Let’s be honest – there’s nothing that social media marketers want more than better leads. Without new social media leads, there’s basically no chance that your marketing materials will get in front of fresh eyes – and that’s crucial if you want your business to grow.
However, generating new leads is easier said than done. With more and more companies focusing their efforts on lead generation, you’re going to have to stay ahead of the game if you want to make sure that your company is the one benefitting from new social media leads.
That’s where interactive content comes in. Rather than focusing on traditional static content – think infographics, email messages, or pictorial advertisements – interactive content is all about transforming your customers’ relationships with your marketing material so that they are deeply engaged with it.
After all, you’re going to be much more likely to click through on a piece of content, make a purchase, or share it with your friends if you’ve already had a significant interaction with it, meaning that interactive content is a great way to boost your lead generation.
But how can you actually use interactive content to generate social media leads? Read on to find out our eight effective tips.
What Is Interactive Content on Social Media?
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To put it simply, interactive content is any piece of content that encourages user participation. This means that, rather than just scrolling yet another image on Instagram, you might be prompted to choose an option in a poll.
It’s this interaction that elevates interactive content above passive content, ensuring that you’ll be more likely to generate a lead from these interactions. But how does this happen, in practice? Here are some of the specific ways in which interactive content generates social media leads.
Improved Conversions
When it comes to social media marketing, getting your marketing content in front of potential customers is only half the battle. Getting viewers to click through to your website and make a purchase (for that lead to convert) is much more difficult.
Interactive content breaks down an invisible barrier between your brand and the user: by already clicking on an interactive bit of content, they’re much more likely to continue interacting with your company.
Better Engagement
Traditional static content can easily be swiped past or ignored – ultimately, it’s not very engaging. On the other hand, interactive content is designed to be especially engaging. This means that your leads will spend more time with your brand, whether that’s watching a video, completing a poll or quiz, or talking with a bot.
Wide-Ranging Lead Recording
Because interactive content requires the users to make deliberate actions when using your content, there are a lot of opportunities for you to record their contact details and other valuable information.
Let’s assume, for example, that you are a VoIP service provider who’s just introduced a contact center feature to its portfolio. You want to promote this on Instagram, but feel that a static post may either bore your audience or result too tech-heavy.
So, you come up with the idea of creating a short, interactive quiz. You begin by asking your followers to select the best contact center definition out of a range of possible answers, and move on to describing features and benefits.
At the end of the quiz, users are prompted to enter their email address in order to receive the results. This will give you a lead for future sales campaigns while also creating an enjoyable and memorable experience for the user.
Valuable Data Collection
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Similarly, this sort of engagement with your content will produce data about your customers that are often invaluable for modern sales engagement strategies. With more data about your customers’ demographics, interests, and behaviors, you’ll be able to reshape and perfect your marketing techniques.
8 Tips to Generate Social Media Leads With Interactive Content
Even if your social media marketing campaigns are still based on a traditional form of social media content, it’s never too late to incorporate interactive elements. Below you’ll find eight great tips for creating interactive content that boosts your lead generation efforts.
Understand Your Audience and Build a Strategy
Before you can start to think about the exact pieces of interactive content that you want to design, you should probably get a clear understanding of what you want to achieve by using interactive content. This means that you must always start by building a simple strategy that can be communicated easily to everyone in your marketing team.
Most importantly, you should put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Think about why they usually use social media and what they want to get out of your content. Properly understanding your audience means that you can set up a few target customer profiles based on demographic data, ensuring that every piece of content is designed with someone specific in mind.
Creating a strategy and knowing your audience helps you have simple and easy-to-understand guidelines to keep in mind when it comes to designing your interactive content, stopping you from mindlessly wasting time, energy, and resources on content that interests no one.
Use Polls, Surveys, and Quizzes
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When the time comes to begin building pieces of interactive social media content, it can be difficult to know where to start. That’s why we recommend polls or quizzes. These can often be very simple to design, with most social media platforms including in-built polling tools.
These are designed for everyone who uses the app, so they won’t require any specific training or extra investment. Think about the polls that anyone can post on their Instagram story – they’re not designed by an experienced team of marketing experts but will still count as a piece of interactive content.
On top of this, once you’ve been able to set up more sophisticated polls and quizzes, you’ll be able to use the information from these to collect important data about your customers. Polls could ask users about their shopping habits, for instance, which will shape your new products and your future marketing campaigns.
