10 Best Practices for Interactive Video Success

Interactive video is quickly becoming one of the most powerful trends to take over the digital space by giving companies the opportunity to create video assets that increase engagement and drive action. With video content expecting to make up 82% of all internet traffic in 2021, finding new ways to break through the noise of the video environment is critical. 

There are plenty of ways to integrate interactive video into your brand—whether you're using video to drive results for sales, marketing, teaching, training, etc. Interactive video allows you to bring any video to life, connect with your audience on a deeper level, and help your business stand out from the competition.  

At Mindstamp, we’ve been able to observe millions of interactive video viewer interactions. While each of these uses for interactive video is unique, with distinct objectives or measures of success, there are best practices that have emerged. 

With such a powerful tool as interactive video, you may be asking, “What are the best tips, ideas, and best practices for implementing interactive video?”

Based on the insights collected from Mindstamp users, we've put together a list of tips to help you get started with creating the most effective interactive video possible and how you can achieve them with Mindstamp.

10 Best Practices for Video Success in 2021:

1. Keep your audience engaged right from the start.
2. Let each viewer decide the direction of their video.
3. Create personalized video experiences that drive action. 
4. Use relevant imagery that continues the conversation.
5. Build trust by showing your viewers you’re listening.
6. Don’t underestimate the end call-to-action.
7. Add call-t-actions throughout your video – not just at the end.
8. Use a ‘try it again’ trick with conditional logic to drive home key points.
9. Incorporate pause functionality to give your viewers a break.
10. Gather information about your audience to determine future messaging.

But first, let’s discuss Mindstamp’s interactive video capabilities and features that make it the simplest and most powerful interactive video solution available.

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Introduction to Mindstamp

Mindstamp is an interactive video platform that makes it easy to turn any existing video into an interactive experience.

• Increase viewer engagement: Create content your viewers can interact with directly within the video.
• Understand your audience: Collect responses to gain a better understanding of the objective and interest of your audience.
• Personalize the video experience: Build a deeper connection with your viewers and maximize their engagement.
• Maximize communication impact: Ensure viewer comprehension, participation, and completeness.
• Drive action and sell more: Provide your viewers with the ability to take action at the right time.

Mindstamp Interactive video features

Add Mindstamp’s interactive video features to quickly and easily bring your videos to life.

• Questions: Ask questions that pause the video and solicit a response
• Buttons: Add clickable buttons throughout the video to drive actions.
• Hotspots: Add hotspots to label video content or enable clickable video areas.
• Drawing: Visually engage the viewer by drawing and highlighting the video.
• Comments: Provide context or commentary by overlaying comments in the video.
• Images: Include clickable images that can open full size or drive actions.
• Video clips: Overlay video clips onto your video to provide visual context.
• Voice clips: Add voice clips throughout your video for personalized commentary
• Personalization: Use variables to personalize a video to many viewers
• Dynamic navigation and branching: Let viewers choose the content and direction of their viewing experience.
• Reporting: Get play reports for every view and see every viewers’ interaction.
• Transcription: Create a searchable, clickable transcript of your video.‍

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‍10 Best Practices for Successful Interactive Videos

Interactive video gives you the power to insert interactive features into any pre-existing video to create a more dynamic, personalized experience. Whether you’re adding a simple CTA button or using a more advanced feature such as conditional logic, you’ll have the ability to transform the overall viewing experience for your audience. Ultimately, this will benefit your audience and your business as you work towards achieving your business goals.

1. Keep your audience engaged right from the start.

Interactive video viewers respond very positively to an early but low commitment call-to-action. A call-to-action, also known as a CTA, serves as the visual or auditory cue that encourages someone to take the desired action. By including a CTA at the beginning of your video, you ensure that expectations are set and that the viewer knows that they will be an active participant in the video viewing experience. For instance, pausing the video within the first few seconds and adding a ‘Let’s Go’ or ‘Get Started’ or ‘I’m Ready’ button will allow you to set engagement expectations and keeps them actively participating as they continue throughout the video.

Benefits of using CTAs at the start of your video:

1. Increased engagement levels
2. Improved KPIs such as conversion rate
3. Data collected to gain audience insights

2. Let each viewer decide the direction of their video.

Many Mindstamp users are looking to let their viewers take an active role in video navigation since viewers love to choose their own viewing experience. This could be in video chaptering that uses a simple video guide or buttons to take you to a different area within the same video.

