What Is Interactive Content And How Can It Help You Engage Your Partners?

‍Interactive content can not only help you skyrocket your marketing efforts, but also keep your partners engaged. We have been saying this since day 1.

However, now that interactive content is being dubbed as the ‘future of marketing’, many marketers are using it to get more out of their affiliate and referral marketing efforts. In fact, research shows that 53% of marketers use interactive content. But that’s not all. Interactive content can help you generate more leads with complementary brands and help your agency partners pitch your product efficiently as well. Thereby, strengthening your relationship with your partners through mutually beneficial efforts. In this blog, we will try to decode the science behind it. How can you engage your affiliate, agency and referral partners with interactive content?

Get. Set. Go!

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But What Is Interactive Content Anyway?

Before we move any further, let’s get our basics straight. Interactive content is content that engages the user. Essentially, the user has to take part in the interactive experience to derive a result out of it. Exhibit A:

Now, there are various types of interactive content. Namely:

1) E-Commerce Recommendation Engines

You can create interactive experiences like these to generate more leads, segment your leads/customers, and increase customer loyalty for your e-commerce store. Through these experiences, you can provide the perfect product recommendation to your leads/customers. Moreover, you can include products directly from your own inventory. Engaging content like this can do wonders for your e-commerce marketing efforts. The example above is enough to corroborate that claim!

2) Calculators

The interactive calculator can be used to solve tedious estimates and cost calculations quickly for your prospects and users. You can create calculators to provide a valuable piece of information to your prospects in exchange for their contact information. For instance, if you work for a real estate firm, you can create a calculator like this.

Furthermore, you can create similar calculators for lead nurturing, qualifying sales and increasing customer loyalty as well.

3) Quizzes- Graded and Outcome

A) Graded Quizzes

You can use graded quizzes to evaluate your users’ knowledge on any particular topic. Thereafter, you can attach an incentive to their performance. For example, a social media management tool like Buffer can send a graded quiz titled "Test your Facebook Marketing Knowledge" to their leads. People scoring above 90% may get a 25% discount on their services and people scoring above 70% may get a 10% discount.

Maybe their graded quiz will look something like this:

B) Outcome Quizzes

Outcome quizzes are basically recommendation quizzes with an element of fun. You must have attempted those ‘Which GOT Character Are You’ quizzes. Well, this is no different. Except, you use the ‘fun’ element to boost your marketing and grow your sales. Say you are own an influence score and platform company like Kred. You can build an amazing outcome quiz like this to interest your leads and engage them:

4) Polls and Surveys

The average response rate to external surveys is 10-15%. However, 66% of marketers have reported greater audience engagement after using interactive content. So how do we ensure increased and genuine responses to our polls and surveys? We go interactive of course! Polls and surveys can help you gauge the general opinion surrounding your niche industry and your tool in specific as well. Interactive polls can help you with your market research and check customer satisfaction levels. 

5) Chatbots

A chatbot is a tool that allows one to conduct conversations with a user without the need for human personnel. Outgrow Interactive chatbots can help you handle all the grunt work so you can use your company’s resources for more productive purposes. For instance, if you own a bakery, an interactive chatbot can help you take all your orders and answer all the basic questions that would otherwise take up your time.

Uh! We know, we know-  this is extremely interesting!

But how can you use this to engage your partners?

Well, follow us!

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How Can You Engage Partners With Interactive Content?

Okay, we promise- we will try to keep this section concise.

Who are we kidding?

Here is a detailed rundown of how you can use interactive content to attract new business partners and ensure success with your existing partners.

1) Agencies

If you want to attract agency partners, you can provide them with free educational content related to your niche field. Hubspot has been doing exactly that- with great success, of course!

To attract agencies, they provide them with free inbound marketing education and training. This is where interactive content can help. If you want to continue engaging your agency partners, you can include interactive content to make your educational content fun and engaging. Instead of a google form, create a graded quiz to check their knowledge!

Moreover, you can provide channel consultants to make sure that your agency partners are successfully onboarded. Interactive chatbots can come handy here as they will answer the most common questions that your agency partners might have!
Just attracting agencies to work with you is not enough. Long-term partnerships are necessary for business profits. So, how can you ensure continued partnerships with the agencies you work with? 

You help them grow their business, that’s how.

Outgrow was facing this exact problem. Hence, they created whitepapers that included interactive content ideas for each industry. This meant that those agency partners had plenty of fresh novel marketing ideas for their leads. Consequently, they noticed an increase in their conversion rates. Needless to say, their partnership with Outgrow continued. 

2) Affiliates 

The best way to attract Affiliates for your business is through Return of Investment or ROI calculators. Let your prospect Affiliates know what they stand to gain by associating with your product. 

To attract affiliates, you need to create interactive content that is not only engaging but also showcases your product. This is a great way to introduce your product as it'll allow your prospective affiliates to get an idea about it.

We think this would be best illustrated by an example. Outgrow is a marketing tool that helps fellow marketers create interactive content. They wanted to attract affiliates in the field of content marketing. They knew that content marketers are always searching for novel marketing methods. Hence, they decided to cash in on this fact; using their own tool for the same.

They ended up creating an Idea Generator that helped marketers get ideas for interactive content that they can create to engage leads at different stages of the funnel. The experience helped Outgrow secure qualified affiliate partner prospects as it offered valuable information in return.

Another way to attract affiliates is by creating a Commission calculator. You can use this to provide personalized estimates of how your affiliates can benefit by associating themselves with your product. 

But how will affiliate interactive content work in real life? 

Let's say you are an affiliate for a credit card company. You can host an interactive outcome quiz on your site that suggests the right credit card to your readers. You can ask them relevant financial questions that one has to take into account while choosing a suitable credit card. Use your niche expertise and create a piece of interactive experience that is actually helpful to your readers. Now, how can you attract customers for the credit card company through this move? Here's how you can go about it:

Feature the credit card company as one of the personalized results in the outcome quiz. Include your affiliate link for every card that is recommended. You can direct your readers to that site through the quiz itself. Now, if any of your readers end up becoming a paying customer of the credit card company, you earn a commission for the same.

Now that is what we call a win-win situation!

3) Referral Marketing

Did you know Referral Marketing generates 3-5x higher conversion rates than any other channel? Well, we did.

And that is why we wondered how interactive content could help you engage your referral marketing partners.

Turns out we didn’t have to wonder for too long.

You can use interactive content to gain as many referral partners as possible. Interactive content is apt for social sharing and tends to go viral very quickly. You can create niche based interesting interactive content along with clearly visible social share buttons. Moreover, you can include a 120-word pre-written tweet, a Facebook post, or a catchy Instagram caption in the experience itself. This will simplify the sharing process for your referral partners. 

Let us show you an example.

Here is an interactive calculator created by a software company, Venturepact. This calculator estimated the cost of building an app. The rough estimate to build the app is shown in real-time. However, to get a detailed estimate, the prospect has to give out their own contact information and refer someone else as well.

That’s lead generation and referral marketing in one straight move!

Conclusion

So? How did you like our concise blog on interactive content to attract business partners? :D

We hope we enjoyed reading it as much as we enjoyed writing this down. What are your thoughts on the same?

Are there any other ways to use interactive content to engage partners?

We are all ears!

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About The Author

Etee Dubey, a full-time content marketer at Outgrow and part-time dreamer. In her free time, she catches up with her reading and often finds herself explaining the meaning of her eccentric name to people around her.