Using Interactive Content to Drive Leads for a SaaS Business

Philip Cleave

July 12, 2019

Software as a Service, also known as SaaS, has been a growing market for a long time now, and that growth shows no sign of slowing down (Which is good for us, because we’re a SaaS business).

That growth recently led Satatista to predict a market value of 125 billion dollars by the end of the year.

The increased opportunities that come with operating in a growing market also bring greater challenges, particularly in terms of being noticed and being distinctive. Using interactive elements as part of your content marketing mix can really help with this.

Many SaaS companies use basic content marketing to good effect in attracting potential leads to their site. But simply creating blog articles and landing pages and all the other usual elements of this may not be making that content as interesting, useful, and most importantly, effective as it can be. With this kind of business, what we’re really looking for is for site visitors to start a conversation with the company.

Adding quizzes and interactive elements to the content journey

By using interactive content such as surveys, quizzes, calculators, and polls, you can attract new potential customers and get them into a conversational mindset before they actually speak to or email someone from your company.

One of the reasons for this is that customers who are looking for SaaS software are usually doing so because they have a problem or challenge to which they need to find a solution. As Software providers, we’re seeking to provide that solution for them or, if they don’t end up converting and being a customer on their first visit, to be useful and interesting enough on that visit that we’re remembered as being useful which leads them to come back.

Surveys as the content element

Using surveys and quizzes to form the interactive element of your content marketing gives you huge flexibility, and can help you kill several birds with one stone. They can help you by gathering information about the visitor and they can help the visitor, + by directing them towards the right content for their needs.

SmartSurvey makes implementing these quizzes really easy and flexible. As the quiz can be hosted on the page via a web embed, you have complete control over the quiz contents and can easily add or remove elements based on the results you’re seeing.

How we’ve used interactive content

You probably remember that much of the first half of 2018 was characterised by a lot of drama around what was the then-imminent introduction of GDPR. We decided to create a page where users could take a quiz to determine their level of preparedness for the new legislation.

While not evergreen content, it’s still a page that gets traffic, even over 12 months after the new rules came into force, so it’s been a very effective tool. We found that the page where we hosted the quiz was twice as effective at converting visits to leads compared to a regular landing page.

By collecting the data and then showing the visitor useful information at the end of the quiz, it both helps them to understand what they need to do to achieve compliance and helps us. If they decide to contact us, we can focus in on those key areas that are of concern to them, and not spend time on things that might not be relevant to them.

Not everything has to be serious

While our example was quite serious in tone, your content doesn’t have to be. Anyone who’s spent time on the internet knows that quizzes with a light tone can be very effective at drawing traffic, especially from social channels. If you can combine this approach with something relevant to your audience, then that’s a recipe for effective content.

Get more value by adding return triggers

If you’re doing a survey as part of your content then it makes a great deal of sense to round it off with data collection for the purpose of sending the participant an email to let them know when the results have been published. There’s always a strong sense of natural curiosity into what the results were of surveys we took part in, so this simple addition can generate a return visit without a great deal of extra effort.

It can also work the other way as well – if you’re putting out content around the results of a previous survey, then rounding off the article by encouraging the reader to take the same survey, or a related one, feels like a natural progression to the visitor and should see good engagement.