2 Simple Strategies To Make Any Existing Video Interactive

With over 23% of marketers [1] already leveraging interactive video in their marketing campaigns, you’re likely considering how you can test and explore how interactive video can work for your business or clients.

Of course creating a video from scratch with interactivity in mind can be an exceptionally powerful experience. You can allow the viewer to control their own navigation and pacing, collect insight about their interests and objectives, integrate video directly into your CRM platform like Hubspot or Salesforce to create personalized experiences, and use conditional logic to dynamically present viewer-specific and highly engaging content.

But you likely already have plenty of video content that could be made better through interactivity as well. The only challenge is how to integrate interactivity into your existing video content without disrupting the narrative, story telling or flow. The good news is Mindstamp makes this simple. No heavy editing of your video. No post production re-work. Mindstamp works with any of your existing video content with just a few clicks.

Strategy 1 - Test simple calls-to-action with buttons, hotspots or images

Mindstamp makes it exceptionally simple to add buttons, hotspots or clickable images to existing videos. So depending on the core objective video, this is a great place to start without disrupting the rest of your video content. You can:

• Add a button (for instance up in a corner) that remains present throughout the video itself and leaves your call-to-action ready and at the fingertips of your viewer as soon as they are interested. Add ‘Buy Now’ buttons to product videos or ‘Schedule Demo’ videos on your website marketing overview.
• Add a hotspot to existing video imagery (for instance your website URL, logo or social media icons) that lets viewers click on otherwise static video content.
• Add a clickable image (logo if you don’t have it, calendar linked to a scheduling app, product imagery, face of your sales rep, you name it) at an appropriate time in the video to drive the viewers to take your ideal next action.

None of these interactive elements will disrupt from the pre-existing flow of your video, and you can use some subtle text (“this is clickable”), animated image GIFs, and the out of the box glowing hotspots that Mindstamp provides natively to ensure your viewers know they can take interact.

 Strategy 2 - Ask questions at the end (including with a prompt at the beginning)

Most existing videos will have a closing scene or visual that provides an excellent opportunity to inject some interactive questions into your video. This scene might be your logo as a trailing endpoint where the main content of the video has completed. If your viewer has gotten this far, they’re already deeply engaged with your content, and therefore you’re in an ideal position to leverage that engagement to get a bit more information that can help you with sales, targeting and conversion.

• Go ahead and present two buttons with a ‘Pause Until Viewer Action’ control and some simple text on the screen that says ‘Thanks for Watching….do you mind answering 3 quick questions?’. Then have the buttons show YES or NO. Right away, the viewer will be interested because interactive video like this is engaging.
• If they click NO, well, you’ve got your answer. Consider showing a ‘maybe next time’ message and moving on.
• But if they click YES, using Conditional Logic on Mindstamp you can then present your series of questions. Ask them about what feature they found most compelling. Ask them about how they’d see using your product. Ask them about the size of their organization or anything else that can help you better target and sell. Or ask them if you can call them to set up a demo. Go right at it.
• Finally, consider asking the question up front in the video, before it even starts. ‘Would you mind answering a few questions at the end of the video?’. You might find you increase viewer willingness to watch until the end EVEN if they say NO, because they want to be sure you honor their request. With Conditional Logic, you can even say ‘Hey….you said no before, but have you changed your mind’ at the end of the video to show you were listening and leverage that commitment as an earned right to ask again.

Both these strategies allow you to turn any existing video into an interactive experience, to drive more value and create more engagement from and with your existing viewers, and to get to the next best action you want from your audience that much quicker.

You can see how simple Mindstamp makes it to make any video interactive in seconds with our free trial at mindstamp.io.

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1: https://www.wyzowl.com/video-marketing-statistics/