4 Key Benefits of Interactive Marketing: Making the Most of Web 2.0

Avitage helps customers create, manage and deliver highly relevant and compelling content in multiple formats. Burns said the company’s services are focused on creating content like publishers to leverage multimedia for more compelling communication, as well as to operate lead management programs.

Marketing automation provider Eloqua is adapting to the growing trend, as the company created a new position, Director of Content. “The role is 100% focused on creating engaging content where no such content exists,” said Joe Chernov, who occupies the newly created position. “That is, to extract market-relevant expertise from peers, then package that knowledge into consumable content (videos; tweets; topical guides, etc.) and overlay it on top of the sales funnel and distribute it over the social web.”

Eloqua embeds a “social sharing” tool into email campaigns, designed to foster a peer-referral quality to email, ultimately aimed at extending the lifecycle of the program.

DemandGen Report tapped industry insiders to offer 4 key benefits of engaging prospects and customers with interactive elements:

1. Metrics- Traditional metrics, like email click throughs or web site visits can fall short because they don’t provide actionable data on how to prioritize follow-ups or qualification level. “If marketers are armed with new metrics that interactive elements can provide, you can deliver the right follow-up to the right people at the right time,” said Joan Babinski, VP Marketing, Brainshark.

Brainshark’s solutions are aimed at delivering rich, high-impact communication by transforming static business content such as PowerPoint slides, documents and web pages into high impact multimedia presentations.

Interactive video solutions provider Visible Gains has helped customers improve before and after response rates from 20% to 200% with valuable video content.

“We believe that interactive video for marketing is more than just tracking views, and more closely parallels to key metrics used for landing page campaigns,” said Craig Daniel, Co-Founder & VP Customer Development, Visible Gains. The company tracks opt-in rates, engagement profiles, conversion rates and user paths in marketing campaigns.

2. Engagement- Why stay stuck in a marketing rut when you can leverage the changing web technologies to adapt to prospects’ buying cycles? “Allowing the audience to self-select where they want to go next, or branching them to different resources based on how they are interacting with you, allows your prospect to gain more value, and you to educate them more effectively,” Babinksi said.

Burns added that capturing prospect attention is a big challenge for marketers, as well as realizing how to capitalize on that attention. In an instance where prospects are enjoying content and immediately finding the relevance and value, they are more likely to be interested and in tune with messaging.

3. Efficiency- By capturing more in depth data from prospects, marketers can adapt quickly and seamlessly to address their needs best. “By definition, interactive elements generate many more avenues for interaction — and, each interaction is captured and recorded, resulting in better intelligence on the visitors’ intent and interest level,” said Dennis Shiao, Director of Product Marketing, INXPO. “Number of views is certainly important, but there is so much more beyond the ‘view.’  The marketer now has the power to place relative weightings on individual actions (i.e. what’s important to you?) and be able to ‘score’ interactions based on the relative importance of each action.  In addition, by reviewing individual sessions, you can gain valuable insights into the “journey” of your visitor — how did they consume your content and in what order?”

INXPO’s virtual events platform is focused on mapping out a customer journey with clients to achieve objectives via a dynamic, multimedia experience.

Although the plethora of engaging tools offers something for every marketer, video is proving to be the cool, new kid on the block. “Communication, to be optimal, must not end,” he said. “Video and vignettes are more frequently shared than email and even documents. Audio motivates and explains complexity and delivers nuances more effectively than text.”

4. Extension- Repurposing marketing content and selling tools is an important trending strategy that, Babinski said, is a MUST for today’s marketers. “If you’re not doing it, you’re pouring resources down the drain,” she said. “We all spend so much time trying to deliver a stellar program or campaign; it’s important to think about how you can ‘chunk’ it up into components and tailor it for other audiences and distribution channels. It’s all about leveraging what you’re already doing today.”

Avitage’s Burns said companies need a better profess to create a continuous content engine for publishing compelling, relevant content in the many formats that viewers need today. Avitage shows customers how to re-purpose webinars to acquire knowledge and insight, as well as editing and converting to turn content into short articles and blog posts.

Social Gaming: The Next Big Thing?
While video games were typically relegated to teenage boys for recreation, the concept is making its way to the BtoB world. After all, prospects are just looking for some fun (and engagement, information and value)!

“Gaming and social provide tremendous uplift to BtoB marketing,” Shiao said. “The web is increasingly social, which, in some ways, makes BtoB marketing easier — if you leverage social in the right way, the viral nature of social allows your audience to handle promotion (and marketing!) on your behalf. With respect to gaming, we believe that product messaging can be effectively “distributed” within a game — and learning can also be effective within a gaming framework.”

Brainshark recently explored the concept of gaming for business in a webinar called “The Power of Play.” “Creating an entertaining experience, particularly one that people want to share with others, AND that educates is very compelling,” Babinski said. "The hard part is coming up with the compelling experience that is a perfect fit for your audience that also moves you closer to your business goal.”

Eloqua’s Chernov said a rise in geosocial and gaming components is underway for the BtoB marketing industry. “There are two reasons for this prediction,” he said. “First, business people tend to have ‘smart’ handheld, and these high-feature, high-function devices are idea for geosocial uses.  Second, BtoB companies still pump massive human and capital resources into events.  The ‘killer app’ for geosocial is likely to be event engagement.  Check-ins, scavenger hunts, badges, honorary titles, free prizes … these perks, all in the geosocial toolkit, will help companies increase attendee engagement at their events.”