You’ve heard it before: “Content is King” (and you probably wouldn’t be here if you didn’t think so.) The trick however is creating the right content, for the right people, at the right time.

Easier said than done.

In comes rich media. Rich media is the combination of text, audio, animations, video, and interactive content meant to attract and engage users. At its best, rich media should be targeted and allow you to instantly capture user insights and interaction data directly into your marketing automation platform (MAP) or CRM.

So how do you use it? Here are my 4 top suggestions on how to increase conversions by incorporating rich media into your display campaigns, email nurture programs, websites, and social media.

Display Campaigns: Boost Leads with In-Banner Forms

You’ve A/B tested your banner ads, you’ve picked interesting and eye-catching imagery, and your text is quick, on-point, and even a little funny. You’re already promoting your content instead of sending traffic to a product page. But there’s a simple fact you may not have thought about: Your prospects do not want to get routed from their current page to your landing page.

Instead, incorporate your witty content, landing page calls to action, and lead-capturing forms into your display campaigns. When properly implemented, these in-banner lead forms are tightly integrated with your in-house marketing systems. By using these forms throughout all of your display campaigns, you’ll significantly increase your lead captures and lower the display impressions needed per download.

Also, if you’re already investing in top-of-funnel display campaigns on Google, you can capture leads with personally identifiable (PII) lead data, directly inside display placements, using Google Display Network (GDN) rich media ads with in-banner forms. See the live unit to the right to check out how it works.

Email Nurture Programs: Increase Response. Capture Insights

If you’re like most marketers, you are probably worried about dropping email response rates. This is another great time to use rich media ads. By embedding rich media polls (see example to the right) inside emails, you can improve your email nurture programs and increase response rates. These interactive tools allow you to engage prospects and gather relevant information about their interests, purchasing behavior, or products and service needs.

Get creative, make your questions interesting, and get to know your potential customers a little better across both email and web placements!

Tip: Make sure that you can collect all of these insights into your MAP and CRM in real-time so that your marketing and sales teams can use the data to guide their future prospect interactions.

Website: Increase Lead Conversions with Targeted Messaging

Content relevancy is key when trying to capture users’ attention. Therefore, always use previously-gathered prospect data and interaction history when designing campaigns for your website (and beyond!) Apply rules to your rich media content and ads so that the right messaging is displayed to the right users. You can actually serve data-driven rich media ads on a range of publisher sites, ad networks, and ad exchanges and leverage any data that’s available to you in your MAP system. Your targeting options for display campaigns can go well beyond more traditional site-based audience targeting or contextual targeting based on keyword match to specific content on a site, to newer targeting options where the rich media ads that get served are dynamically changed to match a target list of companies (known as account-based targeting.)

The better the targeting, the higher the odds of engaging a potential buyer. 

Social Media: Get Customers Talking

Word-of-Mouth is one of the most effective forms of marketing,  and running a rich media tell-a-friend campaign is a great way to incentivize your happy customers to share their experiences with their networks and generate more leads. Use rich media contests, promotions, and sweepstakes throughout your social media pages to get customers excited about sharing your company or product with their friends and followers.

Hopefully, this helps you understand rich media and how it can help you drive success in your content marketing campaigns. So go ahead, use rich media to add a little lead form pizzazz and a huge dose of engagement and relevance to your digital marketing. And if you have any questions or comments about using rich media to increase conversions and generate leads, let me know in the comments below.

Mani Iyer, Kwanzoo CEO: This is a guest post from Kwanzoo, a cloud-based platform that provides rich media-based demand acceleration solutions.