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We’ve already told you about interactive storytelling and interactive news stories, but now you’re asking yourself, “how can I replicate successful interactive storytelling campaigns for my organization?” It’s time to lay out a revised content plan—and we’re here to help you with a few guidelines for introducing interactive storytelling in your marketing department.
Pick the right content
The first step in creating standout interactive stories is identifying the topic best suited to an interactive treatment. What will hold high value for your prospects, and also lend itself well to an interactive form?
This may be data-heavy content, where your team can create graphs and charts that the audience can manipulate, as in the Planet Money examples we shared on Monday. Or, you may find that your organization has opportunities to use interactive sidebars and video to illuminate a white paper, and you can repurpose an old piece to increase engagement. And don’t forget the first rule of content: keep it educational.
Creating interactive content is resource-intensive. While interactive offers some of the highest potential for engaging your audience members and moving them further through the sales funnel, it needs to be reserved for the areas where it can make the greatest impact.
Plan the interplay of text and other media
Before you begin work on your interactive content piece, outline it. How will you arrange the various media elements of your piece so that they complement rather than compete with one another?
For example, make the interactive elements of your content compelling by requiring audience engagement to complete the experience. If your content includes an audio or video piece, don’t make the text a simple written transcript. Instead, use the writing to comment on and further the conversation in the multimedia. If you incorporate a quiz or survey questions, set up the piece so that your audiences’ answers shape their journeys through it.
In this stage, you must also determine the resources you will need to create the interactive content. Does your own marketing team have the necessary capabilities, or would it be a good choice to find a partner firm?
Work together to create an impactful piece
Once you’ve determined the team members you need to work with to create your interactive story, it’s critical to work together strategically to create a cohesive piece. Avoid working separately and trying to stick the pieces together at the last minute. Throughout the creation of this content piece, you should be collaborating closely to make sure that every element supports each other in the finished product.
Need some content best practices review before you move on to interactive content? Take a look at our past blogs:
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Interactive storytelling is a powerful tool for brands, but the rise in interactive storytelling has actually been led by the media, including by some long-standing outlets that may surprise you. There’s no better way to inspire your own content than by taking a look at great examples, so today we’re sharing some of the best unbranded interactive content we have come across. Which examples are your favorites?
Interactive and immersive content from The New York Times
In December 2012, The New York Times published Snow Fall, an interactive story involving video and interactive graphics, launching a trend toward more immersive content in news. From this, it became more common for stories to include elements such as parallax scrolling, embedded video and interactive data visualizations. The piece, which covered the February 2012 Tunnel Creek Avalanche in Washington state, set records for The Times in terms of the amount of time digital readers spent engaged with the story. Since then, The Times has published a variety of immersive and interactive pieces, many of which can be seen in their 2013 and 2014 reviews of interactive storytelling.
What can content marketers learn from this? The New York Times has a strategy for their interactive and immersive content. They know that interactive and immersive content creates something that can only be experienced online, a departure from their longstanding print paper. As such, The Times is in fact using interactive content to build their own brand: that of a news organization that remains a global leader, even as the market moves away from their traditional product.
B2B marketers, take note. First of all, choose the type of material that you build into interactive content carefully. Interactive storytelling offers opportunities to engage the reader far beyond a more static type of content, so it’s not worth spending your resources to do so with something that could just as easily be communicated in plain text. The Times creates immersive experiences for major stories where maps, video or other multimedia elements add to the storytelling. They aren’t spending their resources to report on mundane, everyday occurrences in interactive formats.
Exploring data sets on NPR
Interactive data visualizations are a particular favorite of NPR’s Planet Money economy team, which has run them on topics including working hours by industry and how automation will create and destroy jobs. In Planet Money’s visualizations, site visitors can scroll over graphs to explore the data and get more information about specific groups, or choose options from drop-down menus to focus in on particular data segments.
