What Types of Interactive Content Will Your Customers React Best To?

Are you thinking of investing in interactive sales and marketing content for your B2B customers? Do you want to find out more about the interactive sales enablement tools that successful salespeople use?

Interactive sales and marketing content can be a fantastic way for customers to interact with your brand. Marketing tools for sales reps, such as an interactive sales tool, sales enablement tool or touchscreen experience can equip your sales team with everything they need to engage with and WOW your customers.

After all, 91% of B2B buyers say they actually prefer interactive and visual content over static content.

But if you’re considering going down this route, and investing in interactive sales and marketing content or an interactive experience your customers will love, how will you know which types of content they’re going to react best to? You may even just want to get a better idea of what’s possible first.

As a Creative Technology business, we specialise in helping B2B companies and sales teams connect with and demonstrate value to their customers using fun, visual and engaging content via interactive sales tools that ultimately result in sales success.

TIP: Here are some other compelling statistics that’ll make you want to start creating some great interactive content right now!

What types of interactive content are there?

When it comes to interactive sales tools or touchscreens, basically the only limit is your imagination. There are so many different ways your customers can interact with the experience you create – but the more surprising and engaging, the better chance you have of delighting your customers.

Here you can find out about tools that are successful at increasing sales and the types of interactive content you can include with an interactive sales tool or touchscreen:

• Interactive diagrams and menus
• Object recognition
• Demographic recognition
• Videos and stories such as ‘a day in the life’
• Infographics
• Microsites
• Quizzes
• Speech recognition
• Gesture control
• Facial and shape recognition
• Manipulating 3d models
• Creating drawings and notes they can be saved for later or emailed
• Downloadable content customers can email to themselves
• iBeacons
• NFC

TIP: Don’t forget micro interactions! Those are often just as important, if not more so, than all of the above – our blog explains why.

Add a few of the above together, along with an engaging, visual theme to tie it all together, whilst ensuring you’re delivering all the right information your customers are going to need, and you should come away with something that’s fun, compelling and memorable that your customers will enjoy using.

Well, as long as you follow the next piece of advice, that is…

Design with your customer in mind

This is without a doubt the most important consideration when developing any sort of interactive content or experience – which is why it’s surprising when this seems to go right over some companies’ heads! You need to really know your customers.

After all, at the end of the day, it’s your customers who are going to be interacting with the content that you’ve spent so much time and money investing in. If they don’t like it, then surely all of that initial investment will have been for nothing.

Instead, you need to ensure your content is specific, personal and relating directly to the individuals you’re designing for. Who are they, and what sort of experience might work for them? What messages are relevant to them, and what sort of content will they enjoy interacting with?

They’ll definitely have their own objectives and goals in mind whilst interacting with your experience, so how can you align your goals with theirs? Speaking of your own objectives, you it’s vital you map all of those out, too.

If you start looking at all of the above factors methodically, you’ll begin to get a picture of your customers and the content that needs to be pulled in to support those conversations. It’s also something we recommend doing before you even contact an interactive design agency who might be able to help.

TIP: We’ve actually detailed out this process a bit more and taken you through a lot of the process we’d go through with our own clients, in this blog post: Where to Start When Creating an Interactive Touchscreen Experience.

Advice from a creative technology business

We understand that there’s a lot to think about when you’re in the early stages of developing an interactive touchscreen experience, and it can be overwhelming.

Whilst there are lots of different ways your customers can interact with your content using something like an interactive sales tool, sales enablement tool or touchscreen experience, it’s vital to remember:

• It has to be simple enough for the audience to know what to do
• Engaging enough to be memorable
• Whilst at the same time providing the right level of information your audience is looking for

If you’re able to balance these three elements, you should end up with a great experience for your customers, and you’ll achieve the objectives that you originally set out to achieve.

TIP: For more detail on the types of interactive content and the steps you should take to figure out what you need, check out our recent blog: How Customers Interact with Your Brand on a Touchscreen Display.

In summary…

With any luck, this blog has managed to give you a better idea of just some of the ways your customers can interact with an interactive sales tool, sales enablement tool or touchscreen experience. There are so many options and ways to create a fun, engaging and memorable experience that it can seem a bit overwhelming.

Luckily, that’s where an interactive design agency will be able to step in and help guide you through the process, whilst doing all the heavy lifting. Just remember to design with your customers in mind, and ensure you align your business goals and objectives with the goals of your target audience.