How to Use Interactive Content Marketing to Grow Your Leads

Brands are looking for new and innovative ways to interact with their customers. Here’s how…

Content marketing is leveling up—70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing in 2020, with 75% of current users planning on increasing their budget for this strategy. The sheer density of content out there has led brands to think outside of the box, and there’s been an increase in interactive content marketing as a way to increase leads and their eventual conversion into sales.

What is Interactive Content Marketing?

In short, interactive content marketing produces content that requires engagement from the user to function or exist. It can come in many forms and seeks to build relationships as well as increase leads and sales.

Interactive content marketing is not a “one-way street,” like blogs, email marketing, and podcasts often are. Rather, it requires participation from both the brand and the user, although that doesn’t mean you’ll need a team member on hand 24/7 for your efforts to be successful.

The best interactive content marketing uses marketing automation strategies to give users a more personalized experience. You can easily create this experience using the simplest automation tools and tactics.

This article will explore some of the best ways you can use interactive content marketing to grow your leads and will share examples of brands that are doing it best.

Top 5 Examples of Interactive Content Marketing

1. Use Interactive Quizzes to Grow Your Leads

Interactive quizzes are a fun way to engage your followers and dig a little deeper to understand what solutions they’re looking for. BeardBrand found this personality quiz so successful that they integrated the quiz into the homepage, front and center.

They later converted the quiz into other forms of content, like a Beardsmen YouTube video that now has nearly 100k views.

How Do Quizzes Help You Grow Leads?

Use your custom quiz to collect a user’s contact information and offer to deliver the quiz results to their inbox. You’ll guarantee yourself a higher open rate, build your email list, and sell with personalized marketing tactics further down the funnel.

2. Use Viral Challenges to Grow Your Leads

Interactive content marketing doesn’t always need to rely on an immediate interaction; it can also involve interaction at a later point in time, or with a slight delay.

Let’s take the popular video platform known as TikTok, which now has an estimated 800 million monthly active users, with around 83% of them having posted a video. There’s no denying the platform’s growth and high user engagement.

The platform is notorious for challenges created by brands or users that encourage viewers to create their own video responses. TikTok interactions come at a slower rate but encourage much more involvement than other interactive marketing tactics that we’ll discuss.

TikTok challenges are a great opportunity for brand interactions. If someone creates a response video to a challenge that your brand posted, they clearly have a significant amount of interest in and awareness of your brand or product. Companies as big as ABC Network and Haribo have already created their own brand awareness challenges on TikTok.

Give TikTok users the chance to enjoy engaging with your content and a reason to create their own. @CharliePuth called upon his community to help him with his music. The challenge spawned the hashtag #writethelyrics, which now has 955 million views, and led to an eventual collaboration with the singer and one of the users who responded.

How Do Tiktok Challenges Help to Grow Leads?

At its core, Charlie Puth’s example demonstrates the success of interactive content marketing and the importance of brand awareness. If you want an immense reach to increase your chances of growing leads, TikTok could be your answer.

The platform’s rapid growth, combined with the virality of successful challenges, could place your brand in front of an audience that may just be interested in what you have to offer.

How to Launch a Successful Tiktok Challenge

Successful viral challenges share a few common trends:

• Use a challenge hashtag with your brand name.
• Use music or a theme tune.
• Use the hashtags #Foryou and #FYP.
• Make the challenge fun.
• Target TikTok’s younger demographic for best results (provided that the audience matches).

3. Use interactive landing pages to grow your leads

Give your landing page visitors an opportunity to engage with your content and brand. Create an experience that’s playful yet informative and that keeps your visitors active. Venngage did exactly this by introducing the opportunity to live chat with their team right there on the home page.

How Do Interactive Landing Pages Help to Grow Leads?

The effort you put into creating an interactive landing page will decrease your drop-off rate and increase conversion rates. Devin Beverage, founder of DevBev, was able to increase his company’s conversion rates to 48% just by implementing a chatbot and interactive quizzes on the landing page. Beverage gamified his sales process and saw a direct increase in leads and sales.

What Do You Need to Remember When Implementing Interactive Features on Your Website?

Make sure you find the level of interaction that’s right for each specific page. Perhaps a visitor has a high intent to buy, so some pages will be less likely to convert and are merely there to be browsed. In short, you want to create personalized interactions that are relevant to the page content and the intent of the visitor.

4. Use Gamification to Grow Your Leads

Gamification is certainly easier said than done—this is not an interactive content marketing strategy that you can implement if you don’t have the resources. However, if done correctly, it can create a truly fun experience for page visitors while educating them about your brand, product, or campaign.

Take a look at what the Financial Times did with Uber. The game challenges players to earn $1,000 as a full-time Uber driver in San Francisco and has a whopping 70% completion rate.

The game is oddly satisfying and manages to provide real insight into the life of an Uber driver. It speaks to different audiences—those considering becoming an Uber driver as well as users of the service. The game manages to educate and create fantastic brand awareness around both the Financial Times and Uber.

How Can Gamification Grow Your Leads?

Like TikTok challenges, gamification can provide brand awareness opportunities. You’re finding innovative ways to educate and reach new audiences—and with reach come opportunities for educated lead generation through organic search.

5. Use Interactive Social Media Tactics to Grow Your Leads

Keep your influence on social media with interactive polls and remain at the top of feeds. Social media algorithms are forever changing, with core channels like Facebook and Instagram being very elusive about how exactly their algorithms work.

One thing that has always rung true, though, is that brand engagement on social media helps to drive conversions. For example, some companies merely have a Twitter account for the sake of checking it off a list. But then there are accounts like Xbox Game Pass, Elon Musk, Wendy’s, and more that are highly engaged with their users—and it pays off.

Keep this in mind and keep your content engaging, not just ordinary. National Geographic Travel (@natgeotravel) did exactly this with its fun Instagram polls that you can see above.

Better yet, learn from these polls. If you’re in a position to build a new product or trial a sample product, then ask your audience, via social polls, to help you build it. They’ll feel more responsible for the end-result and are more likely to help it succeed/invest in it.

Ask Questions on Social Media Posts for Deeper Interactions

As great as polls are for getting interactions from your social media followers, they’re still a relatively low lift. Consider warming up your audience with interactive polls on social media before taking your interactive content marketing tactics to the next level by asking for a higher level of interaction from your followers.

Bamboo HR does exactly this with its HR Question of the Day feature on LinkedIn. They ask their community a question and support it with video content. This tactic is the perfect combination of interactive content marketing and has earned them a 164% engagement rate increase.

How Can Social Media Polls and Questions Help to Grow Leads?

This tactic runs back to Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Persuasion: Consistency. Psychologically speaking, people like to be consistent with their commitments, especially if they’re public. Allow people to interact with and help to build your content, and they’re scientifically more likely to buy into it further down the line.

Wrapping Things Up

I hope these examples inspire you to create your own interactive content marketing strategies to help grow your leads and sales conversions. These are just a few of the examples of the things you can do; there are plenty more out there, so take these as a starting point. See what rings true with your audience and go from there!

Be Data-Minded

If you want to convert more people into leads, you’ll need to be data-minded when pursuing an interactive content marketing strategy. Just because a tactic worked for one brand doesn’t mean it’s right for yours. Be sure to test any new strategies you pursue to make sure you stick with the ones that truly work well.

Identify your key performance metrics; if you’re not hitting them within a reasonable timeframe, then you may want to consider taking another approach.

Do you have interactive content marketing strategies of your own? Share some of them with us in the comments below!