Selling a product isn’t easy. You have to create awareness of the product, market it to the right demographic, and spend huge sums of money in converting the sales—we get it!
One of the most popular ways in which products are marketed these days is through video. Whether you’re on a product landing page, social media site like Instagram or X, or any streaming service, you’re likely going to see videos or ads for specific items or brands.
However, video isn’t what it used to be—people don’t like watching these product videos, especially if they interrupt their engagement with other media. In fact, according to a Hubspot study, 57% of people dislike ads that disrupt their viewing experience.
But what if there’s a way to provide product videos and ads that potential customers actively engage in?
This is where interactive video platforms come into play. These platforms allow you to create videos of your product and add interactive elements to it. You could add quizzes, branching storylines, and other clickable elements to the video itself.
Essentially, you’re enabling customers to understand your product and services through a direct experience, leading to better awareness and engagement.
In this post, we’ll go through the best interactive video platforms that you can use today. But before that, let’s understand the basics of this new form of content creation.
What is an Interactive Video Platform?
Before understanding what the platforms do, let’s discuss interactive videos.
Interactive videos are basically videos that allow the viewer to actively participate in the video’s narrative. Whether it’s for a product, TV show, or movie, the viewer is no longer a passive spectator.
Using this logic, interactive video platforms allow you to market your product or service by enabling the consumer to engage actively. As an example, if you’re selling a product by telling a story, the viewer should get the option to interact with clickable areas in the video to take them through multiple narratives about the product, such as what the product is and how it helps.
Alternatively, you could just add CTAs to the video that take the viewer to your website or the product landing page. The possibilities are endless, and this is why marketers now prefer using these platforms for selling their wares.
What are the Benefits of Interactive Video Platforms?
There are multiple benefits to using interactive video platforms, and we’ll cover the most important ones here.
- Better Engagement: Of course, with viewers actively watching and participating in your video, the engagement rates increase significantly. These platforms allow audiences to explore the product at their own pace.
- Higher Conversion Rates: Since your audience is highly engaged, it’s a no-brainer that they’re more likely to buy your product. Whether it’s through embedded links or CTAs, consumers are more likely to be converted through these platforms.
- Personalization: Not every demographic is the same. You can’t market a service to a 20-year-old student the same way you’d market it to a retired 60-year-old professor. Interactive video platforms allow you to easily customize the video based on your target audience in an effort to drive more engagement and conversions.
- Excellent Visibility: Videos often go viral on social media. This logic applies to interactive videos as well, especially since social media prioritizes interactivity in videos.
- High Return on Investment: As a business, you want to increase revenue as much as possible by spending as little as possible. Many interactive platforms are affordable and easy to use, while providing better engagement. So, chances are that you’ll earn much more than what you’ve spent!
Best Interactive Video Platforms
Now that you’re aware about interactive video platforms and their benefits, let’s check out the best platforms you can use today!
1. Life Inside
Life Inside is an interactive video platform that’s mostly used by organizations and brands to create and distribute engaging videos across multiple digital channels. The platform also collects videos that can be integrated into new content for better brand storytelling.
You can gather all your videos in one place to create a video library and let your audience explore at their leisure. To make it even more interesting, Life Inside allows you to collate videos into specific funnels, providing interactivity and multiple choices for your audience to discover and engage with.
And if you’re a detail-oriented marketer, you can add personalized CTAs at specific points in the videos to drive conversions.
Life Inside’s interactive videos can be used for the following use cases:
- Sales and Marketing: Share videos about your brand throughout the customer’s journey. From product demos to connecting customers with your product representatives for sales, Life Inside’s interactive videos offer a diversified portfolio of features.
- Sports Clubs: Increase engagement and revenue through interactive video that showcases your sports clubs’ culture, history, and more. Elevate sponsors’ positioning and provide BTS scenes for an exclusive look to longtime fans!
- E-commerce: Running an e-commerce brand? Convert your customers through engaging and interactive product videos to showcase your products. You can even collect videos of customer reviews to increase conversion rates.
- Public Sector: Use interactive video to digitize communication with people in your region. You can also present your office’s services, show your workplace culture to boost hiring prospects, and celebrate achievements or educate people about public schemes.
- Real Estate: Share a virtual tour of your listing with Life Inside’s interactive videos. As an agent, you can also virtually introduce yourself to investors and show your listing’s unique features to prospective buyers.
