7 Ways to Incorporate Interactive Video Content Into Your Marketing Strategy

Interactive video content is the marketing equivalent of a sports car.

Take it on the open road and let it eat up the miles — and it’s the best thing ever!

Use it to commute from home to work in rush-hour traffic — and you don’t understand what all the fuss was about.

It’s the same with interactive video. It can easily outperform your other marketing efforts… but only if you put it to good use. And that’s exactly what we’re going to discuss in today’s article!

Keep reading: and you’ll learn 7 actionable strategies for incorporating interactive video content or interactive video animation (either will work) into your marketing.

Strategies that will generate more leads for your brand, improve your conversion rates, boost your average deal value, and nurture long-term relationship with paying customers.

Sound good?

Then let’s start with the #1 underused way to get more high-quality leads into your pipeline...

1. Flood your funnel with qualified leads using interactive video quizzes

Did you notice the alliteration there? We couldn’t resist.

And speaking of resisting… If you’ve ever found yourself completing an online quiz at 1 am, trying to find out what kind of onion you are — or something silly like that — you know how magnetic quizzes can be!

The good news is, they probably have the same effect on your customers. Everyone has this primal urge to discover something new about themselves. Online quizzes exist to scratch that itch. Because who needs sleep, right?

And if you deliver the quiz questions using interactive video content, you could convert more website visitors into eager subscribers than you’ve ever thought possible.

Here’s one obvious way to generate new leads with interactive video quizzes: use them to deliver customized lead magnets and other opt-in content to potential customers.

For example:

Let’s say that you run an Instagram marketing agency. You could offer potential clients a short quiz to evaluate their current Instagram strategy. At the end, based on their answers, they would get a personalized roadmap to getting more followers and successfully monetizing their account.

In the process, you would find out valuable information about their number of followers, social media marketing budget, and more. All that data would help you score this brand-new lead and determine if they would make a great client. Moreover, it would help you decide what kind of content they would find the most useful, and tailor the experience for them. Win-win!

2. Boost conversion rates with interactive calls to action and in-video lead forms

Good news! This is something you can do right now, whether or not you’re using interactive video content in your marketing. Here’s how...

You don’t want people to simply watch your video and do nothing — that would be a huge waste of money and time for everyone involved. Instead, you will want to elicit some kind of action from them:

• Calling a number
• Filling out a survey
• Clicking a link
• Entering their email

Back in the day, you would have to add standalone copy to your video description or landing page to make it happen. But now you don’t have to! You can accomplish the same thing with:

1. Video annotations, or
2. In-video opt-in forms

Virtually every video platform supports annotations (or you can just use YouTube for this) — and you can use Wistia or another advanced video hosting website to enable opt-ins and other interactive elements within your videos.

There you have it — you don’t even need to design an interactive video from scratch!

But if you did do that, you would be able to do a lot more with this tactic, like customize your calls to action based on the viewer’s choices during the experience. Next week, we’re going to take a look at one such video that uses this strategy to great effect.

For now, let’s move on to #3...

Brands like Twitter, Uber, Hubspot, and others are already using whiteboard video to attract more customers. Discover exactly how they do it, along with 9 more business-boosting tips – like how to increase your conversion rates by 20%!

Click here to download your copy of “Top 10 Ways to Use a Whiteboard Video”

3. Delight customers with interactive video animation

The dominant conversation about marketing is… dull, for lack of a better word. It’s always about educating your customers, and delivering value, and solving their problems, and communicating your message, and so on.

All these are important, to be sure. But...

One thing marketers often overlook is the importance of delighting customers. Of entertaining them. Of giving them a fun, memorable experience that might not be useful in any other way except making them feel good inside — and that’s OK!

So if you want to build a strong, lasting relationship with your customer base, treat them to an interactive video animation about them — or something they love and care about.

For instance:

Let’s say that your company sells camping gear, and your main target market is families with two or more kids who enjoy outdoorsy adventures together.

You could create a “family road trip” experience — one where the viewers would have to make choices, brave the elements, and solve problems. And at the end you could simply invite them on your website or ask them to follow you on social media.

It’s a simple concept, because it doesn’t have to be anything else. With interactive video animations like these, your goal is simply to create something relatable to your target market. To bring them joy.

Because when you make people feel joy, they remember it — far more strongly than being educated or being sold to!

4. How to drive pre-orders with interactive video content

When you launch a new product or service, would you prefer to offer it to:

1. Absolutely everyone, or
2. A select group of interested people?

Option B is the way to go. On the surface, it makes sense to pitch as many prospects as possible, you actually stand to generate more sales from a smaller number of people who are truly psyched for that product or service you’re about to release.

This goes back to the idea of 1,000 True Fans, first coined by Kevin Kelly. So the question becomes: how do you identify your most likely buyers before you launch something new?

Interactive video content is one way to do that. Here’s an example:

Imagine that you’re developing a high-end consulting program for business owners who want to go from 6 figures to 7 figures within a year. Among other things, you want to know:

• How many 6-figure business owners are in your audience?
• Do they actually want to grow to 7 figures?
• What are the biggest challenges they need solved?
• Are they ready to invest in something like this?

