improving lead generation engagement and...
TRANSCRIPT
Improving Lead Generation Engagement and Conversion with Interactivity & Usefulness
01Skyrocket Your
Results
03What is Interactive
Content?
04Lead Generation
Inspiration & Ideas
02Why Interactive Content Matters
Table of Contents
05Start Improving your Lead
Generation Results
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01You Need Leads
If so, then it’s likely you’ve been using one of the key tactics in the
unofficial lead-gen marketer’s playbook: Drive traffic into campaign landing
pages that include an offer and a form. For years, that’s about as complex
as it got when it came to scooping up lots of leads online. But with
competition for time, attention and hand-raisers heating up intensely with
each passing day, this old standby tactic is becoming less effective, and
leads are becoming harder & harder to capture.
If you are a marketer tasked with generating high quality, engaged leads,
you already know it’s hard enough to get a lead, let alone a great one.
Your visitors expect usefulness, relevancy, and interactivity from you, and
those expectations directly impact your ability to get those visitors to
complete your form. ‘Good enough’ lead-gen landing pages no longer
provide good enough results. Online visitors expect more.
High Quality
Interactivity
Engaging
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As competition heats up and marketers seek strategies to generate
quality leads in the face of increased clutter and higher expectations,
interactive content provides new opportunities for more engagement and
higher conversion rates. Interactivity turns tired lead-gen campaigns into
modern high-performing lead-gen machines.
Adding interactive content to your lead-gen touchpoints — both within
your main website as well as within your landing pages — creates an
opportunity for higher conversion rates. Here are three ways interactive
content enhances lead-gen opportunities:
1 Interactive content provides value to your audience through
usefulness. For example, if you provide a custom configurator of
your product, that’s useful—and people will register in order to use the
configurator. That same content in a static PDF might not be perceived as
valuable, because it’s really just a piece of marketing collateral (and who
wants to fill out a form to get marketing collateral!?). The more perceived
value something has, the more likely you are to get people to complete a
form to access or use it.
2 Interactive content is easy to test, with bigger potential
outcomes. Just as you can test a headline on your landing page,
you can test the color, layout, copy and forms of interactive content. Heck,
you can even test two entirely different experiences against each other to
see which converts better. Interactive content should be tested, just like
any other online experience, and those tests should yield conversion lift
and learning. These types of tests can yield much bigger lifts than a simple
headline or button test.
3 Interactive content provides a wealth of insightful data.
All visitor behavior in an interative experience can be captured.
Leverage this data by appending it to the lead record and pass off a rich
lead record to your inside sales team showing all responses and clicks
that visitor took within the experience. And don’t stop there. Leverage this
data at the aggregate level by viewing trends in responses, drop off rates,
and outcomes and use this information to fuel new content and new tests
for higher conversion rates. Better yet, track and leverage user behavior
across all your interactive experiences to further personalize and target.
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The old tactic of putting a form on a simple landing page with a white
paper offer is so over. And interactive content provides a powerful way
to engage and convert your traffic.
But we bet you are wondering how to get started. Have no fear!
Brainstorming ways to increase the interactivity of your lead generation
campaigns is easier than you think. You probably already have existing
content that can be transformed into an interactive experience.
• Turn your list of industry-specific best practices into assessments your
visitors can take to rate themselves for how well they are executing those
best practices.
• Take your best sales person, pick their brain on how they engage with
your best customers. Turn that into a product configurator that helps
your visitors determine which products are right for them.
• Leverage your internal pricing spreadsheets by turning them into
interactive calculators that let your buyers determine specific pricing
or price ranges for your products & solutions.
• Turn your audience segmentation messaging into conversion paths
that allow your visitors to easily segment themselves to quickly drill
down into the most relevant content you’ve got for them.
“A relationship exists between placing a high
priority on digital experience marketing and revenue growth. 76% of participants reporting revenue growth in the most recent fiscal year also put a high priority on digital experience creation. For organization that reports declining revenue growth, only 6% report digital experience creation as a high priority.”
~ Demand Metric, Digital Marketing Landscape, The Power of Digital Experiences in 2014
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02Why Interactive Content?
Online visitors expect useful, meaningful digital experiences every time
they interact with your brand. Your digital touchpoints are critical
opportunities to meet (or exceed) visitor expectations through easy,
enjoyable, interactive experiences. Several trends are quickly converging
to radically raise the expectation of the average web visitor.
• Mobility: Users are increasingly conditioned to interact with mobile apps,
which provide an instant feedback loop. Book an appointment. Play a
game and see your stats. Transfer funds between accounts. Put in data,
get a result. There is an inherent interactivity in a mobile app that users
have come to expect with their browser-based experiences as well.
