In the digital landscape, it can be difficult to capture a lead or prospect’s attention.
After all, with so many ads, articles, social videos, and product placements, the average internet user is surrounded by thousands of pieces of digital media every day.
Standing out, then, becomes the main goal of digital marketers who want to interact with their audiences in a meaningful way.
Interactive content is one way to do this. It engages your audience with dynamic materials that encourage participation and involvement from users.
While interactive content comes in many forms, like online calculators, animated graphics, or 360 videos, one great way to use it is in your assessments.
This article will help you understand what an interactive assessment is and give you step-by-step instructions on how to create interactive assessments for your brand.
What is an Interactive Assessment?
A marketing assessment is a tool used by companies to gather feedback from leads and prospects to better understand their pain points or questions.
An assessment can also help you gather important information regarding your brand’s identity, your customer’s current interests, their reaction to your products or services, and much more.
While assessments are incredibly valuable to brands, getting customers and leads to respond to the assessment is another matter entirely.
Engaging with leads to gather their feedback is hard since they often don’t see the value in it.
Even offering incentives can reach deaf ears if your audience isn’t interested in filling out rows and rows of information.
Adding interactive elements to your assessment can be a great way to get your audience excited and involved with your assessment requests.
Even small amounts of interest that take away from the form and add value to the experience can encourage your audience to fill in and complete assessments that might have otherwise sat in inboxes.
➤ To make it easier to visualize, here are some examples of interactive assessments produced by us:
How to Create an Interactive Assessment?
Follow the steps to better understand how interactive assessments can be made.
1. Start with Your Persona
The first thing you need to do is to comprehend your company’s buyer personas.
A buyer persona is a profile of an idealized, fictional buyer. It will often include a name, job title, demographic information, interests, pain points, and goals.
You should have a persona for each specific audience you target.
Buyer personas are fantastic tools to help you understand your audience segments. They allow you to discover information about your buyers and know the best ways to reach them and the best formats to do it in.
Before creating your interactive assessment plan, you’ll need to have a firm grasp of your target audience and know the types of interactive content that will appeal to them the most.
For example, if your audience is largely men over 60 years old, then bright, loud graphics and pop-culture references most likely will not appeal to them.
Once you’ve updated your buyer personas for interactive assessment campaigns, you’ll be able to brainstorm and come up with ideas for interactive elements that will resonate and delight your audience.
2. Set Your Interactive Content Goals
After determining your audience through buyer personas and narrowing down the types of content that might be appealing to them, you can get started with your interactive assessment plan by setting your content goals.
Goals are important for the creation of any content piece as they provide structure to your planning process and give you achievable targets to hit.
After all, if you create content without a goal, you have no means to measure to see if your content was successful or if the time and money invested in the project was worth the outcome.
In this context, interactive content has many benefits over traditional content and has been proven to better support you achieve your marketing goals. Here are a few areas where it can be helpful:
- Increases the average time a user is in on a page.
- Boosts your click-through rate.
- Optimizes lead generation.
- Makes it simpler to collect first-party data.
- Boosts sales.
- Improves the overall customer experience.
- Builds engagement and brand awareness.
Using these benefits to help plan your interactive assessment goals is essential, but remember that the ultimate end goal of it is to bring in responses and valuable feedback from your audience.
You’ll need to plan out the questions you want to be answered from the key audience segments the campaign is targeting.
Think about different ways to phrase questions to garner the best answers from your ideal buyers.
3. Plan the Production of the Assessment
The next step to creating interactive assessments is to plan the production.
While most traditional content can be created quickly to distribute across your networks, interactive content typically takes much more time, as the development and production of high-quality interactive content are more involved than writing a blog post.
The depth of involvement in your interactive assessment strategy can be incredibly varied. After all, interactive content could involve video production or mobile app development.
While not every interactive assessment will be that varied, there is still a need to plan production time.
If the content you want to create requires a high level of production that can’t be completed by your team, then you can consider hiring a separate agency or firm that specializes in the creation of interactive content.
These firms might have a high cost but will specialize in creating interactive content that drives real results.
4. Execute Your Plan to Create Interactive Assessments
There are a wide variety of tools to help you create interactive content in-house if hiring an outside agency is outside of your budget.
Ion Interactive, for example, helps you cover the stops needed to develop different types of interactive content and provides a platform to facilitate the process of creating your company’s content.
The team behind Ion helps with graphic design, writing, designing, and marketing your assessments to your customers.
Finding the right tool for your needs might require a bit of playing around to test the abilities and the best choices to create interactive assessments that meet your goals.
Once you’ve determined the best platform, you can begin creating your assessments based on the goals you set previously.
As with all interactive content, you want to make sure you test and run quality assurance on your assessments before you distribute them among your audience.
Making sure that interactive content is running smoothly is key to guaranteeing higher rates of success.
5. Launch the Assessment and Share with Your Audience
After you create interactive assessments that are in line with the interests and goals of your ideal buyer profile, you now have the job of launching the assessment and sharing it with your audience.
There are many different ways to get your assessment in front of your leads and prospects, and you should use multiple channels to get the best responses.
You can promote your interactive assessment through social media channels, including both your regular feed and paid ads.
You can also try emailing the link to your interactive assessment to a curated list of leads, or add a button or pop-up on your site to direct traffic to the right page.
6. Collect Customer Data
The final step of a well-rounded interactive assessment strategy is to ensure that you are collecting important customer data.
During the course of the assessment, you’ll be collecting feedback on questions and concerns that you’ve posed to customers as well as personal data like emails and names.
When you have your customer data collected, you can use it to improve a number of business functions in your brand.
This data can fix problems in your buyer experience process and help you work on a brand identity revitalization strategy or create new marketing initiatives based on pain points your audience has identified.
The personal data you collect can also be used to produce specialized, personalized messages to audience segments and give you new email lists to use for specific products and services that would appeal to respondents.
The data you collect isn’t just useful, it’s the reason behind an interactive assessment in the first place, so you need to have a plan in place to review and use the data you gather.
Otherwise, you might as well not have sent out the assessment at all.
Wrap Up: It’s not Difficult to Create Interactive Assessments
But each step of creating it has a purpose, and taking the time to strategize and plan for your interactive assessment is key to success.
A well-executed interactive assessment will bring you important insights regarding your business practices, brand identity, and marketing approach.
If you are a marketer who wants to learn more about interactive content and how to incorporate it into your content strategy, then check out our resource on getting started with interactive content.
You’ll learn everything you need to know about interactive content as well as important tips for getting started today!
Start creating interactive content with Ion and increase your marketing results!
Start creating interactive content with Ion and increase your marketing results!
