Video marketing is a cornerstone of your marketing strategy, allowing you to simplify complex ideas and connect better with your audience. But, your traditional videos can’t be customized or personalized for every demographic. Plus, they lack an engagement factor as audiences have to be mere spectators throughout the video’s duration.
If you’re looking for a solution to these problems, interactive video is the answer. In fact, according to a 2024 market study by Idomoo, 81% of consumers prefer receiving interactive video from brands. Additionally, 87% of audiences have been convinced to purchase a product after watching a video.
These statistics show that while interactive video marketing is still a novel concept, it’s had a significant impact on marketing and sales, and this impact will only continue to increase.
So, in this post, we’ll tell you how you can adopt interactive video marketing to boost your sales and engagement. It’s time to jump ahead of the competition, and we’re here to give you all the deets!
How Interactive Videos Boost Sales
Interactive videos actively involve the viewer in driving the narrative forward, leading to increased immersion and engagement. This is in stark contrast to traditional video, which viewers passively watch.
And if you’re implementing them in your marketing strategies, here’s how they can boost your sales:
- Higher Engagement Leading to More Sales: With clickable elements that showcase the product and/or service and guide the customer through the experience, interactive videos engage viewers for longer. This long engagement fosters a strong connection with the brand, leading to better conversion rates.
- Personalized Experience: A customer will always prefer a buying experience that’s tailored to their requirements, instead of a generic shopping experience. Interactive videos can be customized, allowing customers to choose their path forward and giving them a sense of control. This increases your content’s relevancy in the eyes of the customer.
- Data Analysis and Insights: Each interactive video gives you the chance to analyze consumer behavior. With these videos, you can track engagement rates, drop-off points, interactions, and more. By extracting insights from this data, you can refine your video funnel and customer journey for better outcomes.
- Seamless Shopping: Shoppable interactive videos allow consumers to make purchases and explore the product directly from the video itself. This creates a smooth shopping experience, and directly boosts sales.
- Lead Generation: Interactive videos allow you to embed polls, quizzes, surveys, and forms into the video directly. Plus, this doesn’t disrupt the viewing experience. Essentially, collecting and nurturing new leads becomes a cakewalk!
Types of Interactive Videos
Before you start using interactive videos in your marketing efforts, it’s important to understand the different types of interactive videos that you can use. We’ve discussed the major types below:
- Clickable Hotspots: These interactive videos have embedded links in clickable areas of the video, allowing consumers to view product information or purchase the product. A major advantage of these hotspots is that the consumer doesn’t have to stop or leave the video to interact and engage with the link.
- Branching Scenarios: These are basically interactive videos that provide multiple choices and allow the viewer to choose their narrative path. The biggest benefits of this type of video are that it’s highly personalized, gives a sense of choice to the viewer, and results in better brand connection.
- Quizzes and Polls: Incorporating quizzes and polls in your interactive video shows that the brand cares about the opinions of the audience. Not only is this entertaining, but it also helps you understand consumer preference.
- Lead Generation Forms: Embedding lead generation forms in your dynamic video content is a surefire way to gather information on new leads. Plus, if done correctly, viewers don’t even have to leave the video when filling in the information. They’re great for collecting data and working on new leads.
Apart from these, other types of interactive videos include 360° interactive videos, interactive product demos, live interaction videos, and gamified interactive videos.
Best Practices for Creating High-Converting Interactive Videos
Now that you know about the different types of interactive videos, let’s move on to the guidelines and best practices to follow. After all, creating an interactive video isn’t just about adding random clickable elements; you have to create these videos with a strategy in mind.
- Define Your Goal: First things first, understand why you need to create an interactive video. Is it to boost sales? Or do you want to generate leads? Maybe you’d like to promote an event? Defining these goals will help you use the right interactive elements on your video to create the best viewing experience.
- Always Keep the Experience Seamless: If your interactive video has plenty of friction in terms of navigation or instructions, it’ll hamper the customer experience. Ensure that your video’s interactive elements blend organically and that you don’t overwhelm your viewers with too many instructions.
