Should Your B2B Marketing Be Interactive? [VIDEO]

Hello, everyone! Today, we’re going to answer the question, “Should your B2B marketing be interactive? Should B2B interactive marketing even exist?”

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[ Note: Learn or retain more by reading? We got you. Here is the video above in blog format. You’re welcome. ]

The answer is yes! A thousand yeses!

It has to be interactive. We need B2B interactive marketing.

I want to fight with every ounce of my body the idea that B2B marketing has to be boring, sucky, and unsexy, and like it’s this horrible part of the marketing universe.

We need to rethink our strategies and figure out how to involve our customers in the marketing process. And by the way, that might even leak in a little bit into sales.

So today, let’s dive into how you can make your B2B marketing more interactive.

Multi-step Forms

The very first way we can make our B2B marketing more interactive is how we’re actually gathering information from our customers.

The “Contact Us” form is no longer the only way.

Click on our call to action at the top of our site. You’re going to find a multi-step form.

What this does, is that it leverages the psychology of the human brain — a concept you’ll often hear in economics —  called sunk cost.

If someone can give you their least valuable, least possessive, least worrisome piece of information — their first name — you’re getting them ready to interact with your form and get bought in.

Then, you ask for their last name. Then, for their company. Those three things, they’ll give away really easily.

After they’ve done all this work and they’ve interacted with your site, you then ask for their email and phone number.

You see, when you do it like this, you’re able to get someone to the point where they’re like:

“You know what? It’s easier for me just to finish than stop. I’ve already invested all this time.”

So one of the best ways to make your B2B marketing interactive is through multi-step forms.

Using A Chatbot or Chat System

Another amazing way to make your B2B marketing interactive — and in the process of collecting information and improving your conversion rates — is by using a chatbot or even a chat system.

I’ve tried a lot of them. I started with Olark. Then we moved over to a thing called Intercom, and now finally, we’ve landed on Drift.

I love Drift. I’m a big advocate of Drift. They’ve made it so simple for us on the back end to communicate with customers — and on the front end, they’ve created amazing things like chatbots that allow us to pre-qualify visitors.

You see, I talk to people about chatbots a lot here, and I always hear the common complaint from in-house marketers:

“Honestly, we know that they’re important. We want to do it, we just don’t have time.”

And I’m like, “Yes, you do! You definitely have time. You just need to qualify the chats first.”

In fact, we believe in it so much that we have our VP of Marketing man our chatbot because we want our person who has awesome knowledge of our products and services to communicate directly with our customers.

You should be doing the same, but you don’t want him/her to communicate with every customer — but only your most qualified customers. You can use chatbots to do this and still keep really good use of your time.

There are two more ways to make your B2B marketing incredibly interactive.

Separate Messaging on Mobile Landing Pages

This one is really simple — and we’re not gonna unpack it like crazy, because it’s so obvious.

It’s to use separate messaging on your mobile landing pages for your pay-per-click campaigns.

By using Unbounce — the software we use here for all of our landing pages — we can use action-oriented messaging for mobile campaigns.

So instead of just having a phone number at the top of the landing page, we can have tap to call. At the very bottom of the page, we can have click to submit. That type of messaging and copy immediately can help boost your conversion rates and encourage your users to interact with your landing page.

Interrupt– Interactive Group Video Webinars

And then lastly, this is just I think a personal vendetta or a bone I have to pick with B2B marketing — and that would be un-interactive…

Is it un-interactive? I don’t even know.

It’s videos and webinars that the audience can’t interact with the presenter.

I constantly see these webinars where the person will present and they say:

“Yeah, just chat us any questions.” There’s a better way to do it.

Just open up the webinar to be a group video, and allow people to actually interrupt your presentation.

And by the way — “interrupting” could also be a synonym for interacting.

If you can allow your audience to interact with you while you’re doing your webinar and presenting your information, it allows you then to mold, shape, and communicate your message to exactly how your audience needs to hear it.

Should Your B2B Marketing Be Interactive? —  Takeaways

So, please, remember:

• B2B marketing doesn’t have to be boring.
• B2B marketing doesn’t have to be stale.
• B2B marketing doesn’t have to be unsexy.

Let’s think about how we can better interact with our customers through our creativity every day to make B2B marketing more interactive.

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