New data from Mediafly confirms B2B buyers’ preference for interactive content and presentations in an increasingly digital selling environment.
On average, B2B marketers designate 20-30% of their marketing budgets to content marketing. Why so much? Because content is one of the most powerful tools in a revenue team’s toolkit.
A successful content strategy will produce a healthy return on investment. Content that works improves brand awareness, increases demand for your products and services, accelerates prospective customers along the buyer journey, and contributes to revenue.
But what does “good” content look like? Many marketers thought they had it all figured out, and then the pandemic happened.
The End of Static Content
In March 2020, in-person B2B sales interactions were forced online, giving buyers more power than they’d ever had before. They began consuming more content to inform purchase decisions, but how they consumed that content changed. It became more difficult to capture buyers’ attention and even harder to keep it.
At Mediafly, we noticed shifts in content consumption patterns early on in the pandemic. Our buyers were skimming where they used to read, bouncing sooner than they used to, and engaging less with traditional content formats overall.
To tackle this challenge, we transitioned our content strategy from static PowerPoint presentations and PDFs on-screen to more engaging interactive content formats. After experiencing initial success, we acquired Presentify, a visual communications provider, to empower our customers with the ability to do the same.
New Data Confirms Interactive Content Sells
Presentify – a Mediafly Company empowers brands to replace static, linear content with engaging and interactive presentations, animated social media & explainer videos, simulated app or software demos, sales enablement toolkits, and other self-guided, interactive documents. Revenue teams can then deliver that content to customers via the Mediafly platform to elevate sales storytelling through animation, track buyer engagement, and measure and improve content performance.
To confirm the effectiveness of interactive content, Mediafly reviewed content engagement data from more than 160,000 content shares across 99 customer environments over the last two years. The data shows:
- Digital selling has driven content consumption up, with the average number of views per piece of content shared increasing 207% during the pandemic.
- Mediafly customers who leveraged interactive content saw a 94% higher increase in content views than customers leveraging traditional, static content.
- Interactive content sees 52.6% more engagement than static content, with buyers spending an average of 8.5 minutes viewing static content items and 13 minutes on interactive content items.
4 Considerations for Adopting an Interactive Content Strategy
The proof is here. Interactive content is just “good” content. If you struggle to engage distracted digital buyers, consider transitioning away from traditional content formats. Here are four tips to help you start creating dynamic, engaging, and interactive content now:
- Narrative – Ensure you understand your audience and determine the objective you want to accomplish before crafting a compelling sales story. Communicate your value proposition in the context of your buyer’s challenge, highlight tangible benefits, and provide proof you can do what you say you can do. What do you offer? How does it work? Why do they need it? Don’t forget to close with a strong call to action.
- Animation – Use visual communication to simplify product or process-focused content. Use animation to highlight the most important things you want your buyers to take away from the interaction. Remember, we remember 10% of what we hear and 20% of what we read but 80% of what we see.
- Navigation – Incorporate navigation into your design to help your sellers tell a better story. With buttons or vignettes embedded on each page, presenters can quickly and easily pivot to discuss what is most important to their buyer in real-time. Similarly, buyers who consume your content on-demand can delve deeper into the topics that interest them most at their own pace.
- Analytics – Interactive content keeps buyers engaged longer, meaning (if you have the proper tools) you can capture more data to inform future sales interactions, gauge the health of your pipeline, and optimize your content assets and strategy. Use a sales enablement platform to deliver interactive content so you can capture insights such as who viewed a specific content asset, for how long, and whether or not it contributed to a closed-won deal.
Do you wish your buyers were more engaged? Request a demo to see how we can transform your existing content into compelling, interactive sales stories that drive revenue.
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