Consumer engagement is the key to the success of any Digital Marketing strategy.
By creating engaging experiences, you optimize the buyer’s journey along the sales funnel and boost your conversion rate.
Also, the practice has the potential to generate customer loyalty. But how do you overcome the competition and delight your audience?
The answers to this question may vary, but the fact is that investing in interactive content is currently the most effective way to engage the buyer.
Such content should vary in the format according to many factors, including the stage of the funnel you want to impact.
In this post, we’ll talk more about this strategy, focusing on interactive case studies. Here, you’ll learn:
What are the benefits of an interactive content strategy?
Have you ever heard of interactive marketing? The idea is to explore the interactivity of the content you produce to optimize the customer experience, making them advance in the marketing funnel.
Unlike static ones, interactive content establishes direct dialogues with the consumer, allowing them to participate in their journey actively.
Therefore, using this approach is excellent for improving your engagement rates.
When consuming interactive content, the audience takes several actions that bring them closer to the brand. From the moment your company gets more clicks, shares, and comments, you can invest in nurturing efforts to qualify leads.
The advantages of inserting interactivity into your strategy go beyond.
By using specific formats, such as quizzes and calculators, you can collect valuable audience data, such as their level of knowledge on a subject or the needs you can exploit to close sales.
The practice also favors the generation of new leads through a very common Content Marketing technique: link building.
If well developed, interactive content attracts great attention from the market and may be referred to by other domains, enhancing your SEO score.
As you can see, interactivity is an extremely beneficial element to your Digital Marketing strategy. It contemplates the whole funnel, from top to bottom.
To get excellent results, you must understand different types of interactive content, knowing how and when to use them wisely.
In this post, we’ll focus on interactive case studies. Keep reading and find out more about them!
What are interactive case studies?
Ads promoting a company’s products and services have long been the most potent weapons to attract new customers.
However, times have changed.
The consumer 4.0, empowered by quick access to information, is no longer as susceptible to advertising. Today, one factor that most influences people’s buying decisions is the referral of friends, family, and influencers.
This reinforces the idea that more than listening to what the company has to say, customers want to see results. They want to know if your solutions can have actually helped those who came before them.
You can create brand advocates who spread positive feedback about you, but this is a process that takes more time.
The fastest and most efficient alternative to show the visitor that your brand delivers what it promises is to offer interactive case studies.
So, imagine you own a marketing agency specialized in generating qualified leads.
If you already have a blog and social media pages, you probably use these channels to educate the buyer persona about their problems and needs, to the point where the customer decides they need to acquire a solution.
Then, you make a report detailing how your company could improve the numbers obtained by the client, showing actual or hypothetical situations.
Don’t you agree that this content would be highly powerful in convincing your buyer persona of your service’s efficiency?
Well, to do even better, add interactivity to your case studies. We’re used to case studies structured in long blocks of text, which can make the reader experience much more complicated.
Create interactive content to make reading and understanding easier, more intuitive, and completely customized. You can insert questionnaires for the user to fill out.
Information such as the number of people they employ and their field of operation allows you to customize the scenario and address the customer’s greatest needs and desires.
Adding interactive calculators is another excellent option. The tool can quickly estimate the ROI that the acquisition can generate.
Later, we’ll detail the steps for you to create interactive case studies. Now, let’s better understand how they can fit into your strategy.
How can interactive case studies fit your strategy?
As you already know, the success of any Content Marketing strategy depends on the ability to use the most appropriate formats for each funnel stage.
As a rule of thumb, your top-of-the-funnel content should approach broader topics and focus on communicating with people who know a bit about the subject.
In the middle of the funnel, the leads are already searching for solutions, so you can offer more complex and specific materials.
Content focused on closing a sale, in contrast, should only be inserted at the bottom of the funnel when the customer is close to conversion.
Based on this information, where do you think interactive case studies can have the greatest impact? The attraction stage is certainly not the most appropriate.
After all, if the users are not yet aware of their problem and haven’t even started thinking about the solutions, how can you present a relevant case study?
Starting from the consideration stage, you can work with case studies, but at the conversion stage, they present the most significant results.
Offering this type of content to customers at the last stage of the funnel can generate the missing piece to conclude their buying journey.
How to create interactive case studies?
After highlighting their importance and showing how they can fit your strategy, let’s get down to business: how can you create interactive case studies for your marketing strategy?
Conducting the process with excellence is fundamental to reaching the expected results.
The strategy may vary according to your business characteristics, but some tips are relevant to enhance content performance in any situation.
Check them out!
1. Structure your case study
First, you need to structure your case study. Define the subject you want to address and outline the content.
It’s important to use an informative title to attract the consumer’s attention and inform them of what they can expect from the material.
In advance, establish the fundamental points of the study, so as not to leave out any critical details.
As you’ll probably have to use a lot of information, make sure you properly organized the text to make it easier to read. Use subtitles and short paragraphs to improve scannability.
It’s also essential to insert images and other resources to optimize the customer experience.
Graphs and charts are examples of elements that can inform the reader and make the content easier to consume.
2. Consider your buyer persona
Throughout the process, it’s vital to consider the characteristics of your buyer persona.
Use the pains, needs, desires, and motivations to create narratives that really engage the users.
Also, use the most appropriate language for your audience.
The buyer persona also indicates the most relevant channels for you to disseminate your material.
Social media and email marketing campaigns are excellent for promoting case studies, but they must also be available on your website.
3. Use compelling stories to engage the client
If you work with Digital Marketing, you know that one of the biggest challenges in this field is to retain the customer’s attention.
To achieve this, you probably already use storytelling techniques on your blog posts and campaigns.
To ensure the client keeps track of case study information, create compelling stories that may build emotional connections.
You can do this not only in text format but also in videos, presentations, and podcasts.
4. Use your case studies to create more content
We can split and transform a case study into several other types of content. You can fit the information in the document into a blog post with a more superficial approach.
It can also be the basis for information in your newsletter or in videos you offer on your YouTube channel or IGTV.
5. Rely on useful tools
To create interactive case studies, it takes a little more than just structuring the material.
After all, adding elements of interactivity may require coding and design skills unless you can rely on a specialized tool.
Ion Interactive is a platform that is ready to be your ally in this process.
Offering pre-built templates, A/B testing, and an easy-to-use creation studio, Ion helps you to create interactive experiences of various types.
Interactive case studies are content with significant influence on the consumer journey, especially in the decision stage.
Use the tips in this text to create your cases, and don’t forget: counting on a specialized tool can be the difference-maker.
If you enjoyed this post, you might be more interested in learning more about the topic.
Download our free guide on interactive content and learn how to take your strategy to the next level!
Start creating interactive content with Ion and increase your marketing results!
Start creating interactive content with Ion and increase your marketing results!