What could you learn from this to enrich your marketing and content strategy? Planet Money’s visualizations successfully combine two of our favorite things at Movéo: interactive content and data. Successful businesses are data-driven, and to win contracts, B2B organizations have to show how they can make a meaningful impact on some aspect of the client’s work. Consider how interactive data visualizations could transform your research reports, turning dry statistics into a powerful call to action.
Next time you read the news, keep an eye out for great examples of interactive storytelling.
For other ideas to help your marketing team keep up with the rapid pace of change in digital, give us a call to discuss the digital solutions that best fit your needs.
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Last month, we predicted that interactive marketing content—specifically, interactive storytelling—would grow in importance in Q4 2015 and into 2016. In the next few weeks, we’re taking a closer look at the trend, and sharing actionable ideas for how you can incorporate interactive content into upcoming campaigns. Ready to try this up-and-coming content form? Read on!
What is interactive storytelling?
Let’s revisit our earlier description of interactive stories:
“Great interactive content, whether branded or unbranded, makes use of graphics that viewers can manipulate, such as photographs that change as they are moused over or graphs that highlight particular data points or trends depending on where the viewer clicks. Interactive content frequently incorporates a variety of media, from text to audio to video, to tell one seamless story in multiple engaging formats.”
To be successful, interactive stories must be responsive to user engagement in a meaningful way. Consider the difference between a truly interactive story—one where the audience has agency in choosing how to interact with a piece of multimedia content—and something like a slideshow. The slideshow technically requires audience interaction, but it is not participatory in a meaningful way: the viewer’s role is entirely prescribed.
In contrast, great interactive content is compelling and responsive to user engagement, giving the audience power to drive their own experience with the content.
Can interactive storytelling engage your buyers?
B2B brands are still just beginning to embrace interactive storytelling, but they’ve already got a strong handle on other forms of interactive content like webinars, ROI calculators and even quizzes. We know that B2B audiences respond strongly to storytelling in content, whether it’s in a white paper or a video series. So why not take the next step in audience engagement?
Join us next week for a closer look at the best unbranded interactive storytelling. We’ll show how you can inform your marketing with the success of these pieces, and share tips for how to build educational interactive stories for your brand.
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Here at Movéo, we’re inspired by B2B brands that are willing to try something new and think outside the box to win customers. From businesses displaying their products in unusual and compelling ways to those developing a new content niche in which to build their thought leadership, we love to hear those stories and help create them ourselves.
Today, we’ve gathered three examples of B2B companies creating innovative content:
Juniper Security Networks: engaging prospects through gaming
“The future of the data center is in your hands,” promises the landing page for Juniper Security Networks’ advertising game Deception Force. The game’s computer-animated trailer features a young IT employee battling monsters in a data center, the background echoing a city skyline in a superhero movie.
Juniper Security Networks, which sells data center technology, used this game to touch on a real pain point for prospects—the threat of hackers and security breaches—and dramatize it in a visceral, compelling manner. Marketers talk plenty about gamified content, but what about an actual game? “Deception Force” looks as slick as other games people pay to play, comes complete with five levels of gameplay, and can be downloaded as an app for iOS or Android. And after battling these virtual monsters, we feel certain that IT buyers will have data security on their minds.
Caterpillar: combining drones and Periscope for a new take on classic offerings
Caterpillar may trace its roots back to 1886, but their marketing is anything but old-fashioned. Recently, the company combined two hot new technologies, drones and the livestreaming service Periscope, to showcase equipment demonstrations, facility tours and more as they happened. The company is considering more uses for the technology in the future, including to livestream trade shows and other events. As for the drones? Along with the obvious cool factor, camera-equipped drones allow the company to showcase their products and services from (literally) a different angle and provide compelling, interesting visuals.
Caterpillar was drawn to Periscope’s technology due to the audience engagement options it offers, including in-app chatting. What use could your organization make of live streaming video? A key takeaway from Caterpillar’s work in this space: highlight something notable. For a live streaming video, even one filmed by a drone, to make an impact, it needs to offer value to your audience.
