Supercharge your Demand Generation with Interactive Content Marketing

Demand Generation, according to Wikipedia (my go-to for all modern definitions) is:

…the focus of targeted marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in a company’s products and/or services.

It’s basically the total sum of all initiatives designed to help drive demand in a target customer base. I think of demand gen pretty holistically (because, really, shouldn’t almost everything marketing does help drive demand?), including content marketing, organic & paid campaigns, social, email, events, etc. In these programs, we’re trying to move buyers in the demand funnel, from unaware to ‘ready to buy’.

And in case you are wondering, according to DemandGen.com, a demand funnel is:

…the process of qualifying and nurturing prospective customers from first interaction to closing as a customer. It means funneling each individual lead through from their first click — and their 50th click — and ensuring a seamless process throughout.

As people traverse this figurative funnel, it’s theoretically very linear. Like this great representation from Hubspot:

But of course, real life is pretty messy, and while the old buyer’s journey may have looked like the above, here’s what the real-world buyer’s journey actually looks like today (via Forrester):

Everything about how our buyers become aware, consider, and evaluate solutions & products is undergoing rapid transformation.

“Buyers control their journey through the buying cycle much more than today’s vendors control the selling cycle. In a recent survey, 74% of business buyers told Forrester they conduct more than half of their research online before making an offline purchase. This buyer dynamic changes the role of B2B marketing in a fundamental way.” — Lori Wizdo, Forrester

You’ve no doubt seen stats about this. Sirius Decisions research revealed that 80% of buyers conduct their own research online before ever engaging with a seller, and that as much as 70% of the buyer’s journey is done before they reach out to sales.

Even if you think stats like this are urban legend, the fact remains buyers can conduct as much, or as little, research on their own as they wish. Even when they are engaging with sales earlier in the process, they are likely still conducting a large portion of their evaluation outside of that sales process, on their own (more than likely, with their very large buying committees), which makes the buyer’s journey largely non-linear and random. Buyers may be hopping around from point A to point Z then back to E and on to D. You can’t control that, and it’s not even worth trying.

It’s no wonder that demand gen marketers are so focused on aligning content and demand gen. According to IDG Enterprise, it’s their number one priority. Content supports the buyer’s journey, which supports moving people through the demand funnel, which is how we generate demand. Content and demand gen are joined at the hip. But, unfortunately, only 25% of tech demand gen marketers think their content is effective (again, IDG), and I’ve seen similar stats for other industries as well. Content has to be effective in order to get the job done, but we’re not feeling the impact we’d like.

So, what’s a marketer to do in the face of this messy, messy buyer’s journey that we can’t really control? Launch campaigns and toss out content into the world on a hope and a prayer that it lands just right wherever your buyer may happen to be in their journey?

Sort of.

Really.

First of all, it’s a steep mountain to climb to even get the attention of your buyers. I don’t think we should sugar coat this. By some reports, there are 4.5 billion pieces of content generated each day and 83,000 blog posts published each hour. Your audience is entirely inundated with content.

So it’s no surprise that 46% of buyers say they are overwhelmed with the amount of content available, based on research by Demand Gen Report. And 34% say they have less time to devote to reading and researching purchases.

This overwhelm leads to the behaviors we have all adopted — skimming and snacking on content, jumping from here to there. When was the last time you sat down and read a white paper cover to cover? Maybe it happens occasionally, but I bet it’s a lot less today than it was two years ago. According to Demand Gen Report, 46% of buyers say they prefer shorter format content, but I’m surprised that number isn’t far higher. And upwards of 90% of buyers say they prefer visual and interactive content that they can access on demand.

Why? Because it’s easier. And in some cases far more useful than wading through reams of content on the path towards a purchase decision.

Which leads me to interactive content and how it helps bridge that gap for your buyer — turning static content into useful tools and experiences that help support the buyer in their “self-service” journey.

The most popular types of content created, according to the Content Marketing Institute, is social media, case studies, blogs, e-newsletters, events, articles — the usual suspects.

But with interactive content, you can transform these passive pieces of content into things that actually engage, inspire, educate, convert and — most importantly — help illuminate the path to purchase. At ion, in our own marketing, we use a lot of static content (like this article), mixed in with lots of interactive experiences such as calculators, assessments, quizzes, interactive white papers, solution finders and the like. Our most successful customers do the same. Interactive experiences aren’t a replacement to your standard content marketing fare; they are supplemental (and often repurposed from the static content!). But being supplemental doesn’t make them less important.

A good demand gen program, aligned with the reality of the modern non-linear buyer’s journey, offers an array of supporting content and experiences that can be accessed at any point.

An article about the ROI of your solution is interesting and useful to your buyer (hopefully). A calculator that demonstrates the ROI is high impact, easy, useful and valuable (and much more likely to be shared as well). Of course, that ROI article and calculator are likely developed with the later stage buyer in mind, but you know that an early stage buyer may stumble on it in one of their first web searches. And that’s OK. Perhaps in a subsequent visit or search they will stumble on a quick and easy educational quiz designed for the high funnel, and it will keep them engaged and wanting more.

We have an interactive white paper that details what types of interactive content work well for the various stages of the buyer’s journey and how to better align content with demand generation. It goes far more in depth than this article can.

When we design interactive content, whether for ourselves or our customers, we always consider the context of where a visitor may be in their journey, what the objectives are for the piece, what the buyer needs & will find useful, and even how traffic may be arriving to the experience. In other words, we plan interactive content as though it would be a perfect linear experience in an orderly buyer’s journey, but we also know it will be stumbled upon, passed around and shared by a variety of buyers in a variety of stages from unaware to ready to buy.

The keys to making your interactive experience effective in spite of this are pretty straightforward:

• Always have a strong call to action, no matter what. Regardless of where something fits in the demand funnel, you have to tell visitors what you want them to do.
• Use progressive profiling wherever you can. Better yet, eliminate forms for visitors who have previously converted. Why keep popping up the same form, over and over, for repeat visitors to new experiences? It’s annoying and cumbersome and many users will just bail.
• Make as much of the interactive experience as accessible as possible. Give away as much of the content and the “tool” as you are comfortable with. Maybe even more than you are comfortable with. Have a 6 chapter white paper? Let visitors access 3 of them without having to register or fill out a form. If your content is good, they will fill out the form to access the remaining chapters. Offering an assessment? Let respondents see a summary of their results, offering the full results behind a form. Or let them see their full results, but provide a form to register if they want their results emailed to them.

Bottom line, you can’t fight the new, non-linear, totally buyer-driven buyer’s journey. So create pieces that can be useful to everyone in some fashion.

Anna Talerico is co-founder and EVP at ion interactive and blogs about interactive content at medium.ioninteractive.com.

The ion interactive enterprise SaaS platform empowers modern marketers to produce data-driven interactive content at scale and without code. ion’s marketing technology and services deliver measurable business value for hundreds of brands and agencies. ion’s platform launches, customizes and tests all types of engaging interactive digital experiences — infographics, ebooks, assessments, quizzes, lookbooks, interactive white papers, calculators, wizards and configurators. The platform delivers competitive differentiation, conversion performance and lead quality for in-house and agency teams. Connect with ion interactive on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Medium or visit ioninteractive.com.