In this example, the video is asking if the viewer is interested in learning more about interactive videos for marketing or sales. Since the viewer chose marketing, they were taken to the part later in the video that discusses interactive video marketing.

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Or, a more elaborate navigation, such as branching, allows you to connect your video to other video content based on viewer feedback. In this example, the viewer clicked the CTA that asked if they were interested in learning more about interactive video. Based on their response, they were taken to a whole new video about the topic.

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In both cases, the viewer feels empowered to control their destiny and explore their topics of interest further which leads to higher levels of engagement. 

With Mindstamp, you can create deeply personalized videos that guide your viewer through a series of questions to provide them with content that's most valuable to them based on those insights. ‍

Benefits of a dynamic viewing experience:‍

1. More tailored content and CTAs
2. Increased engagement levels
3. Data collected to gain audience insights

3. Create personalized video experiences that drive action.

72% of consumers say they only engage with personalized content, which means that personalization works.

To keep a viewer’s attention, you can use what you know about them (their name, company, previously purchased services, etc.) to modify your interactive video content appropriately. Consumers are more likely to pay attention when the content is relevant to their interests and when they are directly and personally addressed. For example, you can add personalized text to call out the viewer by name, swap in images specific to the viewer, change questions to tailor the experience for each person, or even change the button’s call-to-action based on where they are within the buyer’s journey. 

Benefits of personalization in videos:

1. Increased engagement levels
2. Higher click-through rates
3. Build trust and relationships
4. Enhance brand loyalty by gaining insight into customer’s needs

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4. Use relevant multi-media that continues the conversation.

Learning can improve by over 400 percent with the addition of visual aids, which are processed 60,000 times faster than text.

Images are a great way to add incremental multi-media content to your video in direct response to your viewer’s interests and add immediate value at the exact time your viewer wants to consume it. You often have a lot to say about your product or service, or training content to communicate, and it can be too much to fit into your video itself. With interactive video, you can share product specifications, infographics, or diagrams to provide more digestible information or detail. 

From add-on video clips to infographics, you can offer incremental content in a manner that doesn’t disrupt the viewer from the core video flow, but also lets them dig in deeper if a particular topic catches their attention.

Benefits of using multi-media in videos:

1. Increased engagement levels
2. Provide more context
3. Enhance audience understanding of topic
   

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5. Build trust by showing your viewers you’re listening.

81% of consumers say that they will only buy from companies that they trust. 

If you ask your viewer a question, you have an immediate opportunity to take that information and use it in a way that lets them know you were listening. This could be as simple as confirmation of their answer. For example, you could use the interactive question feature to ask, “What do you think of our video so far?” and then use dynamic variables to show the viewers’ response in a comment in the next slide saying “You responded: [response]! Thank you for your feedback.”

You could also use it as an opportunity to ask for more information from your viewers. For instance, you could ask the question, “What product/service are you most interested in?” From here, you can collect their responses and integrate the information within your CRM to provide future tailored content to them. Instead of sending sales information that is not relevant to your audience's challenges and needs, you build trust with them by taking their responses and providing them with content they actually want.

Benefits of asking questions in videos:

1. Data collected to gain audience insights
2. Increased viewer engagement
3. Build trust and relationships
4. Future personalization opportunities

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6. Don’t underestimate the end call-to-action.

While you have to expect that viewers may drop off during your video, if your viewer does make it to the end they may want to know their next steps. Whether they are just learning about your product or service, or they are ready to make a purchase, not having the proper CTA at the right time could be the only thing stopping them from taking action. 

Mindstamp provides interactive features such as buttons or hotspots that can allow you to add an end call-to-action for your videos. These interactive features can prompt actions such as replaying the video, opening a new video with more content on a given topic, opening a link to more product details or purchase pages. If you’re looking to give one final punch, you can also add interactive elements to the last second of your video with a ‘pause control’ to ensure you’ve really connected with the viewer.

Benefits of using CTAs at the end of your video:

1. Improved KPIs such as conversion rate
2. Data collected to gain audience insights‍

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7. Add call-to-actions throughout your video.

