In this post we will talk about interactive marketing tools for small businesses. And will also discuss interactive content benefits and which platforms you must use to create and publish your own content.
In traditional marketing, advertising and promotional activities flow in only one direction. The usual approach is to design an ad, publish it and wait for the results. This is a one-way message towards to the consumers that they can accept or reject.
But with the advent of internet, there are many tools that small businesses can use to ask for feedback, track customers, and tailor product offers to the consumer’s interest.
What is interactive marketing?
Interactive marketing is a marketing practice that centers on customer actions. These actions trigger certain marketing initiatives from the business’ side and is opposite to a passive consumption of your messages from the customer.
The key fact about interactive marketing is the ability to offer the customer certain options and then build strategies based on those actions. When a customer provides feedback or gives personal information about precise situations, marketers can collect that information and use it to channel their advertising efforts.
This implies a two-way communication between the consumer and the brand. And both the customer and the company will get better results in the end.
What are interactive marketing benefits?
1-Interactive content adds value to the customer. As nowadays consumers are exposed to a big number of online ads and promotions, it gets difficult to grab their attention.
2-Interactive content increases engagement through surveys, calculators, chatbots, quizzes and email. This type of content makes a close relation between the prospect and the brand.
3-This marketing strategy also helps to bring more traffic to your website or social media account. This is because this type of content is usually shared on social media by the prospect.
4-Interactive content helps to generate leads. If the prospect filled a quiz and he is eager to know the results, there is a high chance that he gives an email address in return.
5-Interactive content reduces bouncing rates, taking the consumer a step ahead to a closer and trusted relationship with your brand.
Interactive marketing examples:
Contests and Giveaways:
This form of engagement is a well-known way to grab your target audience’s attention. Giveaways and contests are an intelligent approach to the human need to go for free things.
Contests are an effective interactive marketing experience and can provide valuable information about your prospects. As contest always have some kind of fun content, people Is keen to participate.
People also find it fun to take part in contests. There is often the possibility to win something and this is a magnet for every person.
Quizzes:
Quizzes are a very effective form of interactive marketing because always have some dosage of fun and provide high level of engagement. Customers make their way through a set of questions and see their progress and results. As quizzes show a personalized result in the end, you can include there a form to capture user information. You can collect emails and specific info.
To get an idea about what quizzes and how you can use them for getting leads, take a look at this Interactive Product Survey Template (typeform.com)
In this quiz the prospect answers 11 short questions about overall product quality, how innovative the product is, what is his purchase intent and more. You can then process the collected info to fine tune your strategy.
Polls:
Polls engage customers providing immediate feedback in the form of results. People like to complete a poll to compare their own results against other answers and justify their own answers against other people.
Polls help to collect valuable information about customer satisfaction, brand awareness and more.
A poll is quicker to complete than a quiz or a contest because users don’t have to go through several steps to get an outcome.
Calculators:
Calculators are a useful tool to provide value to your customers. If you can show your prospects how much money they can save with your product or service, you will surely increase your sales and conversion rates.
With calculators you can give personalized responses, with the chance to generate more leads. Calculators help to segment customers thus helping the sales team to close deals.
Calculators collect the information that the customer inputs and using this data can be helpful to plan your next steps nurturing leads. This is an excellent method for lead qualifying.
Here’s an excellent example about calculators from Outgrow Interactive, Business Calculators | Outgrow
With this calculator, the prospect can see how much will save by purchasing a Tesla electric car. After answering some questions, the results are shown in an interactive graphic and the system asks for an email address to send the results. This is a win-win; you are adding real value to the customer, and you are getting a valuable lead too.
Chatbots:
With chatbots you can communicate in a friendly and seamless way.
Chatbots are available 24×7 and can capture visitor’s data for further following by a salesperson.
Chatbots can get info about customer feedback, product requirements, order tracking and more.
See this example about Outgrow Chatbots | Outgrow in real estate
RELATED: Why you should boost your marketing with chatbots
Email:
Email autoresponders are great tools to promote interactive content. Surveys, polls, and calculators can be sent to the prospect and reply with the right content depending on the prospect previous actions.
Email is not a superstar interactive marketing tool, but a perfect complement for your interactive content.
Learn how popular brands are using interactive marketing here
Interactive marketing stats:
If you are wondering if interactive content is important for your business, here are some stats from proven sources.
Check them carefully to understand why interactive marketing is the key to engage customers, provide value and grow your sales records.
80% of consumers are more likely to buy a product or service from a company that provides a personalized experience: New Epsilon research indicates 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences
91% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands providing relevant recommendations and offers Personalization Pulse Check | Accenture
Interactive content gains two times more engagement than static content.2019 State Of Interactive Content Marketing (demandgenreport.com)
89% of digital companies are investing in personalization Transform Your Personalization Strategy At Forrester’s Consumer Marketing Forum
72% of customers engage only with marketing messages that are customized to meet their individual interests Privacy and Personalization Report | SmarterHQ
77% of marketers agree that interactive content has “reusable” value, resulting in repeat visitors and multiple exposures Interactive Content Fuels Customer Experiences [Research] (contentmarketinginstitute.com)
In a HubSpot poll, 15% of consumers preferred to tap through Instagram Stories with quiz or poll features. This interactive content type was the third most popular Story format Which Instagram Story Formats Really Engage Viewers [New Research] (hubspot.com)
10 Statistics That Prove Interactive Content is the Future of Digital Marketing 10 Statistics That Prove Interactive Content Is the Future (outgrow.co)
Interactive marketing software tools:
Now that we have covered what interactive marketing is, let’s take a look at some of the best software platforms to create and publish interactive content:
Outgrow:
This is a full featured platform for building quizzes, calculators, forms, assessments, chatbots, giveaways, and surveys.
