes to help them recognise pain points. They include questions such as:
- Do you rely on data to create candidate profiles?
- Do you measure employee engagement regularly via surveys or other feedback tools to ensure it remains high?
- Is offering competitive benefits a key focus at your company?
Prospects can take this quiz for free to understand how they can optimise their hiring strategy.
2. Calculators
Interactive calculators are one of the best forms of interactive content for SaaS businesses. Why? Because these can help them gain targeted information on potential ROI, cost or pricing plans, software processing efficiency and more.
Not to mention, these are quick and offer personalized calculations for free.
A great example of this is HubSpot’s ROI calculator. It asks companies to share monthly budget, expected CPC, targeted conversion rate, average sale price, lead to customer rate, etc. and then calculates the Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) for them.
3. eBooks
Interactive eBooks offer additional features over and above the standard content type. These include clickable links and other content types to improve the reader experience and engage them effectively. Some of the common additions to an eBook to make it interactive include:
- Videos
- Maps
- Audio narration
- Hyperlinked endnotes
Skale, a SaaS SEO agency offers interactive eBooks that include the above features to drive reader engagement. Not to mention, they use their interactive eBooks for lead generation efforts as well, by requiring visitors to share their personal information to access the eBook.
4. Product Demos and Virtual Tours
These help your prospects experience your offering first hand and is a great way to stand out from competition. Most suited for bottom-of-the-funnel prospects, these involve you walking your prospects through your offering and making them understand what it would be like if they become a customer.
One brand winning at this is Citrix. This workspace software leverages product tours to familiarize prospects with their offering and offers interactive pop-up windows, detailed labels and buttons to prompt viewers to take action.
This step-by-step guide helps encourage buyers further down the funnel.
5. Webinars
Interactive webinars are another great way of engaging your prospects. These are usually meant for top-of-the funnel marketing but you can customise this to any stage by changing the focus of the webinar.
For instance, you could host a webinar discussing specific product features for prospects at the end of their buyer journey. Similarly, you could host a webinar covering what your solution offers and how it can help improve your audience’s operation for prospects just starting out their buyer journey.
Or even better- you could have a live product demonstration like SEMRush. This SEO tool asks companies to nominate their websites for live audits during a webinar. During the course of this, SEO experts explore their website identifying issues and discussing how to eliminate them.
This allows them to showcase their domain expertise while also engaging prospects meaningfully.
6. Interactive Infographics
Infographics are highly effective interactive content formats for B2B SaaS businesses. Why? Because these can help you transform lengthy and information-heavy content into smaller, more digestible bits. These are especially useful if you’re quoting numbers and statistics.
And these become interactive when you add small engaging modifications to it. Let’s take the example of Upland Kapost. This content operations management software uses a visually striking infographic about marketing technologies over time, as seen in the screenshot below.
Clicking on the infographic will direct the viewer to a new page which again prompts them to click on a specific tile to learn more about what Upland can help them achieve.
Tips to Produce Stellar Interactive Content
Now that you know the types of interactive content that you can leverage, it is time to discuss how you can optimize your interactive content.
Here are four tips to keep in mind when launching interactive content:
1. Repurpose Existing Content
Interactive content might be a new addition to your content strategy, but the content within it, needn’t be. You can simply repurpose the content you’ve already published into an interactive format.
For instance, you can visualize a LinkedIn post or turn a blog post into an interactive infographic. This way, you don’t just have a steady content pipeline but also reach varied audiences across platforms.
2. Keep the Sales Funnel in Mind
Treat interactive content as you would any other type of content, and keep your buyer persona’s goals, priorities, and pain points in mind when planning it. Not just that, but ensure you have interactive content all through the sales funnel.
This will allow your content to do the job of nudging the prospect to the next stage of their customer journey to ultimately be ready to convert.
3. Snap the Chance to Capture Visitor Data
Lastly, do not, I repeat do not let go of a chance to collect data. Customer data is your very lifeline today. And so, you need to grab every opportunity to collect prospect data and learn more about them.
Let’s say you’ve designed a quiz for your customer. They’ve taken it and are now waiting for the result. Have them fill out a short form sharing their details before giving them access to the results.
Having taken the quiz, they’ll be naturally curious to know the result and so, will willingly share their credentials.
4. Leverage Collected Data
As discussed previously, interactive content can help you gain valuable audience data. One that is accurate and updated thanks to customers sharing it themselves.
Be sure to leverage this resource when curating fresh B2B SaaS content to make them more personalized and effective.
And that’s it, folks! Interactive content can prove to be a powerful medium if wielded strategically. And with the concise list of interactive content types above, along with actionable tips to help you get it right on the first try- you’re off to a strong start. Check out more exciting content on the Ukti Blog.