As a SaaS brand that’s concerned about customer satisfaction, your content must be tailored toward solving problems. Interactive content is how you can engage with your audience like never before.

If you desire to make your customer’s life more efficient and easier, you need to make your content interactive. Visionary marketers have embraced this powerful content marketing concept.

A research by Content Marketing Institute shows that 46% of SaaS marketers are making use of interactive content.

From the same research, it’s found that 77% of SaaS marketers agreed that interactive content also have reusable value. That means you can invest in interactive content and still reuse the content to drive business growth.

87% of SaaS marketing businesses agreed that interactive content captures reader’s attention much more than static content does. You could present your audience with the interactive element; asking them to do something such as type, swipe, tap, or click.

Perhaps you already know that an effective content marketing establishes relationship, brand, and expertise with your prospects.

Do you want to generate brand awareness and capture leads?

If yes, then you need to create more engaging content so as to improve every stage of your business process right from awareness to closing deals.

Here are five proven ways to create interactive content for your audience.

1). Analysis Tools

Content with powerful visual data enables customers to quickly go through your content for in-depth analysis. Analysis tools are used to sort through data in order to establish a relationship and detect patterns.  

Valuable content is essential for a successful SaaS marketing campaign.

A survey carried out in 2016 on content marketing by Curata showed that 75% of content marketers are increasing their content marketing investments, whereas, more than a third of these content marketers never used any content analysis tool that would make them know how this increase in content marketing was performing.  

An analysis tool is important in your content because:

• SaaS marketers can understand how well their content is performing.  
• It helps to identify irrelevant and outdated content and to determine content that should be repurposed.
• Analysis tools improve the general quality of existing content.

There are various tools for different purposes. Some create the actual content, while others distribute it. And some tools evaluate the efficiency of content marketing.

Analysis tools could be very complex and require a lot of resources to build a useful one. However, they proffer solutions to complex problems like creating a strong brand affinity and walking prospective clients into further actions like making purchases.

Neil Patel’s QuickSprout tool is a principal example of an analysis tool. This tool gives answers to questions on website owners can increase traffic to their websites as well as revealing what their competitor’s website traffic is like.

Simply enter your website URL (e.g., yahoo.com) into the search box, then click on the “Analyze website” button.

Creating content is all about engaging your customers. So it’s really meaningful to create an interactive content that would go a long way to engage ideal customers who use your website.  

2). Calculators

Calculator. What comes to mind when you hear that word — tons of codes and complicated algorithms?

Well, that’s definitely not it. We are talking about a simple calculator, something like the common “2+3” calculator, and not the type you would use for a heavy computation.

You don’t even have to code a calculator from scratch, you could embed the code from a third-party website or simply use the API. A calculator provides a great value to users and drives leads and sales for online businesses.

Harte Hanks, a marketing services company increased click-through rate by 51% when it created a market-intelligence calculator that tabulates and simplifies the value of missed opportunities.

If you’re in the health market, for example, you can add the Life Expectancy Calculator from Social Security Administration.

It’s simple. The calculator doesn’t consider information that could decrease or increase life expectancy like family history, lifestyle, and current health. But considers only your sex and birth date.

With this data, the calculator gets your proposed death date by cross-referencing your information with the average data. This calculator offers a way for users to interact with your website on a deeper and personal level.

You can also add retirement calculators. SaaS businesses, including those in financial services, make use of calculators almost all the time — usually in the middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel when clients are about making an investment [source].

The currency conversions calculator is also an example. If you operate a finance-related website, your target audience may want to know the current rate of Dollar to another currency. 

With this calculator on your website, ensure to provide brief and simple answers to key questions that users might ask when using it.

Make the calculator shareable and embeddable as you might want users to spread your products and services with their fans on social media, and embed it on their websites as well.

According to SnapApp, “Calculators are simpler ways for users to quantify impact without the need for direct interaction with anybody.”

Calculators provide a simple way to engage with users, nudge them to further move down the funnel, probably by either contacting you directly, subscribing to your email list or doing more research on your website.

3). Interactive content is rich content

If Content is King, rich content is the Monarch. This is because they are more engaging and interesting to consume. Examples are video and audio content.

They are capable of establishing a deeper user engagement with prospective customers. They are extremely easy to share on multiple platforms.

Do you already have helpful content — maybe a blog post that delivers a lot of value to your audience — you may want to capitalize on it?

If that’s the case, you can easily repurpose that content into another format (such as video, audio, infographic), and share on relevant media-rich websites like YouTube, Vimeo, SlideShare, Soundcloud, Apple Store/Google Play store, among many others.

Though it has been generally believed that rich media takes lots of effort — but that’s always the case. The truth of the matter is that all the pains you experience from producing audio/video content is worth the gain.

You can reuse popular blog articles if possible as the basis for producing rich media. In your SaaS website, you can use rich content for both onboarding new users and create brand awareness at scale.

Keep your audio/video content relevant, engaging, and short, and align it with the value your products and services offer.

4). Quizzes and polls

To make your content more interactive, you can add quizzes to your ebooks, websites, emails, and so on. You can as well make use of short quizzes or polls to improve future customer service interactions.

Quizzes are great ways of learning more about your email subscribers or target audience. For better results, keep your quiz short – like two or three quick and relevant questions. The same rule goes with a poll.

These interactive tools provide the necessary information needed to produce compelling content for your prospects and customers. They are aimed at getting feedback and extracting new user data.

Tully Luxury Travel uses a short and interesting quiz to engage with travelers where the quiz asks a series of simple questions. At the end of the quiz, travelers get a recommendation on where to visit depending on their answers.

5). Interactive video

Video consumption has grown significantly in the past years and this trend will continue to grow.

Video campaigns are popular in the online marketing environment because they are effective, and suitable for converting website visitors into paying customers. For businesses and marketers, videos allow them to express their creativity and communicate their brand story better.

About 51.9% of marketers say that video has the best ROI as compared to all types of content. Consumers love videos too. About 43% of them say that they want more engaging video content from brands.

Video itself provides a form of interaction. Although not pronounced. However, by adding interactivity to the video such as Hotspots — which are tags that delivers additional information when the viewer hovers and clicks on them.

The click can either lead the viewer to your website (external hotspot) or to a section of your video (internal hotspot).

The Guardian’s 7 Digital Deadly Sins is a good example of an interactive video. There’s a lot that goes into such levels of interactivity, but the results and rewards will be well worth the investment.

You will increase your conversion rate if you start using interactive videos in your SaaS business. It could be on your homepage, product pages, or used specifically for onboarding new users.

Let’s Connect

It’s time for you to create interactive content. The best time to start is “now” because your target audience doesn’t want to read boring articles and blog posts.

They want to interact with you — so that they can express their deepest thoughts without holding back. Contact us today for a free consultation!