- Easy Engagement: An interaction is only easy if it’s short and simple. So, keep actionable elements at strategic points, and ensure that these interactions are clear. The users shouldn’t be confused about where to go next or what to do.
- Personalization is Key: Do your research and understand your target audience’s preferences. Of course, branching storylines offer a great deal of immersion and personalization.
- Track the Metrics: You’ll never understand how your video campaign is truly performing unless you monitor the metrics. Tools like Life Inside allow you to track performance metrics of your videos, such as CTRs, interaction points, conversion rates, etc. Analyze these metrics to optimize and refine your video marketing strategy.
- Choose the Right Tool: Not every interactive video tool will meet your requirements. However, popular and reliable platforms like Life Inside are known for their ease of use and seamless integration and can be a great choice for your first interactive video deployment!
Case Studies and Success Stories
You don’t have to dig deep to find case studies where brands using interactive videos have seen success in their marketing efforts.
1. Burberry
Burberry, a popular luxury fashion brand, used interactive video that allowed viewers to click on the clothes worn by the video’s models. This would then allow them to purchase the clothing directly from the video!
2. Nike
Nike’s Nike By You campaign allows users to customize their shoes’ colorways on an interactive video interface. Consumers can personalize their apparel’s color, texture, and more. This was an excellent way to increase engagement, provide tailored content, and boost sales!
3. IKEA
Another great example of using interactive video marketing is from Swedish furniture giants, IKEA. The brand used an interactive video platform to provide users with a virtual space to design their homes with furniture from the brand. Essentially, it helped IKEA’s consumers visualize the products and increase confidence in their purchase decisions.
Measuring Success: Key Metrics to Track
There are just a few important metrics that you need to track at the beginning of your interactive video marketing journey. We’ve discussed these metrics below:
- Click-through Rates: Click-through Rates show how active your CTAs are for a particular video. If the CTR is high, that means that your viewers find the CTA to be relevant to the buying journey. However, if it’s on the lower side, check if you’re using proper, actionable CTAs at the correct strategic points. Optimizing the viewer journey for higher CTRs will result in improved engagement, lead generation, and sales.
- Engagement Levels: Your video’s engagement levels, such as the number of clicks or the watch time, indicate how engaging and interesting your viewers find your content. Needless to say, higher engagement levels have the potential to increase the number of shares and boost sales. Analyze the engagement levels to personalize the buyer's journey.
- Conversion Rates: Ultimately, what matters most for the brand is sales. This means that the Conversion Rates need to grow and be as consistent as possible to achieve the brand’s business goals. CRs show how many of your viewers are taking action to either purchase the product or sign up for a trial. To increase your CRs, ensure that the video experience is seamless and brings value to the customer.
Conclusion
That brings us to the end of this post. The information we’ve provided here should help you start with your interactive video marketing journey. Remember that this form of marketing is being rapidly adopted in the industry. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, it might be time to switch.
Fortunately for you, Life Inside’s interactive video solutions handle every video marketing requirement that you have. From collecting videos to automatic deployment across all your channels, we’re here to serve you. Sign up for a free trial today to elevate your brand’s marketing to the next level!
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How can interactive videos help increase sales?
Interactive videos increase engagement and brand awareness, and provide a personalized experience to the viewer. This results in a better brand connection for the viewer, thereby increasing the likelihood of sales.
2. How do shoppable videos drive conversions?
Shoppable videos incorporate product demos and clickable hotspots (like product info and purchase links) seamlessly to provide a frictionless buying experience to the viewer. In fact, they don’t even have to leave the video to purchase the product!
3. What are some examples of successful interactive video campaigns?
Some successful examples of interactive video campaigns are Nike, Walmart, IKEA, and Burberry.
4. How do interactive videos improve customer engagement and satisfaction?
Interactive videos can be personalized based on consumer behavior. These videos can have branching narratives that give the customer a choice in how the video unfolds. Apart from this, they can provide all the product information to the user without having them exit the video. All these factors increase the customer’s engagement and satisfaction and can help drive sales!