Any salesperson knows they should not sell beyond the close. If your goal with your video is to drive viewers to subscribe to your newsletter, schedule a demo, sign up for a free trial, or put your product in their shopping cart, you don’t have to wait until the end to prompt for the action. Regardless of which stage your customer is at in their consumer journey, they’ll need a call to action that helps direct them to their next step. Include a button, clickable image, or hotspot throughout the video such that when your viewer is ready to act, the rest of your video isn’t standing in the way of driving action.

Benefits of using CTAs throughout your video:

1. Improved KPIs such as conversion rate
2. Increased engagement levels
3. Data collected to gain audience insights
   

Learn more about how to add call-to-actions to your videos.

Here’s an example of how we use hotspots in the middle of our video to drive interested viewers to learn more about a product they could purchase.

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8. Use a ‘try it again’ trick with conditional logic to drive home key points.

Conditional logic is one of the easiest ways to create dynamic, personalized experiences by allowing different content to be displayed (or not displayed) based on the input collected in the video. Based on a viewer’s action, you can store that information as a variable and use it to determine what interactions show up next. 

For instance, have your viewer select a feature they find most interesting and then present an image or video that provides more description or detail about just that feature. Once done, toss a ‘Try it Again’ option on the screen that jumps the viewer back to start the process again. You can dramatically increase viewer engagement through this trick as they repeatedly explore different sets of content.

Benefits of using conditional logic in videos:

1. Provide a personalized experience
2. Increased engagement levels
3. Build stronger relationships with your audience
4. Data collected to gain audience insights

In this example, we asked viewers if they were interested in learning more about interactive video for marketing or sales. Based on their response, we took them to the marketing part of the video, but we offered a “try it again” CTA in the top corners, in case they wanted to learn about interactive video for sales too.

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9. Incorporate pause functionality to give your viewers a break.

Pausing can be powerful. Oftentimes videos allow you to condense a massive amount of information into more digestible content; however, that doesn’t mean the viewer can’t be overwhelmed if you’ve presented a lot of content in a short period of time. It’s possible that the viewer’s attention span could be stretched and you want to ensure they’re re-engaged. Pausing allows you to give the viewer the chance to go back and review the content again on their own time.

For instance, you could add two options with a video pause. The first indicating ‘Yes, I understood that,’ and the second being ‘I missed it, tell me again.’ The first option would continue the video, and the second option would take the viewer back to the information they want to investigate further. By adding clickable items to the screen and then pausing the video until the viewer positively affirms they are ready to progress, you can be sure you’re maintaining attention and reinforce specific topics that are important to pay attention to.

Benefits of using pausing between interactive elements in videos:

1. Enhance audience understanding of topic
2. Increased engagement levels
3. Reinforce important information‍
   

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10. Gather information about your audience to determine future messaging.

Campaigns that use data-driven personalization report 5-8x ROI for their campaign spend. 

Your customer’s personalized user experience does not need to end with the video they are currently watching. Mindstamp offers various CRM integrations such as HubSpot, Zapier, Constant Contact, and more. With these integrations, you can easily gather contact data and user insights from your Mindstamp videos and other business interactions, and then sync and share the data between the two platforms. This back-and-forth connection allows you to continuously collect and utilize data so that you can create even more personalization and nurturing opportunities in future outreach, resulting in a more effective and targeted marketing strategy.

Benefits of using video to gather information:

1. Use metrics gathered to make data-driven decisions
2. Create more personalized experiences
3. Increased ROI

Get started with Mindstamp

Interactive video allows you to provide your viewers with engaging, personalized content that helps drive the viewer result you want, be it moving a customer through your sales funnel, streamlining customer onboarding, or improving internal training. Whether you’re adding in a CTA, using conditional logic, or taking advantage of data collection, interactive videos give you the opportunity to enhance the viewer experience and drive action. 

Best practices for interactive video are still evolving, however, as a pioneer in the industry, Mindstamp will be your source for the best insight.

Ready to start using interactive video with Mindstamp?

Start your 14-day free trial with Mindstamp’s interactive video platform to see these video best practices in action. 

Request a Mindstamp demo to schedule your personalized demo with one of our Mindstamp experts.

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