Businesses are searching for ways to better engage with their customers, employees and partners while balancing the new norm. Whether it’s video meetings (Zoom) or recorded employee onboarding and product videos, brands are making the investment in their digital experiences.
Businesses that are mature in their use of online video are now searching for ways to get more from their investment. The best way to do that (in our opinion) is to add an additional layer of engagement using interactive video.
What’s interactive video? This article will go into all the details — in short interactive video turns your videos into high powered lead generation and communication assets by adding clickable buttons, links and other interactive elements to the video and the video player.
Interactive video gives viewers the ability to interact with your videos and brand in a personalized way that will ultimately lead to sales and continued loyalty.
Read our Interactive Video Buyer’s Guide
Organizations that use interactive video see the following benefits:
- Using interactive video for sales, they are able to better qualify sales targets and leads by increasing engagement and segmenting the viewing audience based on viewer actions.
- Interactive video migrates the sales process onto the web and takes it digital, personalizing the experience for customers by moving leads through the funnel based on their interests.
- Interactive video is great for educating students, employees, customers and prospects with interactive training videos that will drive higher engagement, deeper learning, and verification of completion and understanding of materials.
The most common feature sets:
Given the benefits above, let’s now take a look at some of the most common feature sets found with interactive video software. One of the main things to consider with interactive video that ties directly into feature sets, is the fact that viewer actions from video capture meaningful information while gaining viewer insights and behavior patterns.
Here are the feature sets that feed the insight:
- Overlay comments and images on top of videos within the video player for context or additional information
- Add in-video forms to gather contact information such as name, e-mail, or phone number, right within the video player.
- Collect feedback with in-video surveys.
- Gather insights into video engagement, audience data, comments, responses, clicks, and other actions taken by the viewer.
How interactive video software is packaged and priced:
When you go out to shop for interactive video software, consider the use case, how you will be measuring ROI. Are you enriching educational content or is the use case tied to revenue?
These are important questions to ask because interactive video software vendors can be broken down into SMB/Freemium and Enterprise-Education/Premium.
Freemium vendors tend to deliver basic video overlays and links. These basic interactive tools work well for a single or a couple of videos and limited budget. For more advanced use cases, look at complete end-to-end interactive video toolsets, including custom implementations of in-video click-able elements.
Professionally and well done interactive video can be somewhat costly to work with, but it’s a video marketing tool that can be directly attributed to the success of your videos.
You can learn more about the cost of interactive video by reading our Buyer’s Guide here.
At the bare minimum make sure your interactive video software has these features:
- Interactive video layers including, links, hotspots, buttons, images, iframes and much more.
- The ability to create a single interactive video or apply elements to an entire library.
- Data reporting and integrations with 3rd party marketing and CRM software, which is usually a premium feature.
Finding the right interactive video software for you….
Interactive video software is a niche software category with less than 30 vendors in total. To make things easy, we’ve created a comprehensive list of interactive video software vendors here.
