Increase Conversion Rates with Interactive Video

What is interactive video?

Lately, the conversation has been focused on short-form video , but interactive video is one we should be talking more about.

Interactive video is a non-linear form of media that allows viewers to engage with the video they’re watching by clicking on hotspots, answering questions, choosing their own paths, and other forms of engagement.

Interactive video can allow viewers to control “what to do next,” and watch the characters in the video respond to their decisions. This permits branching, playing out consequences of making choices, jumping to what interests you, and watching events unfold through the eyes of different characters.

Lightbulb moment: HubSpot's 2022 video marketing report revealed that interactive video offers the fifth-highest ROI, behind product-related, funny and trendy, and behind-the-scenes videos. In addition, 47% of marketers surveyed say interactive content is one of the most effective lead generators.

If you have ever experienced marketing and sales funnels (you read the content of a web / landing page, take an action to click on a call to action button or fill in a form, depending on what choice you made you will be presented with a next page and it will guide you through a marketing and sales process to match your needs with the seller's solutions. Think of interactive video as being a slick way of doing something similar but rather than the visitor having to read a ton of content, they click a button about something that they are interested in, and someone speaks to them about that topic and what next steps to take. Convinced? Not yet, ok let's take a more detailed look below.

Our real case Autus Interactive Video

As a business we like to be ahead when it comes to sales and marketing technology. With this in mind we have been exploring using the interactive video below to automatically popup bottom left corner in widget form on our website. Can't wait to our new website is up and running (this summer!), as we are going to keep pushing the boundaries with interactive video. This real live example below allows us to make a very fast intro to our website visitors and allow then to select what they are interested in (CRM, Marketing Automation, Digital Marketing) and for our founder to respond with a further message / call to action, whether that be offering up a free relevant ebook / guide, book an appointment or something else. It also allows the visitor to respond by text, audio or video...of course we prefer video, and we can respond back with video replies.

Warning: We are not professional actors and neither is this a professionally shot video, it's a real, raw and pragmatic example of our first attempt at trialing the use of interactive video that we wanted to share - minus the marketing fluff and cheese!

Go on try it out and see if you can get ideas on how it could work for your business.

There are different ways you can use interactive videos in terms of their placement on websites. The above is an embed method and it takes you to a page where you can interact and have a further dialogue, pushing the visitor through a workflow / funnel. In fact, if you request our ebook on offer, we have also integrated the video funnel with our email system, and it sends the book to the visitor if they request it.

Professional Tip: Take it a stage further and integrate with your favourite CRM and Marketing Automation tools to further nurture, engage and follow up with your prospects and customers.

Another method is the widget or floating widget version of the interactive video and that can popup like a chatbot on the bottom or middle of your web page. Visit our home page and experience the widget version of the same interactive video above and note how it works slightly differently. Try out the widget version here.

Finally another cool method of where we use our interactive video is linkaroo and you can see the interactive video in action on our own linkaroo here .

How can I use interactive video?

There are many ideas for using interactive video and we have listed 6 that we believe will benefit many businesses.

Lead Generation

Stand out and make your lead-gen funnels more personal, to get more, higher quality leads.

Recruitment

Make better, faster hiring decisions using pre-recorded video to screen and interview applicants.

Sales

Create a more personal sales experience and watch your conversion rate rise!

Testimonials

Make collecting video testimonials easy for both you and your happy customers.

Audience engagement

Make your story impossible to ignore through video and start building better relationships with your audience.

Training & Education

Scale your 1:1 services with video or engage with your students after class.

How to move forward with Interactive Video

Create A Specific Scenario

Before you create your interactive video, you must build a concept. What will the video be about? What’s the journey you want to take viewers on?

Your answers to these questions should be driven by your marketing objectives. Otherwise, it will be difficult to create a successful concept.

Once you have that sorted out, how will you engage the audience? Given the various types of interactive content you can have, you’ll need to determine which one will work best.

Consider which Tool / Platform is best for your needs

The tool / platform choice will depend on the type of content and workflows you require and what you want to achieve from this. Try some out, take advantage of free trials, seek advice if stuck, but don't site still, as this is definitely going to be a huge benefit to most businesses.

Once you have decided which tool / platform to go with, then just do it...don't wait try it out with a simple scenario. As you will see with our first Autus interactive video above, we are not movie stars and just try to add value in a natural way.

Test and Evaluate

Once you are up and running with your first interactive video, it's time to assess its performance. At which points in your flow do you get more engagement, how many interactions are you getting, are you getting leads and what for. Of course, the video might not be the problem of no leads, you might have other marketing challenges with overall lead generation and website traffic etc.

The key thing is to keep reviewing, adapting where necessary, maybe consider integrating with other sales and marketing tools for a broader customer experience. Try different presenters, topics, flows...the opportunities are endless really!

Best Interactive Video Tools

Many tools exist and as this is a relative new market for video technology, it's not clear who will ultimately win the race. We do have a preference so far for Videoask .

Our friends at HubSpot have such a wealth of great blogs and are just the best at creating amazing marketing and sales content, check out their more comprehensive blog on interactive video and see some more examples here . Of course, if you are looking for a free CRM, look no further than HubSpot .

About Autus

Autus provide Digital Marketing Services, Marketing Automation Services and Revenue Growth Platforms (CRM, Marketing and Sales Automation) to help sales and marketing personnel and teams build efficient and effective sales and marketing best practices and automate their marketing and sales processes by leveraging personalised content, various digital marketing tactics, segmentation and behaviour of their prospects and customers.

Let's keep in touch!

If our team at Autus can help advise further, please don't hesitate to get in touch with our founder, Tom Berry.

We would love to know what challenges you're facing with your sales and marketing? ??

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