Interactive marketing offers immense potential, properly leveraged. Yet, many businesses still hesitate to implement this potent tool. To help you understand what you stand to gain and how you might utilize interactive marketing to build your relationship with prospects and current customers, we’ve put together this brief guide.
Within this article we’ll touch on the basics of interactive marketing and practical applications of interactive marketing. We also give you a few tips to keep in mind as you begin integrating these tactics into your marketing efforts. Let’s start with a simple definition.
What is Interactive Marketing?
Interactive marketing refers to a marketing strategy which allows consumers to connect with your company directly. This communication can take many forms. So it doesn’t necessarily refer to actual conversations. For example, a customer makes a particular decision within your ecosystem, triggering a particular automated response from your company.
Many forms of content marketing thus fall into the category of interactive marketing. The majority of web-based marketing either directly implements or benefits immensely from the integration of interactive marketing principles. Gamification, in which game-like elements are added to non-game interactions, are another increasingly popular approach to interaction. Here are some interactive marketing examples:
- A guest visits your site daily and receives a reward for frequent visits.
- Also, if you take questions via social media and upload an answer video once a week, that’s interactive marketing.
- Let’s say a customer signs up for your newsletter and indicates certain interests, and those interests trigger a specific set of emails, that’s also interactive marketing.
Who Uses Interactive Marketing?
Interactive marketing might be used by anyone within a company with a job related to marketing, customer interactions, or sales. Interactive marketing principles can be implemented on:
- Small scale, by having a single social media account take on a more interactive tone;
- Large-scale marketing strategy, guiding every aspect of your presence online and off.
To use interactive marketing on a larger scale, you’ll need marketing and sales teams to communicate frequently and clearly. This way you maximize the shared understanding of the audience and build a consistent narrative through different interactions. Without consistency, any given interaction won’t have much value beyond the immediate question of whether a prospect takes the next step. With a consistent company-wide focus on nurturing leads in an interactive manner, you can guide low-value prospects to become high-value prospects over a period of time.
It’s important to note that most of the popular approaches to online marketing today depend heavily upon interactive marketing. So even if your offline marketing doesn’t adopt gamification and similar tools, your online marketing team should take the time to become familiar with the tools available.
Ways in Which Interactive Marketing Can Help Your Business?
The biggest strength of interactive marketing lays in its ability to build a firm, lasting image in the mind of the customer. It’s potent for building your brand and powerful as a tool for name recognition. A prospect will naturally remember an interactive back-and-forth with a company more intensely and more fondly than a passive advertisement built for a general audience.
5 Tips for Using Interactive Marketing Successfully
1. Know Your Audience
Take the time to figure out who your audience is. If you can identify market segments in advance, do so. Otherwise, start looking for them immediately. After all, for most business models you won’t have time to put together specific responses for every individual you’re marketing to.
You need to identify likely reactions so you can deliver appropriate responses to given events. Put together buyer personas and vet your content against them thoroughly.
2. Authenticity Is Key
There are chances for your interactions to come across as inauthentic or manipulative. So they’ll have the exact opposite effect you’re looking for. Make sure you have someone working on content and experiences. That person needs to have a firm understanding and appreciation for the subject matter.
If you throw out too much nonsense, your audience will catch on and lose interest—or turn against you.
3. Experiment with Mediums
Don’t get too caught up in a single approach to interactive marketing. In the same way that an interactive experience settles more firmly in the mind of a prospect, being approached across multiple channels leaves a stronger impression. Text, video, social media, infographics, browser games, mobile apps, all of them are viable tools.
Use any and all that make sense given the demographics you’re targeting. The more points of contact you can create, the better you’ll do at cultivating prospects into leads.
4. Maximize Data Collection
The connection to your customers is only as valuable as your understanding of said customers. So make sure you’re collecting as much data as possible throughout the interactive marketing process.
Customer Relationship Management software, web analytics suites, these are the tools you’re going to need if you want to make interactive marketing—or any web-based endeavor—succeed in your hands.
5. Emphasize Experience Above All Else
Interaction matters because it is memorable. Make sure you’re delivering a high-value experience with your interactive marketing. Otherwise, it’s all for nothing. Think about how much of an impact a given piece of content will leave on the market segment you’re targeting.
It’s not enough to keep throwing empty experiences out there, if none of them leave any mark.
Wrapping Up the Hello
If you’d like to learn more about interactive marketing and other ways to empower your business and build your brand, follow us today on Facebook and other social media to receive regular updates. We’ll help you understand the cutting edge of marketing online. Also, we’ll give you the tips you need to make the most of the tools available to you today.
You can also read through the other articles on our blog, comment below, or contact us with questions. We’ll be glad to hear from you.
Images: depositphotos.com.