Segment and Nurture Your Leads with Interactive Content
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While B2B and B2C marketing are undergoing dramatic changes, lead generation remains a key focus for marketers and 69% of companies consider converting contacts/leads to customers being one of their top marketing priorities. What does this mean for you as marketer? You must segment and nurture your leads.
You can’t stop at lead generation. A lead nurturing strategy is what you need to attract, interest and engage your prospects, so they have a smooth, positive experience with your product or service. To survive in 2019 and beyond, you need to make lead segmenting and nurturing an integral part of your marketing strategy.
But let’s start with the beginning.
What is lead generation?
Even if the definition is more complex, for this post, I’ll consider lead generation as being the process of collecting leads using digital marketing. 53% of marketers say half or more of their budget is allocated to lead generation.
However, as today’s audience only reacts to information that is relevant to her, the “traditional” lead generation strategies won’t work anymore with the same efficiency.
When understanding your audience and trying to acquire new customers, lead segmentation is a crucial step, and this for three main reasons:
it lets you target the right audience
it improves your ability to channelize your marketing efforts
it improves your ability to deliver better value to your customers
And here the interactive content comes in. DemandMetric’s report “Enhancing the Buyer’s Journey”, reveals that interactive content generates 70% rate of conversion, compared with just 36% for passive content.
Well-built quizzes can help you segment your prospects and create a stronger lead nurturing strategy because they are:
attractive and address to our human tendency to test ourselves, compete and compare to others, and share our opinions
they are a way to build trust – you can position yourself as a credible source in your area of expertise, as provides prospects with insights and information customized to their specific needs and interest
they keep the conversation going; while prospects answer to the questions of the quiz, you may learn more about them from their answers, score them, segment them in different groups and nurture them with relevant content
they’re funny and inherently social, driving shares and referrals.
How to create an interactive quiz to segment and nurture your leads
Even if it sounds complicated, creating an interactive quiz is easier than you might think. And there are many online apps out there than can help you to do this. But regardless of the tool you choose to use there are several steps to consider:
Decide what is the goal of the quiz
Are your prospects in the awareness stage and you want to provide more information about your area of expertise /business/services? Do you want to find out more about your audience or your prospects? - set up the aim you want to achieve with your quiz and write it down.
Let’s say, for example, you run a cosmetic company that sells skincare products. You will want to know which type of skin have your potential customers to recommend them the right products. Do they have oily skin? Or a dried one? How old are they? Or maybe you are a real estate agent who sells properties located in a big city and its suburbs. You might want to know what is the lifestyle personality of your potential buyers. Are they metropolitan style? Do they prefer to live in the suburbs?
Determine the outcomes of your quiz
Outline which are the results that the quiz takers should obtain. This step is essential as it helps you reverse and establish the questions that you will insert in the quiz.
For example, the goal of my quiz What Type of Digital Marketer Are You? was to find out in which type of digital marketing personality fits each of my prospects. As I provide content marketing strategy services and content writing services, this information is beneficial when deciding to target my future campaigns, create freebies, paid products or write blogs. Deciding on the type of quiz you want to use is an important step when you want to segment and nurture your leads with interactive content.
In terms of quizzes, whether the quiz builder you decide to use, there are a few options:
- Personality quizzes - this type of quizzes assigns the quiz takers into categories. “What kind of morning are you?” / “What style of home are you?” or “What kind of technology adopter are you?” are such examples.
- Assessment quizzes - this type is knowledge-based, the output of the quiz being to identify the knowledge level of your quiz takers. For example, “How much do you know about website hosting?”
- Scored quizzes - this is also a knowledge-based quiz, but displays the results, shows how many answers were responded correctly. Something like “What’s your emotional IQ” is a scored quiz.
Revise and keep it short
It’s essential to find the right balance: to have not too many and not too few questions, in general, a quiz having 6-9 questions is considered the best option. Also, the quiz must take maximum a few minutes to complete, otherwise you will lose people’s attention.
Build your quiz
Whether the app you use for creating your quizzes, you have two options:
Use a pre-made template and customize it or
Build your quiz from scratch
Choose what fits better your goals and start to create your quiz.
Add the title of your quiz, a cover image and your own branding elements – change the colors, choose fonts and insert your logo. Also, add a subtitle describing your quiz and a call to action.
Insert the questions and craft the results
Build your quiz by inserting the questions you’ve already decided to ask, choose the overall format, add the possible answers and edit them as you desire.