Royal Mail combines “real life” and social media for compelling content
This campaign took place in 2013, but it still stands out as an innovative example of a B2B brand reaching its audience with innovative content. The UK’s Royal Mail has a business service, MarketReach. When they wanted to remind their audience of the power of physical direct mail as a part of a marketing campaign, they decided to create a “real social network” and invite members of their audience to participate.
In the project, individuals, many of them marketers, were invited to contribute objects to a display in Central London, along with the reasons these objects held value to them. The gallery was open to the public, and included an area where anyone could add to the displays. Then, Royal Mail used the power of “virtual social media” to share the story of their “physical social network,” reaching over three million people online, with 45% of those engaged in the conversation from the marketing and communications industry, MarketReach’s audience.
Like Caterpillar, Royal Mail found a way to connect their digital and in-person audiences in an exciting, on-message manner. How could your brand do the same?
To see some examples of the impact Movéo’s content is making, check out our case studies.
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When your organization broadens its focus to new audiences, it’s important to conduct frequent analysis to determine the impact of your efforts. That means regularly questioning your approach to make sure your targeting tactics are on track.
So marketers, before you go any further with a newly-expanded targeting strategy, ask yourselves these questions:
Awareness
- How do we define “awareness”? Is our definition accurately capturing what people know/don’t know about our brand?
- What percentage of customers in our new target market are aware of our brand today?
- How is our name recognition in this market compared to that of competitors?
- Will our strategy promote thought leadership relevant to our new audience?
Building connections
- Have we identified influencers in this market? Who are they?
- Are we building influencer relationships that will make an impact with our new audience?
Data
- Are we collecting actionable data to drive our targeting decisions?
- What does our data reveal about where we could improve our targeting efforts?
- Could we improve our data collection process to obtain more useful insights?
- What can we learn from comparing these data points to those we have collected in past campaigns?
Progression through the marketing funnel
- What percentage of prospects in our new target market become marketing-qualified leads (MQLs)?
- What percentage of MQLs in our new target market become SQLs?
- Are our leads progressing through the marketing funnel slowly or quickly relative to those in our other markets?
Reaching the right people
- Are the new contacts we’ve collected through our expanded marketing decision makers?
- Are our marketing efforts reaching the right people at the right time?
- What are the most effective content forms to reach our targets? How are we using that form?
- Are we effectively distributing content in the channels where this audience is most active?
- Are we offering a product or service that truly adds value to this market, or do we need to adjust who we are pursuing?
Success
- Are our new contacts responding to our content in a way that moves them down the marketing funnel?
- How has our market share grown in the new market we’re targeting?
- What feedback have we collected from our new audience that could help us improve our targeting?
Need help answering your marketing questions? Contact us!
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If you’re like most marketers, you spend much of your time focused on expanding your brand’s market share in the target markets where you already have significant traction. But if you want to drive above-average business growth in 2016, you need to begin thinking about expanding to new markets, as well.
Target market expansion is not something that should be entered into blindly. Rather than “going with your gut” when selecting a new target market and building a strategy to reach its members, you should approach your target market expansion armed with data that can help you make smart marketing decisions and investments.
Here are three steps to follow when planning a data-driven market expansion:
1. Conduct an opportunity analysis
In many ways, expanding into a new target market is similar to launching a new business venture. You can minimize your risk by first assessing the market and the viability of the opportunity. Is there demand for your product or service in the new market you aim to serve? What is the total size of the market? How much market share can you reasonable expect to own in the next year, five years or ten years? Is the market likely to be receptive to your existing marketing messages, or will you have to invest in developing new campaigns that will resonate with them? You should aim to answer all these questions and more as you conduct an opportunity analysis to assess a target expansion opportunity. Conducting this type of analysis can be complex, involving market sizing research, value chain analysis, needs assessment research and pricing strategy exploration, or it can be simple and straightforward, with a focus on frank conversations with a few of your potential target customers. Just make sure you’re putting in the time and effort required to gain an adequate understanding of your ability to succeed in your expansion effort.
