[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1534540106727{margin-bottom: 0px !important;}”]The B2B landscape is flooded with content — both good and not-so good. To stand out and stay top-of-mind with your customers, it’s crucial to create campaigns that not only inform, but also entertain and engage.  

Creative B2B marketers have turned to interactive content to fuel campaigns with engaging quizzes, assessments and more. Uberflip’s Own The Journey campaign, for example, featured an assessment that was fun and helped its marketing and sales teams learn more about their customers and prospects at the same time. In just three months, the campaign generated 1,297 clicks and 907,843 impressions on social media, which led the Uberflip team to win a Killer Content Award for the Interactive Content category at B2BMX this past February.  

We sat down with Christine Otsuka, Uberflip’s Senior Content Marketing Manager, to learn more about the inspiration behind the campaign, why interactive content works and more. Read on!  [/vc_column_text][mk_moving_image src=”https://b2bmarketing.exchange/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/screenshot-2018-08-17-17.10.49.jpg” axis=”horizontal” align=”center” animation=”bottom-to-top” el_class=”ImageStyle”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1534540719994{margin-bottom: 0px !important;}”]B2BMX: Tell me the story behind Uberflip’s Own the Journey campaign? What inspired it? 

Christine Otsuka: Own the Journey is one of my favorite campaigns. It was the first time we made the centerpiece of our campaign an interactive assessment. Rather than launch a new E-book with supporting assets like blog posts, videos, infographics, a webinar (the usual stuff), we made the assessment the anchor and an accompanying E-book one of the supporting assets.  

Creatively, we wanted to play with our former rally cry “Own the Journey.” To us, at the time, it was a message to marketers that by using our platform they could own the entire journey. But it has so many obvious applications to travel and maturity — where are you in your marketing journey? So, we developed a maturity assessment for marketers because we’re all different. There are “marketing tourists” who follow in others’ footsteps and “marketing explorers” who blaze their own trails. And where you are on that journey will help us determine your readiness to buy a solution like Uberflip. 

B2BMX: Why did you choose an assessment and complementing E-book for the campaign? 

Otsuka: We opted for an assessment because honestly, it’s a struggle to get marketers’ attention these days. Our inboxes are flooded with content and if it isn’t fresh, shiny and something we’ve just never seen before, then the chances of it hooking us are slim. We knew we needed to do more to stand out so that’s why we led with an assessment and kept the E-book as a complement.  

But aside from that, we also wanted to provide better quality MQLs for our sales team and extract more information about the accounts we already knew. An assessment allows you to do that. It’s like a giant lead form with 25 fields, but it’s also beautiful, interactive content that gives the user a meaty payout in the end. There’s beauty in the fact that this is a creative campaign that allows us to be innovative, while also supporting our sales team’s efforts with discovery. 

B2BMX: How has interactive content helped Uberflip gain greater insights into its buyers? 

Otsuka: Interactive assessments in particular are so useful for both marketing and sales. Not only will you, as a marketer learn that much more about your prospective buyers more generally, you’ll be able to hand insights about specific prospects over to sales. Having a target account fill out an interactive maturity assessment is like doing the discovery call for your sales team and handing them the transcripts. Talk about hero status! Think of how much more meaningful that first call between sales and that prospect will be, or how much deeper the conversations can go. That’s sales enablement! 

B2BMX: What kind of metrics do you look for when measuring the success of your interactive content? 

Otsuka: Completion rates and form submits, hands down. Firstly, we want to ensure that people are engaged with the content all the way through. If they drop off, then we’ve done something wrong. Secondly, form submits will tell us if the assessment was of value. In this case, we offered an E-book to complement the assessment, and if they wanted to find out who they were (a Homebody, Tourist, Navigator or Explorer) and get the E-book, they had to give us their information. At the end of the day, this is a lead generation effort, so if we’re not getting form submits, then we’re not succeeding at showing our prospects value. After that I’d want to know if they engaged further with us. Did they read the entire E-book? (We convert our PDF E-books into Flipbooks so we can see engagement metrics and know what page readers drop off).  Interactive content shouldn’t be a one-and-done type deal. Those prospects should be nurtured and their engagement with our emails and follow-up content is also a measure of the campaign’s success.  [/vc_column_text][mk_moving_image src=”https://b2bmarketing.exchange/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/uberflip-video-gif-kcs.gif” axis=”horizontal” align=”center” animation=”bottom-to-top” el_class=”ImageStyle2″][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1534540728143{margin-bottom: 0px !important;}”]B2BMX: What advice would you give content marketers looking to incorporate interactive content in their campaigns? 

Otsuka: Do it. Don’t be scared. It may seem like a lot of work if you’ve never done it before, but it’s not more, it’s just different. And be creative. Think about the types of content that make you say, “Oh, wow,” and aim to offer that same experience to your prospective buyers. But you must also be strategic. Ensure that what you’re doing aligns to your overall marketing goals and that you’re investing the time and resources to elevate the experience in a way that will get that next action or secure more information about the right potential buyers. 

B2BMX: Can you share any current/updated results and lessons learned from the campaign?   

Otsuka: The biggest lesson learned is not to make your assessment too long. We opted for a lengthy 25-question assessment and as a result we had about a 30% question completion rate and a 60% lead submission rate. We definitely could have dropped 10 or more questions from the assessment. It would have increased our completion rate dramatically and a shorter assessment is still really valuable. We were really ambitious with this past assessment and basically overwhelmed our sales team with insights. It’s hard to dig through all that info, and the reality is they won’t.  

Following our Killer Content Award Win, we re-launched our assessment and moved the lead gate form to the front. Our mini-campaign around the award win (which included three blog posts and a webinar on how we built an award-winning interactive assessment) helped us boost our clicks, impressions and lead submissions. 

B2BMX: What’s next for Uberflip? 

Otsuka: We’re taking an integrated approach to our marketing efforts and putting the experience at the core. We want everything that we do in marketing and in all areas of our organization to speak to each other and put the customer experience first. Interactive content just so happens to fit into our plans. I’m already working on the next assessment! But this time it’s only eight questions. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”alert-warning” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-trophy”]P.S. Have a Finny-worthy campaign? Nominations for the 2019 Killer Content Awards are open! Nominate your best content or campaign here![/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row]