Also, customize the results, by adding as many potential outcomes as you want. In my example, people are grouped into one of the following four categories:
Outcome #1: Content Marketing Moguls
Outcome #2: Quintessential Marketing Genius
Outcome #3: Email Marketing Mega Machines
Outcome #4: Mass Media Movie Mavens
In the background, you must correlate the results. For doing this, go to each question and select at least one potential result for every answer. The final results will be calculated based on the most popular answer-result correlation.
In the end, review the quiz to make sure everything is looking just the way you want it. After you save it, you can integrate your quiz in your website, in your emails or share it on social media, as they are the top three ways to segment and nurture your leads.
Create a consistent and effective lead nurturing strategy using interactive content
Building a quiz is just the first part of your lead generation strategy. The second part consists of developing a targeted lead nurturing strategy based on the results of the quiz. This way, you will connect better with your customers and offer relevant information for them.
Lead nurturing is a lengthy and ongoing process that you can improve based on your needs and observations. There are many ways to create and develop a coherent and efficient lead generation strategy, such as:
Email drip campaigns
Personalized, targeted emails
Email newsletters
Direct mail
Sales calls
Blog posts and content marketing
Social media or PPC retargeting ads
BUT….
If interactive content is excellent for lead segmenting, then why don’t you also use it for lead nurturing? However, even if I mentioned before some great ways to convert your leads, for the purpose of this post I’ll just focus on using interactive content as a creative way to segment and nurture your leads.
Follow-ups using interactive content
The recent studies show that 83% of B2B marketers use email newsletters for content marketing (de verificat cu 2018) and interactive content generates 2x more conversions than passive content.
Then why not include a quiz in your follow-up emails? The best part here is that you can customize them according to the part of the funnel your prospects are. Let’s say, for example, that a prospect landed in one way or another on your website and you used a lead magnet to get his email address. Based on his interactions with your business, you assume that the prospect is at the top of your funnel. You can send him interactive content such as calculators or outcome quizzes (aff. link) that will help to evaluate your services and find out how he can benefit from working with you.
For example, Tesla is using this calculator to target the customers that have shown their interest in Tesla brands on in buying a car.
On the other side, if you already have interested leads that are at the middle of the funnel, you can send them interactive infographics, assessment quizzes or scored quizzes to increase their interest for the services or products you offer. For example, you provide content marketing, social media marketing and content writing services to your clients. For prospects in the middle of the funnel, you can lead them to a calculator that calculates the ROI of their actual content marketing or social media strategy. Then, based on the results, you can send them personalized offers on how your services can improve their online footprint.
Interactive abandonment cart emails
The high rate of the abandonment cart is one of the biggest issues that eCommerce companies face today. Even if there are many ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment, it’s known that interactive content generates 2x more conversions than passive content.
So, instead of sending emails that include just passive content, why not take the full advantage of the interactive content and include interactive quiz in your follow-ups? Based on the results you collect from your prospects, you can lead them to specific products on your website, that fits perfectly their needs.
People like to feel unique, recognized and rewarded for their individuality.
Retargeting with interactive ads
Your regular retargeting ads may convert, but don’t you add more value to your prospects using a dash of creativity and personalization? Quizzes (aff link Interact) and calculators don’t just provide you with leads, but they also give you valuable information about them. You can collect this information and use it to create retargeted ads for those prospects. Or you can send the people directly to a page displaying the right products for them.
Rewards and Giveaways
Rewards and incentives are a great way of lead nurturing, as they encourage the prospects or customers to engage more with your brand or products. You can also experiment with how you offer rewards to your leads.
Instead of regular contests and sweepstakes, you can think more out of the box and build the whole campaign starting from a graded quiz. For instance, you can create a scored quiz (aff. link interact) related to your brand or products/services and then attach incentives according to the score people get.
Let’s assume that a cosmetic company creates a scored quiz. The questions would be related to the products of the company, the founder’s name, the history of the company, and even about the beauty products in general. Prospects will be scored according to the number of correct answers. The more they score, the more significant is the incentive!
Conclusion
One thing is clear: nowadays it has become a necessity to segment and nurture your leads. As the business competition becomes more intense and buyers want more personalized content to engage with a brand, mastering lead segmentation and nurturing becomes more important than ever. Use the steps above to get started. Then update and adapt your lead generation strategy as needed.