• Utility: It’s no longer enough to pitch your wares and win the sale.
Consumers expect useful experiences from the brands they do business
with. A helpful experience will always win over a self-serving experience
that simply overloads the visitor with information.
• Content Overload: With the explosion of content available at every
turn, web users are increasingly feeling overwhelmed. Visitors now either
stockpile content to read ‘at a later date’, or they surf & skim, ‘snacking’
on content rather than dining.
Mobility
Youtility
Content Overload
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Digital touchpoints can drive revenue, lower costs, build brands, and engender customer loyalty. But to achieve these potential benefits, companies must deliver digital interactions that meet their customers’ needs in easy and enjoyable ways.
~ Forrester Research, Top 10 Ways To Improve Digital Experiences
Transform static content into interactive, useful digital experiences.
Forrester Research identifies 3 types of customer perceptions that a
digital experience must align with:
Enjoyable — How enjoyable were they to do business with?
Easy — How easy were they to do business with?
Useful — How effective were they at meeting your needs?
“The degree of sophistication of the digital experience that is created is a clear predictor of brand perception.”
~ Demand Metric, Digital Marketing Landscape, The Power of Digital Experiences in 2014
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03What is Interactive Content?
An interactive content experience is a browser-based marketing experi-
ence designed for user engagement. It’s not a mobile app that runs on a
mobile operating system as an installed application. Rather, it’s an inter-
active, engaging experience that’s lives within the browser, regardless of
device. It’s desktop, mobile, tablet—it’s any device, any time. Interactive
content can take the form of:
• Quizzes
• Assessments
• Surveys
• Contests
• Conversion Paths
• Calculators
• eBooks
• Wizards
• Configurators
• eCatalogs
• Interactive White Papers
• Lookbooks
Interactive content typically includes some sort of feedback loop where
the outcome is directly impacted by the interaction of the visitor. In this
way, even a sophisticated, logic-based landing page or microsite can be
categorized as interactive content.
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04Lead Generation Inspiration & Ideas
Ready to drive way more leads with interactive experiences? Here are
some ideas and examples to get your ideas flowing!
Content Wizard
Content wizards let visitors drill down to their favorite content while
enabling you to learn who’s on your site and what interests your visitors
have. Rather than showing long lists of white papers and webinars to
wade through, content wizards provide a more enjoyable and personal
user experience and allow you as the marketer to gain specific knowledge
about your leads. Ask your visitors about their interests or how they like to
consume content, and serve up the most relevant stuff you’ve got.
Lead-Gen Options:
• Allow visitors to go through the wizard, and insert a form before they access or
download the resulting content.
• At the end of the wizard, reveal only long excerpts from the content, and have visitors
register to get full access to the content.
• Try a lead generation form at the start of the wizard and have visitors register first.
Real-Time Testing Ideas:
• Try varying the number of steps in the wizard to see how increasing or reducing
the pre-conversion steps impacts conversion rate.
• Test where you insert the form to determine where visitors are most likely to bail
or convert.
• Test content (copy, images, buttons) at the start of the wizard to decrease bounce rate.
Testing Lab
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Conversion Path
Do you have specific messaging for verticals, roles, or business need and
struggle with getting the right content into the right hands? A conversion
path will help visitors step themselves through a series of simple choices
to quickly get to the most relevant and targeted information. The post-
choice page is then more specific to the visitor’s interest and more likely to
convert their initial engagement into conversion. And, conversion paths are
mutually beneficial—giving marketers valuable segmentation data tied to
the resulting lead record and tied back to the referring source of traffic.
Lead-Gen Options:
• After visitors have stepped through the choice(s), have a lead generation form
before providing the relevant asset or information.
• After visitors have completed a short lead form in your conversion path, use your
‘thank you’ page to upsell a “contact sales now” option, helping you get the most
interested leads into your sales team’s hands instantly.
• Pass all conversion path choices into your CRM or marketing automation along
with the lead record, so you can use that segmentation information for future
nurture tracks.
Real-Time Testing Ideas:
• Try testing different segment labels and calls-to-action to minimize bounce rate.
• Try testing different page layouts, visually emphasizing the most important
segments first.
• Track your tests to see how the various segment labels impact bounce rate
and/or conversion.
Testing Lab
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Quiz / Assessment
Turn your best practices into an online self-assessment or quiz. Based on
visitor responses to questions, you can deliver personalized recommen-
dations for improvements. You can use the data that you gain from the
answers to drive targeted marketing automation programs and to surface
warmer leads to sales with pre-fab insight into pains. For quizzes to work
well, they must offer valuable information.
