As marketing technology presents marketers with more and more opportunities to grow their brands across digital platforms, the ways a brand can be expressed through digital have and will continue to change.
Consider the power of branded video to drive engagement, and the growing amount of time spent with digital video as a portion of all web traffic. Given these factors, a branded web series could be a promising new avenue for your organization to explore. While some of the best known web series have been created by B2C brands, B2B brands can and should embrace this trend.
Consider this: instead of overtly promoting your brand, incorporate your message into a web story organically, or bookend each episode of your series with “presented by” screens. Your audience will appreciate and spend more time with content that is deeply relevant to them, rather than something that feels like a commercial. Meanwhile, your organization gets credit for the thought leadership. Instead of trying to strongarm your audience into engagement, host the series on your website or YouTube channel to drive traffic, and then entice viewers further through the funnel with other valuable content.
Did you read our November blogs on interactive storytelling? If not, we highly recommend that you revisit them, since interactive storytelling remains a valuable, yet still largely untapped tactic for marketers.
If you already have an interactive storytelling strategy in the works, consider the other types of interactive content that your organization can create as well. Perhaps interactive data visualizations and infographics could help tell your brand story. Try presenting original research in a set of branded infographics that your audience can manipulate to see different data segmentations or to drill down into the information that most interests them. What other examples of interactive content can you think of that would impress your audience?
Using game-like elements to drive sales is nothing new—just think of traditional customer rewards programs. Today, it’s possible for marketers to offer far more sophisticated gamified content to drive engagement and entice leads through the funnel. You may also find success using gamification to remarket to existing or past customers.
When planning your gamified content, Marketo suggests developing rewards for social sharing, offering incentives for the creation of a personal account and creating a sense of urgency through the use of a deadline or countdown.
Want to learn more about how content can help your organization gain customers? Read our white paper, The 5 new laws of content.
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