Using Interactive Content Insights to Accelerate Your Sales Cycle

By adopting interactive content to accelerate the sales cycle, companies are nurturing their businesses’ roots with fertile soil.

Basically, this strategy helps them capture the user’s attention and generate more qualified leads. No wonder it quickly began to trend among best practices of Content Marketing! 

One reason for its success is the possibility of enriching the user experience in a short period. From this point, audience engagement increases, followed by the conversion rate.

So, how can interactive content be used to empower your sales strategy and accelerate its cycle? The main goal of this article is to show you how to do that. 

Keep reading!

1. Know your audience

Interactivity can optimize the content by combining a huge amount of information with a valuable experience.

However, achieving that goal depends on the context. So, before starting, we must get to know our scenario and, above all, the buyer persona. 

This semi-fictional character represents the real protagonist of the sales cycle: the customer.

If you want to be accurate when choosing the strategy that best suits your strategy of capturing users’ attention, you need to identify what they like the most.

Are you dealing with a person who has an analytic profile? This helps you determine whether a calculator or an infographic, for example, would be useful to improve their experience. 

Does the user wish to find out how much they know about a subject? Then a short quiz is definitely a good call. Those questions bring us to another key-point: our options.

2. Analyze your options

There are several types of interactive content, each one of them with its own benefits. So, before we spend a lot of effort to captivate our public with a specific type, we better take a look at the cards we have in our hands.

A study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute points out that, in 2018, marketing campaigns used 63% more images, such as photos and infographics, compared with the previous year.

Click on the image to see an example of an interactive infographic. Notice that extra information is shown as you pass your mouse over the image or tap on it on the mobile screen.

Calculators, in turn, offer customized solutions to the users’ questions, while quizzes put the competitive nature of humans to work in your favor.

Other types of interactive content to accelerate your sales cycle include:

• surveys and polls;
• webinars;
• ebooks;
• emails;
• mobile games;
• apps;
• flowcharts, diagnostic tests, and troubleshooting tools;
• augmented reality media;
• interactive 360º videos.

Take into account that the design has a fundamental role in most cases since the pleasantness of content depends largely on its efficiency.

Here’s an example of a calculator developed by Ion Interactive to help users take care of their health:

3. Make it shareable

Social interaction is as powerful as a direct approach to generate new leads. 

In other words, you can boost your strategy by creating new content and designing ideas that are worth carrying forward.

The quiz score, for example, is not only valuable by itself. People may better situate themselves when they can compare their results with their friends.

In that sense, social media is a digital engine that expands your strategy’s scope and accelerates the sales cycle.

Your blog’s readers can take the interaction to another level by sharing it in their social circles, which means new prospects. 

By doing so, you provide a better experience and extend the reach of your Inbound Marketing actions.

Look at this image from Gartner’s website and notice that we can do both: use interactive content and allow sharing results.

4. Befriend and strengthen ties

When the prospect talks, we listen. 

After all, there is no bigger sign of customer interest and involvement in your strategy than by putting thoughts into words. But what exactly does your buyer persona care about? How can we find that out?

Finding common ground is a basic step to get people’s attention. As Dale Carnegie, the author of “How to Win Friends and Influence People“, says, “to be interesting, be interested”.

In Content Marketing terms, that means mapping the prospect’s location in the funnel, so the interactive content is stage-driven. Here’s a basic example:

• discovery stage: use gamification to increase engagement;
• consideration stage: offer calculators or other tools to provide solutions;
• decision stage: create storytelling through interactive ebooks.

Games are not only fun but also increase brand awareness and, consequently, customer engagement.

As an extra step, you could offer rewards and implement a qualifying mechanism, such as getting likes on social media accounts and sending invitations for joining groups.

ROI calculators are especially valuable in the mid-funnel stage because they offer a quantitative evaluation to a public that seeks reliable metrics for decision making. 

The tip here is to make them intuitive to use and keep them working with no expiration date.

Finally, open space for a storytelling approach in the decision stage. That’s the moment to strengthen the connection between the customer and your brand, combining different formats: texts, videos, audios, and even forms. 

Tell a compelling story that gives you an authority in your field and show empathy for your customer’s needs.

5. Create a self-feeding strategy

A real successful strategy improves itself from time to time, and the key is monitoring results and collecting data.

Firstly, by writing down your goals and executing follow-ups, you arrange a set of parameters to evaluate your strategy’s impact.

Besides that, you can use forms to understand how converted leads experienced the journey and refine your actions based on these unique feedbacks.

Wrap Up

As you can see, there’s a solid base of knowledge behind interactive content to accelerate your sales cycle. The sooner you put these insights to work in your favor, the better are the results.

Your influence tends to scale up, and marketing ROI will follow this movement. So take advantage of these tips and bring benefits to your company!

What about going deeper and dominating this strategy? Download for free our Interactive Content Guide!