What Is Interactive Marketing, and How It Helps Your Bottom Line
New forms of marketing seem to rise to the top of the priority list every few months. And although trends like influencer and experiential marketing are important and effective, being able to read and respond to your customers' actions is arguably the most valuable currency for engagement and for that, you need to make an interactive marketing strategy a priority.
As a customer-centric strategy, interactive marketing (sometimes called event-driven or trigger-based marketing) involves reacting to a customer's behaviours or actions, and then working to meet his or her expectations because interactive marketing is facilitated by the technology at your disposal, it offers new ways for your brand to engage with customers and now that customers journey through digital channels and expect seamless interactivity, interactive marketing has become crucial.
For example, consider a common lead-generation journey for a software-as-a-service company as a member of its target audience goes from prospect to client: Someone visits the website looking for more information about the software.
That person comes across educational content covering what the company does and enters an email address to download a whitepaper or case study to learn more.
The SaaS company sends emails to the person prompting him or her to schedule a call and consult with a salesperson.
Behind that journey is a web of interactive marketing: the platforms, content, and emails already built to attract clients and guide them toward the next step of their engagement.
The benefits of using interactive marketing
As you have likely guessed, interactive marketing boasts many benefits that will have a direct and effective impact on your business. These benefits are as follows:
Increased sales: Increasing their conversion rate is what most businesses strive for, and with good reason. Well, luckily for you, this is what interactive marketing does. It works to increase the odds of your ability to deliver what the customer is looking for as well as offering items that are related to past and current searches.
Lower costs than traditional marketing efforts: Firstly, online advertising of any type costs significantly less than traditional marketing efforts including television, print as well as radio and can often produce a much greater return rate.
Customer satisfaction: As we now know, interactive marketing is based around fulfilling the customer's needs. Often, you will be able to match your consumer with the right product or service, and thus, offering more satisfaction with the least amount of effort. Further, a happy customer is more likely to be loyal as opposed to one who is unable to find what they are looking for.
Cons of interactive marketing
As with any marketing strategy, interactive marketing requires careful planning and implementation. Although a system will ultimately record and decipher many factors for you, you will still require the tools to understand what these measures mean.
Comfortability factor: For some consumers, ads that are targeted towards their wants and needs may come across as creepy or unnerving. Delivering recommendations means tracking what your customers do, and for some this is uncomfortable. Targeting ads in their direction may cause them to pull away from your company slightly. But of course, many technologically aware customers will be used to it.
Customer differences: Interactive marketing works on customer probabilities. However, just because many people bought both items A and B, does not mean that this will happen every single time. Unfortunately, this could go wrong in some cases while working to highlight that you do not know your customer as well as you think.
Implementing interactive marketing in your business is not just about a simple click of the mouse. It is about taking the time to understand your marketplace as well as the wants and needs of your customers.
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