How to generate more B2B leads: five types of interactive content to try

B2B tech audiences love interactivity. For a decade or more, they’ve been on starvation diet of whitepapers, fact sheets and case studies. If any market was ripe for an interactive content marketing makeover, it’s B2B tech audiences.

In fact, interactive content marketing is now being hailed as the ‘fourth wave’ of content marketing (plain text was phase one; rich media was phase two; and personalisation phase three). However, interactive content marketing doesn’t replace these previous trends, it builds and strengthens them.

Why content marketing needs a solid underpinning strategy

Brand utility is crucial for content marketing to be successful for B2B tech audiences. If your content helps an IT decision-maker make a business case, then you’re playing in right space.

In fact, how well you marshal facts, stats, trends and turning points determines how useful, compelling and engaging your content will be. Building your third-party credibility is key. Your testimonials and third-party facts and stats can help make your reader’s business case or proposal rock-solid. Explain and educate, and you’ll engage and persuade; this is true for both interactive content marketing and its more traditional cousins.

Five types of interactive content your B2B tech customers will find useful

1) Calculators

Results from ROI calculators should jump directly from your handy calculator to your reader’s proposal. With a couple of clicks, your reader can show their team projected returns for using your product or service. Remember, practically any benefit that scales can be brought to life in a calculator. If your collateral includes any calculators in spreadsheets, suggest turning them into online calculators for your client.

2) Interactive infographics

To convey cohesive stories, it helps if your infographic gives readers clear message hierarchies. One way to step readers through primary and secondary benefits is to simply mask some of the information with hotspots. Suddenly your readers’ eyes can relax, and they can play with the interactivity instead. Perhaps hide an ‘Easter Egg’ in your interactive infographic and challenge your readers to find it.

3) Quizzes

For B2B tech audiences, quizzes let your brand quickly convey how to solve a particular problem. They are particularly handy if you have a complex product portfolio that your audience needs to drill through. As a call to action, “Take our quiz” is powerfully compelling: it promises a challenge and the chance to personalise results, so it’s much more engaging than a promise of a brochure or data sheet.

4) Infographic quizzes

Another trick is to combine an infographic with a quiz. Populate your infographic with sliders and multiple choice questions, alongside your facts and stats. To avoid information overload, spread your interactive experience over several frames.

5) Self-assessments

Because they relate directly to helping your readers build business cases, self-assessments in various forms are perennial content marketing favourites. Invite your readers to assess their existing solution, and to compare it with your solution. Provide a checklist that summarises your solution’s key benefits. A parallel column lets readers check whether their existing solution supplies the same benefits. Make it easy for your readers to print and save their results so they can add their assessment to a proposal, business case or project folder.

How to create interactive content

These apps and platforms will help you develop high-quality interactive content:

• Ion Interactive
  Create, test and measure assessments, calculators, interactive infographics, quizzes, interactive whitepapers and more without writing code.

• Dot
  Choose from a range of apps for high-quality interactive quizzes, videos and whitepapers.