You can create an interactive video animation that asks your customers all of these questions. It would show them that the opportunity is there, confirm their commitment to the goal, and lay out the challenges they might be struggling with.

Once they pick their #1 challenge, you would give them some stellar advice about how to tackle it, right there in the video. Something they can apply right away and get results.

Finally, you would end with inviting those customers on a waiting list for your new program. Or better yet, paying a fully refundable deposit to book an interview to determine if it’s a good fit for their business.

There — you’ve just successfully created a way to identify and engage the likeliest buyers for your new service!

5. Maximize deal value using interactive video content

Each time a customer buys from you is an opportunity to offer them added value with products and services that precede, follow, or complement their purchase.

Nobody ever walks into, say, a car dealership expecting to buy only a car with zero customization options or add-ons. The same holds true for anything: consulting, ecommerce, online courses, books, furniture, you name it. Not only does it help your cash flow, but it’s also great for consumers who want to get everything they need from one vendor — instead of buying ten things from ten different businesses.

(So, basically everyone!)

Whether or not you rely on interactive video animation to market your offers, you want to be using this strategy all the same. However, it becomes extra powerful when you combine it with a persuasive piece of interactive video content.

For example:

Let’s pretend that you sell products that help people to have the best sleep of their lives. And your best-selling item is a memory foam mattress that everyone wants.

So after someone orders one of your mattresses, you could just send them to a good old thank-you page and be done with it…

...or you could show them an interactive video that asks a few questions about their sleeping environment, and how they feel when they wake up (terrible).

Then, customers follow along, clicking the responses that best describe their situation. In the process, your video educates them about what they could do to sleep better and wake up rested:

• Improve humidity in the room. “By the way, our other customers love this humidifier…”
• Block out external light sources. “And here’s a comfy sleep mask at a discount…”
• Expose their body to white light. “Here’s a light-based alarm clock that does just that...”

And so on; you get the idea.

Now, your customers probably didn’t even know all that stuff existed. But if they are having sleep issues — and they take them seriously enough to splurge on a high-end mattress — it’s a safe assumption that they will see the value in those other products you have to offer!

6. Increase customer lifetime value with interactive video onboarding

This strategy is perfect if you’re unsure whether interactive video content will pay off right away and deliver you that bump in conversions you want. It engages your customers after they’ve paid, and entices them to use your business for longer.

That’s right — customer churn is a huge problem in almost every industry, and interactive video content can help you solve it!

If you want to maximize lifetime customer value, those initial hours and days after the sale are critical. If your brand-new customers encounter something that frustrates them or confuses them, they might leave — and you will miss out on a lot of revenue.

As nice as that would be, you and your employees can’t give personal attention to everyone who buys from your brand for the first time. The next best thing is to give them an engaging, interactive onboarding process that guides them towards meaningful results… fast.

For example, if you sell exercise equipment, your interactive video content could guide new customers through their very first workout using your product. They could:

1. Pick their goal — burning fat or building muscle.
2. Select the muscle groups they want to train.
3. Determine the frequency and the duration of the workout.
4. Watch a workout tailored to their choices and follow along!

This is just a rough example, but we hope that it gets the point across — for new buyers, you will want to deliver meaningful results as soon as possible. Great onboarding is a great way to do that… and it’s hard to beat interactive video content when it comes to engagement and scalability!

7. Interactive video content for recruiting: hire the right people without wasting time and money

Finally, one of the most underrated — yet most valuable — uses for interactive video content is... recruiting.

Hiring the right people is a universal challenge for all businesses, great and small. Companies are willing to jump through many hoops to determine if an applicant is going to fit in with the rest of the team and do good work.

And they do it with good reason: a hiring mistake can cost you as much as multiple six figures in the long run! If only there were a way to make sure if someone is a good fit before you spend all this time and money qualifying them…

Well, there is a way! Interactive video content can help you accomplish within a few minutes what used to take days and weeks: determine how well someone is going to fit with your environment, your company culture, and your high standards.

An interactive recruiting video can test a potential candidate in multiple ways:

• Place them in a workplace scenario to see how they will respond to typical challenges your employees face every day.
• Evaluate their personality and culture fit by asking questions. Remember quizzes, from #1? It’s like that.
• Showcase your company from the best possible angle, making them even more eager to join the team (once you ensure that they have what it takes).

Kick your marketing up a notch with interactive video animation

Next week, we will demonstrate five of our favorite interactive video examples that you’ll want to see — and learn from!

For now, though, we want to hear from you:

If you think that your business could benefit from an awesome interactive video animation, let’s talk about it. We’ll happily discuss your ideas, help you strategize and refine the topic — and come up with an exciting way to use your future video in your marketing!

Contact us today to book a no-cost, risk-free pow wow to discuss your interactive video animation! You can do that by clicking here – or just fill out the form underneath this article, and we’ll be in touch with you post-haste!

P.S. Hungry for more posts about growing your business with interactive video? Check out this article about using interactive video content for marketing automation.