Be honest.

Is your marketing automation system not as snazzy as it could be?

Maybe it has a bunch of messy records. Maybe the nurture streams are all misaligned. Whatever it might be, your system could use a little TLC.

We all know marketing automation is important — a Gleanster study found that 79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for more than 2 years. Investments in marketing automation also aren’t pennies, so we need to get as much value from our systems as we can.

That’s where snazzing up your marketing automation system comes in. Your system should have:

• Detailed, nuanced lead profiles. 
• Complex, robust lead scoring.
• Personalized, targeted nurture streams.

That might seem like a lot to ask. But there’s actually one amazing tool that helps you bring all three elements of your marketing automation to a whole new level: interactive content.

What’s that? Interactive content is any content where the user is actively engaged – clicking or answering questions within the content itself. Common examples include assessments, personality tests, quizzes, calculators, and polls.

Keep reading to find out how interactive content delivers more and better lead data to score and nurture more effectively, so you can sit back and watch the MQLs roll in.

1. More (and better) profile data

Let’s start with a basic one. With interactive content, you can gather a huge amount of information in a more engaging way, while giving your audience something valuable along the way.

Let’s say you’re building an ROI calculator. Your audience is interested because it will help them understand what they can expect to gain by investing in your product or service, so they’re happy to answer questions your sales team cares about – like how many units they might purchase, or the size of their implementation team.

Could you capture that breadth of information with a lead form? Possibly – but long lead forms can cause higher bounce rates, as found by HubSpot’s Dan Zarella (the ideal length is 3-4 fields).

With interactive content, you can include a lead form to collect your basic demographic data, and use the questions and answers to gather the specific qualifying information you and your sales team need to score, nurture and close deals.

Speaking of scoring…

2. More accurate lead scoring

What does a “hot lead” look like for your sales team? Maybe they really want to talk to people who recently hired a new systems admin; maybe their best deals come from companies that use a very specific type of software or hardware.

Identify those characteristics and create an interactive experience around them. Those answers can be pulled into your marketing automation and you can score leads against them, bubbling them up to the surface for your sales team to prioritize.

That’s what the team over at Ecova did with a recent piece of interactive content. They repurposed an existing assessment into a SnapApp quiz: “Good Utility Drives Good Decisions,” a short and compelling assessment to let consumers know if they were on the right track to getting good utility data.

This five-question quiz includes questions the Ecova sales team uses during the qualification process, speeding up qualification and disqualification so the sales team could focus on the hottest leads.

3. More targeted and personalized nurture

Using interactive content lets you learn more specific information about your leads so you can send them perfectly targeted follow-up content.

Offering the right content at the right time is a huge part of driving prospects down the funnel efficiently, and one of the primary reasons companies invest in marketing automation in the first place. According to a DemandGen Report study, 73% of B2B marketers cited better response to campaigns/offers due to targeting/relevancy as one of the biggest benefits of lead nurturing.

Segmenting for lead nurture is important, but can be time-intensive. With a database of tens of thousands of leads, how can you apply unique characteristics to each lead to give them hyper-targeted follow-up materials?

With interactive content, you can feed all the question and answer data into your marketing automation and CRM systems and trigger nurture emails associated with those results. This is supercharged marketing automation – rather than simply nurturing according to behavior or demographic data, you can now nurture according to what your prospects are really thinking and saying.

Conclusion

There you have it – three ways to use interactive content to snazz up your marketing automation system. With better data, more accurate lead scoring, and personalized, hyper-targeted nurturing, you’ll deliver more MQLs faster than ever.

Are you already using interactive experiences to get more from marketing automation? Share your stories in the comments, or I’d love to hear from you on Twitter! Find me @lenagainstme.

Learn more about building a well-optimized content experience. Read our eBook: The Ultimate Guide to Content Experience.