SaaS companies found out that interactive content can be a powerful ally to accelerate their sales cycle. Any successful Content Marketing strategy should include this concept in its practices.
Still, changing direction is often a challenge, particularly when your main goal is to be more attractive to potential customers.
We gathered below some valuable insights and examples in order to help you build a solid strategy.
In this article, you’ll find:
Why you need interactive content for your SaaS company
Interactive content is all over the internet. Have you downloaded an ebook, read an infographic, or played any quiz over the last few years?
If the answer is yes, you have certainly interacted with this sort of resource.
We’re talking about digital experiences created for participation engagement rather than just passive consumption. There is an abyss between these two things.
Typically, one interactive experience has a feedback loop into it, so the user does something and gets something personalized in return. The point is interactive content grabs people’s attention way more efficiently than a typical blog post or just a PDF.
That’s why it quickly began to trend among best practices of Content Marketing.
Enriching the user experience
Interactive content for SaaS turns a monologue into a conversation. That specific quality makes it perfect for Digital Marketing. According to Ion Interactive, for example, 70% of marketers say interactive content effectively converts site visitors.
In fact, most marketing professionals consider engagement as their main goal.
From this point, interactive content enriches the user experience — and that helps increase your conversion rate.
Improving the buyer’s journey
The time a person takes to decide to buy something is fertile soil for marketing actions. By adding interactive content to your strategy, you take advantage of this moment to get your customer’s attention.
The buyer’s journey goes faster in all its stages. In the first phase (discovery), interaction works as a powerful way of being attractive. Then in the selection phase, you can demonstrate the benefits of your products.
A significant differential of interactive content for SaaS, in that context, is the customization. That means giving your customers an example that perfectly suits their needs.
We will show in more detail how interactive calculators are notably useful to do that.
Going beyond pure text
Interactivity combines a huge amount of information with a unique experience to optimize your content. That puts you closer to your buyer persona — and you are no longer the one who drives the conversation.
During those early stages, that means offering different options to each user. No matter who you’re talking to, the content must show directions in a more catchy way than pure text.
A study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute pointed out that marketing campaigns used 63% more images than the previous year. That means pictures, infographics, etc.
Infographics, quizzes, interactive white papers, and lookbooks are very useful for testing your customer’s knowledge and taking them to the next step: the evaluation phase.
In this stage, the goal is education and collecting more data. Here, you can use interactive ebooks, assessments, calculators, solution finders, and product configurators.
All of those interactive content, in their own ways, will show your customers how your product solves their problems in their specific scenario.
In the later stages, when the customers are ready to buy and to act, you can go deeper into data collection.
So let’s take a look at how exactly that can be done!
How to use interactive content for SaaS
You can find several types of interactive content. In order to choose the best ones, you need first to know your audience and develop your Digital Marketing strategy.
Start by elaborating your buyer persona — more than one, if you have a plural public. This semi-fictional character is a crucial guide-star for your content.
Now, here’s a few more insights that will help you achieve better results.
1. Focus on utility
Ask yourself: “Is this asking a specific question or addressing a recurring question from my audience?”; “Is this really useful?”.
Don’t focus on what matters for your business only. You have to be in the customers’ shoes, to explore their doubts, their needs.
Create educational materials and give it for free. Firstly, users have to be interested in it — even better if they want to share it with friends.
The more valuable your content is, the sooner you will get visibility and impact the buyer’s journey.
Also, don’t make it too hard to get value. Big forms and lots of questions typically do not work.
2. Continuity and consistency
Focus on helping your customers achieve their goals. It’s important to keep mapping the next step they can take, so you leverage interactive content all the way.
The first stage is indeed crucial. However, your products must be considered as ever more appealing. Interactive contents that appear at the top of the funnel but don’t go down tend to let the conversation vanish.
You have to be present there and keep adding new value with new experiences.
Don’t forget that this relationship lasts longer than the buyer’s journey: you must reinforce its richness in the post-sale too.
3. Turn data into experiences
Digital transformation means, among other things, data-driven strategies. SaaS companies are very familiar with this idea — so put it to work in your favor.
Collect data from your sales team to identify the public’s most common questions. That can be the foundation of your interactive content strategy since it helps you create unique paths for each customer.
Notice that you need to connect your marketing team to this idea, but not only them. Pass it along to sales, support, and any other department that may make good use of the data.
Also, data-driven content aims at capturing information through natural engagement.
A form field is not exactly the best interactive tool to play that role — a rich assessment or calculator is more effective.
Interactive content is the highest quality data type because the user shares that data with you only. Turn it into valuable insights for your next materials, so you create unique experiences for each customer.
4. Put it to work on behalf of sales reps
Data is a real asset for companies, so extract the best you can from it. Interactive Content makes sales reps lives a lot easier by simply causing engagement.
Create triggers that turn data into notifications for your sales team. Let them know what the customers think. Show them the most potential leads. Deliver real-time recommendations to your customers.
Automation is essential to turn single insights into systematic use of data. Also, be simple, but sophisticated, not only helpful. Personalization helps your sales team to be more accurate and attractive to create dialogue.
Instead of “Hello first name of company X” — which is just boring —, take advantage of the data you have to create a personalized approach. Did the customer use your calculator? Here’s your message:
“Allan, I noticed you have 50 sales reps, you have this average performance for sales rep. We believe our solution can help you to increase this number to X”.
See below what we can do in a practical way.
Best examples of interactive content for SaaS
ROI calculator
This content can take customers to the bottom of the sales funnel. The interactive calculator collects data provided by the user in order to generate solutions in a fully customized experience.
Symantec’s ROI Calculator is an interesting tool. Basically, it allows users to calculate how much money they can save by acquiring Symantec’s services.
It takes less than one minute to enter your number of users and the number of tokens. Then you see what your potential results are, every single metric, and how it works.
Why should you do it?
The biggest benefit is capturing accurate information about how much your customers spend on tools, their challenges, how much time they spend doing manual processes, etc.
Interactive Infographic
Infographics are the most shareable type of content. If that’s not enough to convince you to create your own, add the interactive feature to the recipe. That brings outstanding results, especially during the first stages.
Take a look at the potential an interactive infographic has to educate while the user takes the lead of the journey on their own. This is an example from the Chicago Council website.
It shows extra information as you pass your mouse over the pictures or tap your mobile’s screen.
Wrap Up
As you can see, there are several tools that you can put to work in your favor. When it comes to interactive content for SaaS, the possibilities are limited by your creativity only.
Create your strategy and achieve even better results for your company!
If you want to improve your strategy, don’t miss our content on how SaaS companies can use interactive calculators!