2. Get to know your potential buyers
As we’ve said before, it’s a mistake to assume that your new target market will have the same needs, pain points and concerns as the customers you already serve. After you’ve determined that there is a viable opportunity to expand into a new market, spend time talking to your new potential customers. Just as you did when you launched into your first target market, conduct focus groups, interviews, surveys and more to gain a deep understanding of your new buyers and the drivers that motivate them to take action.
3. Test your offering and your messaging
Before you sink a significant portion of your marketing budget into reaching your new targets, test both your offering and your marketing campaigns among small groups that represent your new stakeholders. Even if you think you know your new buyers, you may find that they respond in unexpected ways to your product, pricing and marketing messages. Wouldn’t you rather know if your intended approach has flaws before you sink all your resources into pursuing it?
Are you seeking a concrete framework through which to evaluate a new market opportunity? Check out Mind the Product’s POEM framework. Then, when you’ve vetted your new opportunity and are ready to think about selling, download our whitepaper: 4 key steps to engaging B2B buyers BEFORE the buying process.
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We’ve written in the past about repurposing content across channels — from putting white paper research to work in infographics and blog series, to producing webinars and Slideshare presentations based on in-person events — but today we want to take a look at how smart marketers can repurpose content to serve multiple audiences.
Why would you want to do this? Let’s consider a theoretical example. Say you work at a B2B company that has for many years provided training software to large corporate clients, but your product development team has worked with marketing to identify and address a need for a new version of your software aimed at businesses with under 100 employees. How could you make your marketing investment stretch further by repurposing content to serve this new audience?
Make repurposing key to your content marketing strategy
If repurposing isn’t already an element of your overall content marketing strategy, create a new one designed to allow for leveraging your content across audiences. Conduct research into how potential new areas of business operate, what their pain points are and how they could work with your brand. In our theoretical example, that could mean researching how pain points differ between a major corporation with multiple office locations, and a small, centralized business. What would decision makers in each audience want from educational content?
Make a Venn diagram to determine the overlap between the audiences, and devote a major portion of your content marketing time and resources to creating new content that has a hook for both audiences. Additionally, identify the needs that don’t overlap so that you can make a plan to create content that robustly addresses these needs as well.
Implement your strategy
As you create repurposable content, it’s critical to identify what items can be used across audiences and what needs to be personalized. For example, in our theoretical example, the marketing plan could include two versions of a white paper, one aimed at buyers at larger businesses and one aimed at buyers at smaller businesses.
Both of these white papers could contain much of the same educational content, as there is plenty of overlap between the needs of these audiences. But each could be personalized with statistics, with one version drawing on business research about the needs of large companies and one drawing on research about the needs of small companies.
Have you implemented this type of content repurposing at your organization? If you’re working on a content marketing strategy now and are looking for more insight into creating meaningful, repurposable content, read our white paper: The five new laws of content.
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In addition to the challenges that come with expanding into a new target market, marketers also face challenges when their organization expands services into new geographic regions, domestically or internationally. As a marketer, are you prepared to broaden your horizons to effectively serve these new audiences?
If your organization is considering expanding its services, take a look at these best practices before you build your marketing strategy:
Perform cultural research for relevant messaging
To paraphrase a recent MarketingProfs article, the world is not an extension of your home market. Before launching any new slogan or marketing campaign, your team needs to invest in rigorous cultural research. Don’t assume that you can simply translate your existing marketing messages or replace an image here or there. Assume that your expanded marketing may need to start from scratch. Go back to the beginning, even reconsidering why people and organizations will buy your product and in what context they will use it.
Pay attention also to the types of traditional and digital media platforms where your marketing can make an impact in the areas into which you intend to expand. Work with a legal team to make sure that you are well-informed regarding any legal barriers to particular types of marketing messages in your new market.
Armed with this research, your organization can get to work creating content to engage your prospects in every market. Need more ideas? Check out Hubspot’s coverage of companies doing just that, including Pearse Trust, an authority on corporate and trust structures for banks, accounting firms and legal firms.
