Chemical companies that are looking for ways to narrow their targets, capture their audiences and drive high-quality leads are turning to interactive content. User experiences such as dynamic websites, interactive animations and videos, online calculators and assessments, provide added value that can pull the right traffic to your website. Interactive content can be used to target audiences, generate more (and better) leads, establish and nurture a relationship with prospects and clients and segment and score leads.
In this blog, we discuss four tactics to get chemical businesses started with interactive content, as well as how, when and why to use them.
Content Is (Still) King
Today’s savvy chemical marketers leverage content to provide reliable insights and guidance to buyers and decision-makers. The Edelman Trust Barometer 2021 shows that people rate business as the most trusted source of information across the globe, coming higher than NGOs, government and the media in both competence and ethics scores.
According to a 2023 report by Marketing Profs and the Content Marketing Institute, 71% of B2B marketers believe that content marketing will be even more important in 2023 than it was in 2022. B2B marketing budgets for 2023 support the fact that content remains king: nearly half of B2B organizations plan to boost their content marketing spend in 2023.
Interactive Content vs. Static Content
As of 2022, over 8.28 million pieces of blog content were being published every day. And that’s just blog content. That’s a lot of competition to get your content in front of your audience. With today’s buyers doing their own research, you can’t just publish your content and hope that it gets the read-throughs, engagement and clicks it needs to win. An interactive experience is a great way to push buyers and decision-makers to your content.
As a participatory experience, interactive content resonates with users. It drives better engagement, conversion rates and leads than static content. That might just give your online chemical business the edge you need. Seven or eight years ago, interactive content was all the rage. The frenzy has settled down, but interactive content hasn’t. What once was a novel approach to content, has become the new normal.
Interactive content works because:
- It drives searchers to the interactive tools they’re looking for
- It increases time spent on your website
- It increases engagement with your web content
- It creates lead-gen opportunities
Let’s discuss some of the ways your chemical business can incorporate interaction into its online content.
Dynamic Websites Segment and Score Leads
A dynamic site is integrated into your martech (marketing technology) stack. This includes your customer relationship management (CRM) software and your marketing automation software. Integration enables you to display different content to different users, personalizing the user experience and guiding the buying journey.
Blog comments and real-time calendars are examples of dynamic web content. Menus can be dynamic. But chemical businesses can take it even further than that with dynamic ecommerce websites and social media platforms that users register and log in to. These dynamic sites serve up information and ads based on preferences, filterable settings and users’ browsing, searching and shopping patterns.
As well as allowing marketers to target users with specific information, dynamic websites also provide user information back to a business through its martech stack. This data helps marketers to understand what information is most important to each visitor based on how they navigate and engage with their website.
Then, with scoring tools, marketers can assign a point value to visitor actions and behaviors that show intent. These scores demonstrate how interested a prospect is in your solution and where they are in the buying journey. They help you segment leads into smaller lists for targeted remarketing campaigns. You can use that data to display targeted web content and send ads and emails that deliver exactly the right message to move a prospect further down the sales funnel.
Interactive Animation and Video Marketing Get More Clicks
Video isn’t just a popular marketing tool – people are demanding more and more of it. The State of Video Marketing 2022 from Wyzowl reveals that the number of online video views doubled between 2018 and 2021.
Marketers in the chemical industry can use animated or traditional videos to present their brand message while giving users an inside look at their business. Moreover, today’s video experience doesn’t have to be passive – viewers can now interact with a brand through video.
A simple example of an interactive video would be a YouTube video with a text box containing an embedded link that prompts viewers to subscribe to a channel, watch another video or visit a website. These types of markers enable a brand to guide prospects through the buyer journey, providing more detailed information or next steps.
With software integration, chemical brands can take video interaction even further. For example, a marketer might use generate more engagement with:
- Immersive 360° videos (like VR but without the goggles)
- Video branching, which allows users to participate in and guide the story
- Embedded polls, quizzes and calls to action
For example, the following video from AFPM allows viewer interaction during a 360° tour of a petrochemical plant:
Interactive Assessments, Surveys and Polls (and Results) Get Engagement
Interactive assessments, surveys and polls are an effective and non-invasive way for businesses to determine customer challenges, find out where your buyer stands in their journey, segment your audience, and gauge client satisfaction (just look at the popularity of the Net Promoter Score). Adding a poll or survey to your content strategy is also an inexpensive way to engage your target audience.
Not only can interactive assessments, surveys and polls generate leads on your website, but they can also be used on other online platforms such as social media posts and digital ads. They are an effective means to showcase your expertise in an industry process or application. And if you use them to reveal customer challenges or needs, they can be effective at guiding prospects further along in the customer journey. And you can reuse your learnings in your content.
Some B2B companies have seen success in elevating surveys with gamification, which increases entertainment value and customer interaction. This is a particularly successful tactic to increase engagement and leads at tradeshows and conferences.
Interactive charts, maps, graphs and infographics are an ideal way to display the results of your surveys and polls. With online tools, you can dynamically display data in a way that engages and enchants your users. What’s more, these interactive elements can be personalized and served up to prospects at key touchpoints along the buying journey.
Digital Calculators Capture More Traffic
As competition increases, chemical companies can capture more web traffic, improve the user experience and convert more leads by with online digital calculators. Their appeal to buyers and decision-makers is obvious – they can condense complex figures into simple, digestible bits of data.
Source: Calculator Academy
Chemical companies can use calculators to demonstrate product value or answer frequently asked questions using variable user data.
Online tools like Calconic make it easy to create a calculator from a template or build one from scratch with no coding. They can be integrated with your CMS and lead generation tools to estimate required units, provide instant quotes and even ROI.
Besides pricing, ROI and quantity, online calculators can compute:
- Overhead cost
- Labor cost
- Lead time
- Production units
- Production time
- Volume and weight
- Raw material requirements
- Thermal energy use
- And so much more
Not only is an online calculator a helpful resource for current and prospective chemical buyers, but it also gives web visitors a chance to interact with your brand in a new and interesting way. It’s a simple, yet effective means of increasing and improving leads. For example, BASF has gated its calculators, which help manufacturers determine plastic stress and strength requirements, injection molding costs and cycle times.
Get Started with Interactive Content for the Chemical Industry
To achieve a fantastic content strategy that will keep your audience engaged, chemical companies should round out their marketing strategy with several types of interactive content. You get started by integrating a dynamic website with your martech stack, and using third-party tools to create digital calculators, add interactive elements to your video, and create online polls, assessments and surveys. These tactics will increase traffic, audience engagement, brand awareness and lead quantity and quality.
If you’re looking for ways to integrate interactive content into your website, contact Elevation Marketing today. We’d love to chat about your strategy.