- Events: Organizing a huge event? Use interactive videos to show your attendees the venue and guide them to the relevant areas. Collect videos of prior attendees and exhibit their experiences to interested audiences. You can also collect videos from speakers or special guests to create hype around the event!
All this is done on a highly user-friendly interface, ensuring that even the newbie marketers in your team can create effective video funnels to engage your target audience. This, combined with Life Inside’s comprehensive features, make it a must-try for all your interactive video needs!
Life Inside Features
- Automated video collection to create a video library (including both existing and user-generated) that can be easily accessed to create new videos or video funnels
- Personalized videos for industries like real estate and e-commerce, tailored to engage different types of consumers
- Interactive elements can be directly integrated into the videos, including collection forms and CTA buttons, based on conversion points
- Tracks metrics like viewer interactions and clickthrough rates for detailed performance analytics
- No-touch distribution to share videos across various social media platforms, websites, apps, and other digital channels while ensuring consistent brand messaging
- GDPR-compliant to ensure privacy and security
Life Inside Pros
- Very easy to use, even for beginners
- Offers personalized customer support for a wide range of audiences
- Allows seamless distribution of videos through multiple channels
- Highly versatile and can be used for events, branding, e-commerce, and more
- Provides detailed analytics to track your videos’ performance
Life Inside Cons
- Relatively new player in the market and is still in the process of building a community
Life Inside Pricing
Life Inside provides 3 pricing plans - Starter, Pro, and Enterprise.
While there’s a free trial, you’ll have to contact their sales department for exact quotes on their pricing plans.
2. VideoBot
Videobot is an interactive video solution that caters primarily to businesses, and is meant to be used by marketers, content strategists, and business executives. The main idea behind the platform is to build and publish interactive videos throughout your customer’s journey in an effort to convert sales.
To enhance the customer experience, Videobot provides 4 types of interactive videos: The Classic, The Widget, The Slider, and the Stories. Each interactive video type is meant for different types of media and audiences.
For instance, The Classic format is ideal for embedding on your product landing page and showcases your product in the usual video format we see on most sites. On the other hand, The Story uses social media’s “Story” feature format on your website, and it’s best for showing customer usages or reviews of your product.
Apart from these, you get a dashboard for content management and real-time analytics, a builder to create customized video funnels, and detailed performance insight through a dedicated Analytics tool.
If you’re looking for the short answer to what Videobot does, it’s used mainly for conversion and engagement, as we stated earlier. But it can also be used for customer support and understanding product consumer insights!
Videobot Best Features:
- Multiple types of interactive videos to enhance the customer journey
- Analytics tool with customized reporting and conversion optimization
- Personalized customer support service
- Allows for multi-platform deployment of videos based on your requirements
- Excellent integration system with CRMs like Hubspot
- Videobot builder provides decent flexibility in terms of customization
- Wide range of use cases in the automotive, banking, and food industries
Videobot Cons
- No free plan
- Lacks online reviews and community feedback
Videobot Pricing
Videobot doesn’t offer upfront pricing plans. You’ll have to book a demo for more information.
3. VideoAsk
VideoAsk comes from the bright minds at Typeform, with a primary focus on building your business relationships with potential customers. However, one of the main use cases of VideoAsk is gathering data through video forms, which directly replaces the forms that Typeform is popular for.
You can also use VideoAsk to conduct async interviews and establish personal connections with candidates, engage with audiences through AI-powered video (and interactive) chatbots, and run video lead generation campaigns. It allows you to customize your video funnels through an intuitive builder and create tailored experiences for audiences.
VideoAsk Best Features
- Get answers through answer types like Net Promoter Score (NPS), appointment scheduling, and payment collection.
- Collect data through transcriptions, tags, and CRM integrations.
- Track video performance with drop-off analysis and integrations with Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and Google Tag Manager.
- Share interactive videos by embedding in emails, sharing on social media, and adding widgets on your product’s landing page.
VideoAsk Pros
- Highly intuitive and easy to use video builder
- Multiple data collection methods
- Great collection of templates for different use cases
VideoAsk Cons
- Price increases based on the minutes you consume, making it less ideal for businesses with limited budgets
- Settings are challenging to navigate
VideoAsk Pricing
VideoAsk provides 3 pricing plans:
- Start: $0/month
- Grow: $24/month
- Brand: $40/month
4. Storyly
Storyly is an interactive video platform that e-commerce brands can utilize to change the shopping experience of their customers, and in turn, boost their conversions. It’s basically used to create interactive, shoppable content experiences for your brand’s app or website.
