Generating leads for your business is challenging. It can be hard to find the time and resources to start a blog or write an engaging landing page copy, create a Facebook page, or do any other marketing strategy to generate new potential customers.
But you are in luck! Interactive content is one of the best ways to generate more leads for your business because it allows you to target an audience with specific needs and interests.
This article will discuss how interactive content works as part of a lead generation strategy, why it works, and what methods are right for your business.
Introduces Your Brand in Style
If your brand is new in the industry, expect people to be unaware of its existence. To increase your brand awareness, you need to pull out all the stops, starting with a content strategy that utilizes interactive and engaging elements.
Most of the content suggestions in this article are geared towards people in the early awareness stage, which is the top part of a marketing or sales funnel. As mentioned, they don’t know that you’re offering products and services that interest them.
Besides creating raving fans for your business with interactive content, you also establish your authority on the market. And it will be through content that you can share your knowledge and expertise about a topic, which should compel them enough to become your brand ambassadors.
But to help you get the most out of your interactive content, your website needs to drive a lot of traffic. This is the only way for them to discover your content on Google without running ads.
Ideally, you want to implement the best white hat SEO tactics to ensure that you will slowly but surely rise through the ranks of search engines without the fear of incurring penalties. It’s important to use SEO on all platforms, including video platforms like YouTube.
On YouTube, for example, you need to make your titles SEO friendly to boost visibility. It’s easy to create SEO-friendly titles with an AI YouTube title generator so that you don’t have to waste time on testing and optimization. Do this for all your online platforms, but for your website specifically, you can also leverage popups and widgets.
For all the examples below, you can make the interactive content appear as a chat widget in the corner of the page, or appear as a pop-up presenting your offer. It also has an exit intent feature such as a lead generation quiz that lets you show your interactive content before visitors exit out of your page for maximum engagement.
Gated Content
Also known as content upgrades, people only receive these exclusive guides and resources if they sign up using their names and email addresses. The additional content is usually about the same topic as your original blog post, making it more relevant and valuable to visitors.
Gated content is based on the premise of creating resources highly targeted to your user personas to build up anticipation for what's inside and it’s one of the many ways to distribute SaaS content to different audience groups across the web.
For example, if you have a post about marketing automation, the gated content offered on the page should ideally be about behavioral targeting, which is a specific area of marketing automation.
This creates anticipation in return for something of value, giving potential customers a reason to share their contact information.
Tools like Beacon can help you create ebooks or checklists from scratch. You can even repurpose your best blog posts into ebooks to offer your prospects or clients for free.
Quizzes
Another type of interactive content that generates more leads is a good old quiz.
This interactive content is what keeps Buzzfeed relevant with its core audience. The number of entertaining quizzes they have lined up for readers keeps people engaged and helps the brand continue to become the buzz of the town (pun intended).
Your business should take a cue from Buzzfeed by offering compelling quizzes as one of the best social media content ideas that will ultimately help your audience find what it wants. To make answering your quiz more effortless, create multiple-choice questions and offer your respondents several options.
To turn quizzes into lead generation machines, you can share the results of the quiz by email Providing an email is, of course, required.
An example of a lead generation quiz is from Genbook. It targets salon and spa owners who want to know if their services are tailored to their clients.
Upon answering the quiz, they will learn key insights as to what their audiences may want.
There are excellent tools for building quizzes and gamified pop-ups to help you achieve this goal of turning visitors into leads. You can use the Omnibot to link your chat box to your interactive quiz or to the exit-intent popup for maximum results.
Surveys
Another example of interactive content used for generating leads is surveying.
Similar to quizzes, surveys require you to answer some questions.
However, among the content marketing tactics listed in this section, surveys provide more in-depth insights into your audience, such as what industry the person works in or their location.
involve.me is a tool you’d want to use if you want to build surveys. Its selection of premade templates allows you to create a highly targeted survey in seconds.
To help you get more responses, you can incentivize them by offering coupons, discount codes, or consider creating an online course or other high-value gated content to compel your audience to action.
Once you have their answers and contact details, the best benefit that surveys provide is how to improve your business. Take action on these comments to help you build a website that people will love.
Add A Live Chat Feature
The ability to talk with site or blog owners in real-time is one of the benefits live chat offers.
The live chat feature can be set up so that it is available at certain times of the day or during specific events, and it’s important to emphasize website performance to make it work smoothly. For WordPress websites, it’s important to have fast WordPress hosting along with an optimized backend to be able to integrate a chat feature seamlessly and without hindering the overall user experience.
This allows site visitors to get help, even when the owner might not always respond. It also reduces abandonment rates on your website because you're giving people an avenue to get their questions answered while they are still browsing.
Live chats allow for frictionless communication which means customers feel more appreciated, especially if they have made a purchase from you already and want to ask about additional products. It’s also a great way to gather feedback through real-time communication.
Furthermore, some businesses find that adding this form of customer service increases conversion rates by as much as 30%. It makes a lot of sense, especially if your storefront has limited hours. Online shopping remains a viable alternative for them to place their orders and reach out to you for questions.
