Marketing online used to be easier.. right?  It was nice and neat.

Person A wants to buy something
Person B has something to sell

Person A buys from Person B = everyone’s happy.

But… things have changed!  There’s always been competition, but never like this!

Person B is now trying to convince Person A to buy from him … but People C, D, E and Freaking G (all the way to ZZZZZZ & beyond) are all shouting for his business too.

Buyers have more options than ever before.  So… what makes someone choose YOU over all of the other people out there?

As simple as it sounds making more sales comes down to:

Giving the person what they want, when they want, at a price they’re happy to pay.

You can do this one of two ways:

1. Use paid traffic segmentation tools (like Facebook Ads), to really target your audience so that the people who land on that page are the exact people you want viewing your ads.  Anyone else who clicks the ads and isn’t prime audience material… well… they just cost you money
2. Ask your visitor what they want and then give it to them, with interactive marketing

Until now most marketing you’ll see online does the first.  They try make the marketing message broad and appealing to as many people as possible so that it will hopefully hit the mark – and close the sale.

As marketers we’re trying to ‘guess’ what they want.  If you’re really advanced, you might do some research, create an avatar and market to that person… but still it’s 99% guessing game.  You’re hoping that it will resonate with them.  Sometimes you’ll get it right, other times … well, it can lead to some very costly learning exercises (since we wouldn’t exactly call them mistakes… haha)

What Is Interactive Marketing?

Interactive marketing that happens in response to something your website visitor does (or sometimes doesn’t do).

It creates a personalised experience for the website visitor based on the action taken by that person.

Some examples of Interactive Marketing used well are to be able to tailor the sales message to their:
– Personal status (male/female, house owner/not)
– Demographic (house owner/not, employed, level of education)
– Willingness/readiness to buy (push them to optin, or push harder on the sale)
– Interest in a certain product
– Previous/existing purchases

This can be powerful – for example… it makes sense to offer someone who just bought a hamburger if they want fries with that, but if you ordered a coffee then selling cake might be the more logical choice (and make a lot more sales for you).

Amazon is one of the biggest leaders in Interactive Marketing, offering “suggested reading” recommendations based on your previous purchases, or even items you clicked but didn’t buy.   Amazon then sends you emails, ads, notices etc based on your activity on their site – bringing you back to their website, encouraging you to buy more of the things they know you want!

Benefits Of Interactive Marketing

The most obvious is the customer feeling like they’ve been understood, listened to and have received an almost concierge-like experience – resulting in more sales, happier customers and customers who keep coming back for more.

Some other benefits of using interactive marketing include:

1. Lower advertising costs: As mentioned earlier, having to narrow down your clicks so that it fits within a really tight targeted audience costs money – and wastes perfectly good clicks.
2. Higher sales:  You’re able to add extra items, choose the products that are better suited for their budget and find other items that might be better suited.
3. Happier clients: Feeling listened to is just the first part.  When you’ve got someone who actually takes the time to find out what you want and need you’re more likely to tell your friends about it, share on social media and build a much better reputation for yourself too
4. Lower buyers remorse: They’ve gotten what they actually wanted, so there’s a lot less sales pressure to begin with – but also, you know you’ve been able to help them find the item that is best for them, rather than just throwing a wide net and hoping you get it right
5. Automation: New software tools let you automate a lot of the process, so you don’t need to create multiple landing pages or videos, it’s all done once and then runs automatically for you after that
6. Less cart abandonment: If they tell you they’re not interested right now (but might be later), you can capture their email and followup (proactively) – rather than just letting them get to the cart and closing the tab

Disadvantages of Interactive Marketing

1. Some customers don’t like it.  It’s clever and sometimes people don’t like technology that watches what they do, provides recommendations etc.  There’s a small percent (really small) who might find it creepy.  Those are the ones that complain about seeing a FB ad for dating websites or flowers in the days leading up to Valentines day.  The fact remains … we’re seeing those ads because it sells.When it comes to marketing, would you stop something you KNEW would make you ten times as much money if 0.01% of your audience would unsubscribe?  Well, I know I would!  Reaching that 99.99% of people in a way that is more rewarding for both you and the website visitor makes it a no-brainer.
2. And… of course… the elephant in the room.  “Customising the content means I need to create 50+ different versions of sales material.  It takes me forever to make just ONE!!!”

Fortunately if you’re marketing with video, there’s a new software that makes it easy.

Here’s a video I created using the new Interactr software :

Excuse the horrible audio… we had some distractions here in the Donovan household today (i’m working from home) and things went a little wonky!  Ignore those glitches and up and down goofs as i changed audio between sections!

Ordinarily of course, if you’re making a sales video I’d try and avoid those – but I thought you’d prefer me to spend more time writing and sharing more than spending that time fixing audio.  I hope I was right!!  🙂

Interested in learning more about Interactr? Targeting the message to your audience is a big passion of mine, so i’ve gone into depth in some other training materials that might interest you – here are the links:

=> Read my Interactr Review and my Interactr Bonus offer here

=> Two simple templates to use for quick, easy and effective interactive videos

=> Discover 8 ways uses for interactive video for online marketers

Tracking Your Interactive Marketing Results

One of the best reasons to use Interactive marketing tools is that you’re able to get a LOT more data.

And as always, data is power.

No, you don’t need to math … I get it, very few people really get excited about setting up complicated software and drilling through the numbers.

That’s perfectly ok.

If you’re still not convinced that Interactive video marketing is worth your time, here are some very good reasons to rethink it.

1. Easily identify WHAT is causing your viewers to buy (and buy more)
2. Clearly see what it is they want to buy (as you can offer multiple offers in the same video)
3. Video sells, if you can keep them engaged.  Seeing where they drop off you can know exactly what to change.
4. Knowing what is selling to which segment of the audience let’s you sell more of that
5. Using a software tool that manages all of that for you takes away the guessing

When you’re left with no guessing… it’s all just numbers – which can be confronting.

We like to convince ourselves that we’re more successful than we are, that our offers are converting better – we’re some mad marketing genius because we’ve managed to get an offer to sell.  The truth is, if you’re not tracking and knowing exactly where those sales came from – and where it was they made that decision and more importantly, what it is that you can sell more of and when etc.

Using interactive marketing you’re not doing some stupidly boring A vs B test.  Don’t get me wrong… A/B tests are useful… but Interactive Marketing takes things to a WHOLE new level automatically, without you even trying.

Without doing ANY extra work, you’re able to see multiple ideas/options/alternatives that present themselves completely automatically!  You can use this to discover new product ideas, better products to promote, new niches to dive into – all in a single video.

Does tracking, testing, numbers still not sound sexy enough to you? 

If it helps, think of it this way.  Knowing the information from a video you’re running and being able to see exactly what lead to that decision and being empowered to duplicate that over and over again – is the difference between buying a pizza for dinner… and being able to take your family out to a fancy restaurant (and not have to skimp on the wine choices).

It makes that big a difference.  Most people ignore it – happy to stay in a bubble of ‘that’s too hard/complicated/{insert your own excuse here}, not aware of the actual cost this is taking on lost income, missed traffic and missed opportunities you’d never have known about otherwise.

So, now it’s over to you!

Have you used any customisation, interactive marketing techniques that have worked for you?

Are there any ideas you’d like to try?  Or want some ideas for your niche?  Share in the comments below and let’s get this conversation really cranking!

After all – one-sided marketing conversation is so 2017 … 🙂

Talk to you soon!
– Cindy Donovan