Lead-Gen Options:
• Try gating the quiz results at the very end. After completing the assessment, the
visitor is highly curious to see their results and will be more likely to convert.
• Let visitors take the quiz or assessment without any registration, including the results
and offer to send personalized recommendations as an option.
• Try the old standby—if your content is of very high value, require visitors to complete
a form before providing them access to the quiz or assessment.
Real-Time Testing Ideas:
• Test radically different versions of your first page to see which version reduces
bounce rates and increases engagement with the quiz.
• Test where you insert the lead generation form—try requiring sign-up before taking
the quiz versus before getting the recommendations versus only if the respondent
wants to receive the recommendations via email.
• Test different number of questions and or answers to optimize for quiz completion
and conversion.
Testing Lab
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Calculator
Turn your internal pricing spreadsheet into an online calculator. Even
complex pricing can be converted into a pricing range estimator. Most
organizations have something that can be calculated using an engaging
app-like experience. This provides the immediate gratification that B2B
buyers crave while allowing sales to continue to build value prior to
delivering a specific price quote by providing them with highly price-
qualified leads.
Lead-Gen Options:
• Offer to send pricing results from the calculator to the prospect instantly via email,
rather than displaying the pricing results in the calculator itself.
• Display pricing in the calculator with a prominently featured form to contact sales.
Real-Time Testing Ideas:
• Try varying form fields to determine optimal form length.
• A calculator is a great place to test different headlines, images and calls to action
around the calculator itself.
• Test different forms of calculators (sliders versus text inputs, for example)
Testing Lab
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Configurator
Do your products or services require complex configurations to
determine the right personalized solution? Configurators allow visitors to
assemble or package your product or service to what they specifically
are looking for. This provides a valuable service to the visitor while
providing marketing with even more valuable packaging data on what
visitors need and want. This insight can be used in marketing automation
programs as well as in personal selling to cater messages and offers,
which makes sales and marketing smarter, more likely to satisfy visitor
expectations, and more likely to convert traffic into leads.
Lead-Gen Options:
• Use a lead generation form at the end before giving the visitor the configuration results.
• Share a summary of the configuration, but offer to send complete configuration
results via email.
Real-Time Testing Ideas:
• Experiment with the number of steps and questions in your configurator to optimize
for engagement & completion.
• There is often reluctance to divulge information deemed too personal or specific,
so experimenting with varying degrees of specificity can reveal the sweet spots at
which information gathering and conversion optimization are in alignment.
• Test layout and copy on the first screen of the configurator to decrease bounce rate
and get more visitors engaged with the experience.
Testing Lab
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Game
Games are entertaining ways to engage, educate and convert
prospects. For example, rather than answering survey questions for
themselves, visitors can guess which answers were most popular
amongst their peers. In answering, they are exposed to shared
pains, problems, and solutions that drive demand. Simple guessing
games provide another way to communicate strategically compelling
information. Not only does it provide knowledge, but gives your
brand that standout attention to draw in qualified leads.
Lead-Gen Options:
• Allow visitors to play the game and insert the form before receiving score.
• Reveal the game score and insert the form to reveal where they stack up against
others that have played.
• Try a lead generation form at the start of the game and have visitors register
before playing.
Real-Time Testing Ideas:
• Game incentives are great to experiment with. Try monetary incentives versus
social recognition versus an asset offer to stimulate engagement and conversion.
• Test different conversion points —pre-game versus post-game —to see which
delivers the most conversions.
Testing Lab
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Voting / Survey
Voting and surveys for preferences can be an easy-to-tap motive for
visitors. Extending the experience to show how the visitor’s answer
compared to the votes of others can further deepen interest and desire.
When the reveal of results shows shared pain that can be solved by the
brand, engagement can turn into persuasion. While it can be difficult to
use a voting app for lead-generation, they are often used to collect data
that can be used in sales enablement or useful information for other
marketing apps. However, surveys in a marketing context can be more
persuasive than ordinary research surveys.
Lead-Gen Options:
• Give visitors the opportunity to share their vote or survey results. Have inside
sales team follow those visitors on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. It’s a soft social lead,
but an engaged one!
• Offer to send updates on how the poll continues to trend, or to send total
survey results, to those respondents who provide their email address.
Real-Time Testing Ideas:
• Polls and surveys are a great place to promote a simple subscribe form for people
to sign up for your newsletter. Test different ways to promote your “subscribe” call
to action.
• Polls and surveys are also a great place to promote social engagement. Rather than
asking visitors to complete a form, ask for a follow, a tweet, a like, etc. Test different
placement of your social icons.