Set Up Chatbots
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are starting to revolutionize the business world, from call center AI to writing tools like ChatGPT. You can use this technology to produce social media leads through the use of chatbots.
Think of chatbots as an interactive version of a simple lead generation form. Rather than having to get the user to write their information and personal details into a standardized (and quite boring!) form, a chatbot will interact with the user. They’ll respond to any queries and automatically prompt the user to input certain information.
This will make potential customers more likely to leave their contact details or social media information, as they will be far more engaged in the process.
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On top of this, chatbots aren’t just an interactive alternative to a basic lead generation form. You can also use them to suggest products or services to customers and provide a friendly helping hand for new visitors to your site, ultimately making customers more likely to make a purchase.
Make Your Information-Heavy Content Interactive
So far, we’ve focused on some straightforward ways of turning previously static content into interactive materials. However, that’s not to say that interactive content is just restricted to social media polls and quizzes or to turning lead generation forms into chatbots. Instead, interactive content is a great way to make even the most dense pieces of information more engaging.
You should start by looking at your website for any long or complex pieces of text – often these are necessary but can quite easily put off customers. You could convert these pages into a more interactive format, for instance by adding widgets that track the user’s progress as they read.
At the same time, you could integrate this into your chatbot strategy and have a bot pop up and encourage the user to download the information by signing up. This will automatically generate a lead for you as you’ll have their contact details.
Use Videos Rather Than Static Images
Video marketing has been around for a while now but there’s no doubt that it’s still a valuable and effective tool for improving lead generation and conversions. You might be wondering what’s so interactive about a video – if that’s the case, it’s important to keep in mind that using video rather than static images can work in multiple ways.
On the one hand, traditional videos are just a more engaging way of communicating with prospective customers on social media, meaning that you’ll likely gain more followers and subscribers. While this isn’t strictly a form of interactive content, any strategy that wants to increase your amount of interactive content shouldn’t forget about video marketing.
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On the other hand, you can easily turn traditional videos into interactive videos. If you embed a YouTube video into a social media post, for instance, you should easily be able to include a pop-up that will allow the viewer to click through and subscribe to your channel.
If you want to be even more ambitious, you can use interactive video technology to create a branching narrative, allowing the viewer to make choices and engage deeply with the video.
Build Games
This type of interaction – allowing your users to make choices and engage deeply with the content – is exactly why games can be such a useful form of interactive content. Of course, you probably won’t want your first bit of interactive content to be a complex video game but these are more easy to develop than many people realize.
Simple games embedded in your website are an interesting way to keep customers on your site – after all, haven’t we all spent a little too much time than we’d care to admit on a straightforward but addictive online game? You can link this to social media lead generation by encouraging players to share the game with friends or by requiring a signup with their social media accounts.
Create Competitions
Interactive content isn’t simply about making materials that are interactive on the screen. Instead, a popular – and long-established – form of interactive content is competitions. Let’s be honest, we all want some free stuff, don’t we? Competitions are interactive because they require customers to engage in a two-way relationship with your company or brand.
You might want to start by making a social media post advertising a competition for a free product. Whether you’re a travel influencer offering up an ultimate SPA day, or a tech startup giving away a free demo of your new enterprise cloud based phone system, you can be sure that your target audience will be interested.
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In order to make the competition worth it for your company, however, you should require people to like the post and follow your account in order to enter. You might also want to make entrants leave a comment and tag a friend to spread the word. Suddenly, you’ll have an explosion of social media leads for your future marketing campaigns.
Promote Your Interactive Content
Finally, you’ll need to keep on promoting your interactive content across your social media channels. This will mean that you constantly attract new users, while spreading your promotions across different social media platforms will draw TikTok followers to your Facebook page, for instance.
A great guideline to keep in mind is that any new piece of interactive content should be easily accessible to new visitors to your social media accounts, so link them in your Instagram profile or pin a Tweet about your interactive content. After all, there’s no point in creating interactive content if no one uses it!
Interactive Content: An Effective Way to Produce Social Media Leads
Now that you’ve read this article, you’ll know why interactive content – such as polls, videos, or games – can be so useful for brands looking to boost their lead generation and attract more social media followers or subscribers.
With our eight key tips, you’ll also be able to incorporate interactive content into your broader marketing strategy. What are you waiting for? Start crafting and sharing interactive content today and watch your social media lead generation boom.