Invest in proper translation
Your preparation should, of course, include making sure that your marketing team includes people fluent in whatever languages you will need for communication in your new market. Don’t rely on translation software for this one: there’s a long history of marketing fails based on sloppy translations, not to mention campaigns accidentally built around culturally offensive slogans. Make sure that you also account for regional differences in slang and language usage.
If you can’t staff your own marketing department with the necessary language and culture proficiency, consider working with a partner firm that can, perhaps one based in your new market.
Whether you’re considering an expansion or simply want to activate sales in your existing market, learn how Movéo can help.
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Has your organization ever decided to expand its horizons by reaching out to a new market segment?
Targeting a new audience brings challenges and opportunities, and responsibility for the success of the venture often rests squarely on the marketing department. As you prepare to approach a new audience, make sure you are doing the following:
Conduct target market research
As you prepare to broaden your marketing department’s reach to a new market segment, it’s crucial to research your new audience. Conduct your own industry research through surveys and interviews or work with a research firm to get detailed demographic and psychographic information on potential new buyers. Gather existing industry research from other sources and compare their findings. Review what you know about your existing customers and how they are similar and different from this new market.
Perform further market segmentation
You’re looking at a new market, of course, but are you making the mistake of considering this market as a monolithic group? Just like your existing market, this one is made up of individuals who represent a demographic range. Furthermore, they may represent organizations from small to large, with differing needs. Consider a range of ways in which this market could be segmented for more effective marketing. When you begin your campaign, you may want to test a few options as you plan ongoing marketing segmentation.
Create buyer personas
Once you’ve segmented your audience, craft new buyer personas to encapsulate your thinking on the individuals who make up your new market. Compare them to your existing buyer personas. How do these people’s needs overlap with those who already engage with your marketing? What new needs do they present that your marketing can address? Hold onto these personas and adjust them as necessary as you roll out your new marketing campaigns and collect data on their impacts.
With these important elements in place, it’s time to launch your new campaign. Good luck!
If you’d like more of our thoughts on marketing matters, sign up for the Movéo newsletter.
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The best marketers don’t fit their work into clearly defined boundaries. They constantly push the limits of marketing practices and challenge widely held understandings of what marketing can and should accomplish.
This month, we’re taking a look at marketing’s “new horizons.” These are the boundaries of marketing ready to be pushed and the areas we most expect innovation to happen in 2016. So what are the “new horizons” forward-thinking marketers need to start looking at and integrating into their strategies right now? Here’s what we suggest:
Marketing/Sales Technology
Technology is such a large part of marketing these days that some business leaders even think it’s time to create a new position: the “marketing technology officer,” or MTO, who would lead marketing product development, introduce new technologies to the department and spearhead all automation tactics. Does your marketing department have the tech it needs to establish your organization as a leader in 2016?
If you do not have them already, your marketing and sales departments should invest in:
- Customer relationship management (CRM) software, fully integrated with both marketing and sales
- A marketing automation program, which can handle all aspects of your digital marketing
- Data analysis programs that help your data analysts gain insights from collected information
Customer Service
How often does your marketing department talk to your customer service team? The customer service team deals with customers day in and day out, and that level of interaction gives team members plenty of customer insights to share. If your marketing and customer service departments aren’t aligned, your team is missing out.
Moreover, a stand-out customer experience is what sets your B2B brand apart from all the others. In 2016, prioritize creating a memorable, positive customer experience that will keep your existing customers coming back, and turn them into brand advocates. Again, work with the customer service team for the best results.
Product Development
The data insights the marketing department collects and processes are all insights into the sort of products your prospects need. So in 2016, it’s time for the marketing department to take a more active role in product development.
Kickstart a stronger working relationship between marketing and product development in these two ways:
- Work with the product development team to streamline customer experience from first marketing contact through their use of the product
- Share insights with product development teams to inform new products based on target audience and customer insights
What else is your organization planning to build into your 2016 strategy? If you have big plans that could use the help of a partner firm, give us a call.
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