Among the different live chat tools you can use, you can use Omnikick’s Facebook Messenger Bot, which serves as a live chat and chatbot at the same time.
You can reply to inquiries manually or prepare a set of answers to common questions people ask about your business. Doing so allows you to simplify customer engagement without breaking the bank.
More importantly, you can turn prospects into becoming leads of your brand, if not actual clients ready to commit to your products and services.
Include Giveaways
Social media is ripe with the opportunity for interaction that can lead to successful branding through content marketing and especially interactive content. However, most posts scheduled using social media tools only provide information about a new blog post release.
Simply including an interactive element in your social media posts can lead to increased engagement and more clicks on your content, which will ultimately lead to higher conversions.
We've already covered quizzes and surveys as types of interactive content that you can also use on social media. However, arguably the best type of interactive content for this channel is sweepstakes or giveaways.
The beauty with sweepstakes is that people can win prizes if they enter their names and email addresses. This technique is unlike most lead generation forms, where you get exclusive freebies from sites and blogs.
If you happen to be the lucky winner, you will receive premium and useful prizes that cost hundreds — if not thousands — of dollars! That should be worth more than the effort of entering your contact information.
The number of prizes you offer should be based on their quality.
In the example above, Saastronautics Giveaway 2.0 offers a M1 MacBook Air as a gift to anyone who signs up by entering their name and email address. There can be many other criteria for people to enter your giveaway, of course, including submitting user-generated content like images and short videos.
With images, you need to be able to keep an eye out for inappropriate content and conduct image moderation quickly in order to filter out any inappropriate user-generated content from your feeds.
Likewise, with sweepstakes, make sure the rules are clear from day one so nobody feels cheated out of anything after winning. That includes specifying when someone gets disqualified as well before even starting!
When it comes to promoting this content type on social media, you need to have lots of followers who will view your posts or promote them via ads.
If you don’t have lots of followers yet, launch a campaign for Facebook lead ads. With millions of users that meet your criteria as a target audience, you can market your interactive content properly to generate more followers and leads as a result.
Another platform you must consider marketing your interactive content is via Instagram.
Use Webinars
Not all lead generation campaigns are the same. Some attract fairweather fans that have a fleeting interest in your brand. In fact, they might not stick around long enough to purchase from you.
So if you want to generate leads that will eventually turn into paying clients, one of the best content marketing tips is to actually consider leaning into video content and target people in the initial stages of your sales funnel.
These are people who are aware of your brand but are still unsure whether they want to give you their money.
Videos are the most time-consuming to create, that’s a fact. However, they are also the most effective in guiding people through your product offerings, how to get started, and why it’s worth paying for your services.
The best content type to draw in people are webinars. In fact, they work best as part of your sales automation strategy.
They provide step-by-step instructions on how your products or services work and how your products can help them.
The most successful webinar campaigns include an interactive Q&A session in which viewers can ask questions whenever they want without the presenter having to answer them live. They can also add video content of their service providers discussing their offers firsthand, or create downloadable educational materials for attendees that tie into your brand's message, so people get more out of attending.
And once the webinar has concluded, this is where the fun starts!
You have all the necessary information to segment them in your email marketing software and send email drip campaigns to them regarding the webinar and the product you’re promoting, which should include product photos and videos to add a much-needed visual element to your emails. From there, you will have created different touchpoints to warm them up to a sale!
When finding people to invite to your webinar, finding LinkedIn leads is the way to go. Many professionals who want to grow their network and learn about the best business practices frequent this platform. Promoting your webinars here allows you to generate more sign-ups as a result.
You can even repurpose the webinar by chopping up sections and sharing them on different online channels.
For instance, you can chop up the webinar and edit them into short, compelling videos for sharing on different platforms. This works best on sites like Instagram and especially with Instagram stories, which are great for disseminating short, impactful visual content to drive engagement and generate leads across the platforms.
To set up your webinar, you can’t go wrong with a tool like WebinarJam. It has all the tools necessary to attract the right audience and broadcast your webinars to various platforms.
Create Calculators
When making a decision, your leads are ready to purchase or interact in another way. It's just a matter of ironing out the kinks — from the services included in the package to its total price.
To help warm up your leads, create calculators that will help compute the total cost of the services.
Calculators are also effective in generating leads at the awareness stage.
For instance, Jon Dykstra from Fat Stacks Blog has a free online website valuation calculator that visitors can use to compute the value of their website based on different factors.
In this example, Jon uses the calculator to provide information about the variables that affect website costs. While he has courses for sale, he's not pushing it through his calculator. At best, this campaign helps position Jon as an authority in niche websites.
Similarly, this calculator asks personal finance questions to help you figure out if you can afford a mortgage. It’s also available as a template.
Tools like involve.me allow you to create different types of calculators for various stages of your sales funnel. This way, you can utilize this interactive content from educating your audience about your business down to convincing them to subscribe to your services.
Conclusion
These interactive methods of generating leads offer something for everyone, which is why it's important to utilize them if your business has an online presence.
If not, then this strategy may be worth exploring further because these tools help people convert into email subscribers and even paying customers by creating a rapport with them before presenting any offers.
Therefore, there shouldn’t be a reason not to give them a try!