Testing Lab
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Interactive White Paper / eBook
Do you have an in-depth white paper? Turn it into an interactive, ‘choose
your own adventure’ eBook. Chunking up the white paper content into
interactive, navigable sections can bring your content to life in a highly
engaging way. Instead of a visitor downloading a 12-page white paper
to quickly skim through then throw away, entertain them with something
useful that they want to share.
Lead-Gen Options:
• Offer visitors a glance at the eBook or interactive white paper. Allow them to see
the first page or so, then insert a form for them to receive the complete content.
• Add in forms within each smaller marketing app used inside the interactive
white paper.
• Add in forms at various points for an optional subscribe, or to have the PDF
version of the whitepaper emailed to them instantly.
Real-Time Testing Ideas:
• Test varying form lengths to optimize for maximum conversions.
• Test various placements of the form throughout the interactive white paper/eBook
to determine where visitors are most likely to convert.
• If you want to give your visitors easy access to the PDF version, try placement
of your form, whether it be in the side rail, or on the last page, or continuously
viewable while scrolling.
• Try testing the gate within one of the supplemental marketing apps inside the
interactive eBook.
Testing Lab
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05It’s Your Turn to be Creative!
After taking a look at some ideas, it’s your turn to be creative. Grab
an existing content marketing asset and transform it into an engaging
interactive experience. It’s time to turn your content from “ho hum”
to exciting with useful, relevant, engaging interactivity. And once you
have your initial interactive experience, leverage the data you collect in
that one to personalize and target your second (and third, and fourth),
building deep visitor profiles that can be used to enhance your visitor
and customer experience even further.
Interactive Content Done Right
Commonly, interactive content is custom created by software
engineers or developers. While this provides the marketing department
with a high degree of customization for the final end-result, there are
some inherent inefficiencies with hard-coding. In addition to long lead
times & high costs for development, a coded experience is largely
inflexible and can’t be modified or changed without additional costs &
time. A modern marketing department needs an agile, flexible,
marketer-managed system for the creation and launch of interactive
content. An interactive content platform can drastically reduce the time &
cost associated with launching experiences, while providing
several significant benefits to marketing:
• Agile, flexible interactive content creation & launch—drag-and-drop
interface with simple rules-based logic give you tremendous power
without programmers
• Optimize both form & function—Rather than being restricted to just
one version of an experience, use built-in A/B testing to easily learn
which experiences & content are most effective at increasing engage-
ment & conversion rates
• Not one experience, but complete “interactive content capability”
throughout all your marketing—launch dozens or hundreds of different
experiences with no additional hard costs
• Share data across multiple experiences—every user interaction can
build behavioral and profile data that can be
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leveraged for personalization & targeting across your entire portfolio
• Reusable components—reuse content and functionality across
interactive experiences.
• Centralized and decentralized control—centralize brand control and
consistent measurement; decentralize creation and deployment
to brands, teams, regions, etc
• Simplified integration—single integration point connects all your
experiences into your marketing technology ecosystem; seamlessly
share data with CRM, analytics, marketing automation, and customer
data platforms
Next Steps
Implement interactive content and see how they can improve your cam-
paign results.
It’s time to turn your static content into interactive, useful, enjoyable
experiences. It’s what your web visitors expect, and the technology
exists to enable you to rapidly deploy and test interactive content while
minimizing development time and costs. Change your campaign results
from “so-so” to “wow” by decreasing bounce rate, increasing visitor
consumption of your content, and ultimately delivering far more leads and
sales to your organization.
In a world where every prospective
customer is facing an invitation avalanche,
where every business is asking people to follow
their tweets, read their blog, or watch their videos,
you must resist the temptation to communicate
solely and endlessly about your company, hoping
for the quick sale. Helping can replace selling, or
at the very least reduce the friction within that
sales transaction. And you can do this. You |can
help your customers learn… You can help them
plan… You can help them enjoy.
Jay Baer, in his New York Times best selling book Youtility says,
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More leads. More engagement. More revenue.Interactive content from ion interactive
ion interactive helps modern marketers produce engaging, interactive
content that stands out while generating leads and revenue. Launch
stunning user experiences across your content marketing, social
marketing, email marketing and advertising campaigns using our
scalable, agile interactive content platform. Powerfully creative, gorgeous
and highly interactive experiences can be created and tested without
developers. ion’s assessments, quizzes, lookbooks, ebooks, interactive
white papers, calculators and more are used to differentiate brands,
increase engagement, boost sales and improve conversions.
According to TechValidate: 73% of our customers double their conversions. 90% get positive ROI. And 95% would recommend us. Join them.
Get Started: meet.ioninteractive.com/getstarted or Call 1.888.ion.idea (466.4332) or
+1.561.235.7474 outside the US