Interactive videos are videos that your audience can interact with. This means that instead of your video taking viewers on a linear journey – where the only options are play, skip, and pause – your video will have many different paths that users can navigate at their choosing.
This new "active" way to enjoy videos will make your brand more memorable and help you compete for attention in an ever-crowded marketplace.
Here are just a couple of ways you can use interactive video.
Story videos give viewers the power to choose their own adventure, and they're also a great way to demonstrate your product in an engaging manner.
Example: The Time Machine: An Interactive Adventure!
The video allows viewers to navigate different product tutorials, choosing the context of each one or you can enable users to click on the item in the video to be taken straight to a product page to make a purchase.
The interactive video is the best way to engage a wider audience, with all kinds of people likely to enjoy it – regardless of whether they have an interest in the brand or product itself. Furthermore, by controlling exactly how the video can be watched, the user experience immediately changes from a passive to an active one, becoming far more engaging as a result.
This one is the best video type for lead scoring and identifying high-quality prospects. As the viewer clicks around and learns more about your product features, you can use the narration to lead the viewer to the benefits and address their unsaid objections. Finally, this type of video doesn't lock people into following a fixed path towards just one call to action. It offers choices based on the level of customer awareness.
Forget about promoting yourself — play to what your customers want. Give them something fun; make them feel joy, excite them. By the time your experience is over, you won't even have to market anything — they will be "sold" automatically.
One of the main reasons video marketing has snowballed in popularity in recent years is because of how engaging it is in comparison to other marketing mediums. The combination of moving images, sound, and, in many cases, a story, is much more interesting than a static advertisement.
Interactive video demands the full attention of the viewer because they are being asked to take part. In other words, it changes the attitude of viewers, from sit back, to sit up.
With the rise of wearable tech and lifestyle management apps, people are gamifying everything they can. Gamification is the process of using typical elements of gameplay – point-scoring, competition, problem-solving etc. – to make menial tasks fun.
The problem with non-interactive video is not a lack of data; it's a lack of useful data.
With interactive video, you can track each decision that a viewer makes and use this insight to create actionable reports based on user interactions.
All of this data allows you to track the return on investment of each of your video campaigns. On top of that, the insights can also help you build a clearer picture of what your audience best responds to, informing future campaigns.
So, that was the case for interactive video! What do you think? Are you in?
You should be! More than 40% of businesses are using interactive video in 2018. If you want to keep up, make sure you're one of them!