Every journey begins with a single step—so you’re going to want to make sure that step is in the right direction.
If you’re just figuring out where to begin with interactive content, this chapter is going to give you some tools and ideas that will help you take action!
If you don’t have any interactive content or you’re wondering where to begin, the answer is almost never “from scratch.” If you’re producing static content, you’ve already got assets you can convert into interactive pieces!
This chart shows how some common types of static content can be repurposed. Static formats are listed along the left, and interactive formats they can be repurposed into are listed along the top.
If you have product or service pricing sheets, why not turn those numbers into a calculator that gives your user the ability to price out their ideal purchase, before they even need to talk to sales!
Ok—so now, you’ve seen that you have options to start with existing content, repurposed into a wide variety of interactive experiences.
But while you could produce several different types of interactive content, which ones should you produce to help you reach your audience and your marketing goals?
There are a couple of helpful ways to think through this—mapping content experiences to the buyer’s journey, or mapping them to your campaigns and traffic sources. Let’s take a look at each and see what’s right for you.
The questions, concerns, pain points and interests of your audience change as they go through the buyer’s journey—so the content you share with your customers at each stage of the journey should be different, too!
In the early stages of the buyer’s journey, you and your buyer are strangers. They may not even know they have a need yet, and if they are strangers, they may not know who you are.
Content in this stage should be lightweight, easy to digest and easy to share. It’s not the time to ask for a big time commitment from your visitor, but a moment where you can help your visitor determine that they have a problem that needs solving, and educate them so that they see you as a viable solution.
As a buyer gets more serious about finding a solution to their problem, they’re going to need more and deeper information. In the mid stage of the buyer’s journey, your visitors want information that helps educate and inform them—and you want to use your content to accelerate the journey towards making a decision.
This stage is about arming the lead with information, overcoming their objections and showing them that you’re not just a viable solution—you’re the best one.
Content here tends to be more in-depth and personalized to the customer.
In the late stages of the buyer’s journey, your content needs to help close the deal. That means building trust, stomping out any last objections and making it really, really easy to buy from you.
This is a stage where pricing and personalization matter a great deal, as leads work to confirm that the purchase they’re making really is the best one for them.
Understanding these stages, you can use the matrix below to help determine the content types best suited to each stage of the buyer’s journey. Importantly, these are not hard and fast rules, and it’s not the case that a piece of content cannot cross all stages. It’s simply a picture of their “best fit.”
As you can see, lightweight content like quizzes, games and infographics works well in the early stage, where awareness is being generated and the lead is just getting to know your brand or solution.
Interactive white papers, assessments, solution builders and calculators all do a great job of educating a lead and accelerating their path to purchase—ideal for that mid stage.
And in the final stage, assessments, calculators and solution builders can all help seal the deal and justify the purchase to your lead.
Another way to think about which types of content are ideal for your business is to tailor your content to the campaigns, traffic sources and context that content will be used in.
For example, those who visit your booth at a trade show likely won’t stand there digging through a detailed white paper—but they’d probably love taking a quick quiz, entering a contest or flipping through a beautiful lookbook.
This matrix lists the primary traffic source along the left column and the types of suitable interactive content along the top.
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On social media, lightweight, easy-to-consume content with a visual element tends to get more traction than complex calculators or heavyweight white papers. That makes infographics, lookbooks, quizzes and contests ideal content types for this traffic source.
With paid search, you can target leads anywhere in the funnel—but if you’re hitting people who are actively searching for solutions (past the point of awareness), white papers, assessments and calculators could be exactly what they need to see to accelerate decision making.
If you’re sending out an in-house email to your mailing list, numerous content types can apply—from infographics and contests for those segments earlier in the funnel, to calculators, assessments, solution builders and white papers for those who are closer to consideration.
Importantly, consider the context that your lead will be consuming the content in, their appetite for information vs. entertainment, and your existing relationship based on the traffic source you plan to use.
But again—these are simply guidelines and ideas, not rules. Do what’s right for your campaigns and your buyers.
Once you’ve defined the ideal content types for your buyer’s journey or traffic sources, you’re not quite ready to produce. First, we’ve got to take a hard look at an important trade-off: effort against value.
The next chapter will give you some tools you can use to weigh both and make a wise decision for your audience and budget.