You can use Storyly to create short-form content with exciting animations and dynamic layouts for your product campaign. The interactivity elements help your customers engage by guiding them through the product’s process.
For example, you can create an interactive video experience for a particular product, adding elements for buying the particular product or searching for similar products on your brand’s website. Storyly also enables you to automate the creation of direct, shoppable content experiences by integrating it with your product feed!
To increase conversions and engagement, you can implement your current content recommendation engine with Storyly. This helps you gain a wider reach with tailored content for diverse audience segments.
Storyly Best Features
- Full-fledged creative studio with animations, images, and GIFs for multiple products.
- AI-powered automation to streamline shoppable content video creation from the product feed.
- Developer-friendly, thanks to integrations with popular development environments from Apple, Android, and more.
- E-commerce enabled features to enable direct shopping from stories and videos.
Storyly Pros
- Great e-commerce based feature set for brands
- Interactive stories can be created for both apps and email campaigns
- Intuitive and easy to use, even for beginners
Storyly Cons
- Lacks localization features
- Has latency issues, especially on poor connections
Storyly Pricing
- Storyly offers multiple pricing plans based on your requirements, starting at $450/month for creating web stories.
- 5. Tolstoy
Tolstoy is mainly known for its shoppable videos, but it does offer some interactive videos and features. These interactive videos can be used as widgets on your website, sending paid traffic from social media to dedicated video landing pages, and embedding shoppable interactive videos on SMS or email campaigns.
It’s particularly useful for brands and their founders, as you’ll be able to share your story and the brand’s unique perspective with your audience for a personal touch. All this, while converting them into customers through shoppable interactive elements!
You can also add responses to FAQs, virtually reading the minds of your potential customers and providing them with the best insight into your product or brand. Of course, Tolstoy allows you to redirect your audience to previous customer testimonials, thereby building brand awareness and trust in the process.
Tolstoy Features
- Turn images into shoppable carousels with interactive shopping elements and background music.
- Extensive UGC video library that can be added to interactive videos for customer testimonials and building brand visibility.
- Add video quizzes to increase engagement and create product awareness.
- Track video performance through detailed insights into customer responses, allowing for further optimization.
Tolstoy Pros
- Very easy to use, thanks to its user-friendly interface
- Extensive interactive and shoppable features for brands, founders, and products
- Knowledgeable and helpful customer support
Tolstoy Cons
- Analytics take longer than expected to update
- Pricing is expensive for smaller teams
Tolstoy Pricing
Tolstoy offers a free plan, with paid plans starting at $19/month for websites under 30K monthly visitors.
How to Choose the Right Platform for Your Needs?
Now that you’ve checked out a few popular choices in interactive video platforms, how do you decide which suits your requirements?
Below, we’ve listed a few crucial factors to consider when investing in these platforms.
- Ease of Use: The platform’s user interface needs to be user-friendly, intuitive, and provide ease of use. If the platform has plenty of features but isn’t easy to navigate, it’ll defeat the purpose of using the software
- Interactive Elements: This is arguably one of the most important factors. Check the platform for the number and type of interactive elements it offers. You should have access to the basics, like interactive polls, CTAs, and product tags. However, it should also allow you to personalize the elements according to your vision
- Video Quality: Nobody likes watching a video with low quality, much less an interactive video. The platform should support at least a 1080p resolution video. Moreover, it has to support videos in different formats
- Personalization: White-labeling is essential for brands to showcase their creativity and spread awareness. Your chosen interactive video platform has to provide custom branding solutions
- Integration: Digital channel distribution is the quickest way to reach a larger audience. Plus, you should know the details of the videos’ performances through advanced analytics and metrics. So, check for social media and analytics tools integrations, at the very least
Engage Your Audience with Life Inside
Interactive video platforms are excellent at increasing your reach and driving revenue. But they’re often difficult to choose from, especially considering factors like integrations, personalization, and scalability.
However, there’s one solution worth considering—Life Inside!
Life Inside provides a user-friendly interface for interactive video creation, access to entire libraries of videos for repurposing interactive content, and scales as your business grows. This makes it ideal for everyone, from beginners to large-scale enterprises.
Sign up for Life Inside today to provide a superior interactive experience to your audience!