Using Outgrow you can increase lead conversion rates, qualify leads while adding value to your customer, and boost your content marketing.
Content generated with this tool can be embedded on your web page, as a popup, in chatbot, or exit intent. This software has 1,000+ integrations to manage your lead traffic with your preferred app.
Outgrow provides full analytics reports for a detailed tracking of your content.
Outgrow pricing: Free plan with basic functionality. Next plan $14/month with 3 content types. Free 14-day trial available.
RELATED: Best Interactive Video Platforms
Interact:
Interact is a well-known player in the quiz market from 2013. This is a tool for creating online quizzes to generate leads, segment your audience and drive traffic to your website.
With Interact you can create 3 types of quizzes:
Personality quizzes, scored quizzes and assessment quizzes (also called multiple choice quizzes) With 800+ templates to choose from, a drag-and-drop builder lets you change logo, fonts and images. More than 80 integrations are available to insert Interact into your current application workflow.
Interact pricing: Free plan with limited features but a good starting point. Next plan $17/month with integrations and email collection.
QuestionPro:
QuestionPro allows to design a survey, add multiple question types and logic. With 250+ templates for marketing research, customer satisfaction, community-based surveys and more. This is a solid and complete product with many features, but perhaps not the best if you are just starting due to the various options.
This platform provides unique features not available in similar software. 100+ languages to choose from (only on paid plans), heatmaps and sentiment analysis. A solid logic allows for almost any type of content.
QuestionPro pricing: Free plan with unlimited questions and answers, color and logo customization, 24/7 email support and 25+ question types. Next plan costs $85/month with full set of features and own subdomain.
Paperform:
This is an online form builder and form creator. With a simple editor, you can create online forms quickly and without technical knowledge. You can define your own logic rules and control your customer`s experience depending on how they answer the form.
This software includes a 300+ professional template library. No matter what your business is about, you will find templates from church forms to poll, onboarding and report forms.
With 1000+ integrations, you can easily import captured information into the systems you currently use.
Paperform pricing: From $12.50/month (annual billing) featuring unlimited forms, 10,000 form views per month and 1,000 submissions per month. Free trial available.
Jotform:
Jotform is an easy-to use online form builder. You can create and publish forms, get an email for each response and collect all related data.
You can design and customize professional looking forms with advanced options to match your branding. A simple drag-an-drop editor makes it easy to create forms, and a solid collaboration feature allows forms to be created by many users. With 1,000+ integrations, Jotform makes it easy to simplify and automate your workflow.
Jotform pricing: Free plan with 5 forms limit and 100 monthly submissions and 1,000 monthly form views. Next plan start at $24/month and allows you to set up your own branding.
Typeform:
Typeform is a leader platform for building forms, surveys, and quizzes. With a built-in photo and video library you can make professional-looking surveys that boost your lead generation.
This tool uses conditional logic to make surveys fell like conversations and not interrogations, so you can grab the prospect attention and get valuable data. Integration with Zapier make it easy to use your actual platforms to integrate data captured in Typeform.
Typeform pricing: Free plan with 3 typeforms and 10 questions per form, reports and metrics. Next plan $35/month (monthly plan) with 1,000 responses per month and 3 logic jumps per typeform.
Leadquizzes:
This tool allows to easily create quizzes to share on your website, paid advertising, email list or social media platforms. This platform offers quiz takers a personalized experience by showing specific questions and results based on their previous answers.
With over 75 templates to choose from you can create text or image-based questions and open-ended answers. You can also add your own images, fonts and colors to fit your branding.
Leadquizzes provides a strong reporting feature, so you can analyze leads and make smart marketing decisions to grow your business.
Leadquizzes pricing: From $37/month billed annually. This includes one website and 5,000 visitors per month, templates, different quiz and survey types, logic branching, URL redirect, and full analytics.
Free 14-day trial available.
SurveySparrow:
SurveySparrow is a complete set of tools that offers many solutions working as an omni-channel solution.
This software provides tools to identify what determine purchase actions from the customer and collect feedback. You can create online surveys and distribute them through email, social media, and many channels.
SurveySparrow pricing: Free plan with 100 responses per month, 10 questions per survey and advanced integrations. Then basic plan at $29/month for 10,000 responses per month, multilingual surveys, unlimited display, and skip logics.
Conclusion:
Today small business can take advantage of interactive marketing to grow sales and revenue.
Interactive content is engaging and provides a lot of value to the customer. The above tools will help you to build a solid strategy with no technical expertise. Calculators, polls, quizzes and contests are powerful marketing tools with affordable cost an excellent cost-benefit rate.
To use the tools listed above you don’t need to be tech-savvy because all of them are easy to use. You can plan and execute a solid strategy with no technical expertise. All these tools provide easy drag and drop editors to create and publish a form or a quiz in minutes.
Regardless of your niche, using interactive content will help your business to increase lead generation, segment and qualify leads, build a stronger relationship with your customers, and grow your sales.
In need of some ideas to start? Check this page for idea generation.
