Consulting thought leadership isn’t just a branding exercise—it’s a great way to generate leads and driving growth.
If you have wondered about the quality and quantity of your leads and conversion rates, then this article is for you.
While, blog posts and whitepapers are great, they are passive content. They don’t allow your audience to interact with and fully experience your thought leadership.
On the other hand, interactive tools such as assessments, quizzes, and calculators are a dynamic way to engage audiences. In fact, conversion rates are almost 50% more! That’s because your audience receives instant value and feedback.
Let’s explore how your can bring your thought leadership to life and grow your business.
Unlike traditional passive content (e.g. blogs, whitepapers), which is often one-sided (you provide information, and your audience consumes it), interactive tools foster two-way engagement.
These tools allow clients to explore their needs and challenges, delivering personalized insights that demonstrate your expertise. Examples include:
These tools don’t just educate—they open the door to meaningful conversations about how your expertise can address specific client needs.
Even after the initial interaction, features such as goal setting offered by platforms such as Evalinator allow for an excellent consultative sales model.
For a business that relies on expertise and engages in B2B sales, creating interactive content is critical. It becomes your anchor content.
Let’s look at some nice examples of real interactive content that do bring together both marketing and sales teams.
Interactive maturity assessments and quizzes directly support thought leadership because they are essentially primary research tools. They help you gather first-hand information from clients.
Once you aggregate this information and analyze it, it leads to excellent data-driven marketing and thought leadership posts.
For example:
On the other hand, when prospects use an interactive tool, they engage with your expertise before any direct interaction. For example, a digital maturity assessment can pinpoint gaps in their current strategy, naturally leading to a conversation about how you can help.
As a result, tools such as calculators also provide immediate, tailored insights to clients. A client who calculates potential cost savings with your ROI tool is likely to perceive your expertise as credible and results-oriented.
In consultative selling, understanding a client’s needs is key. Tools like needs assessments, product selectors, and diagnostics generate data that can guide personalized recommendations, making your subsequent sales conversations more impactful.
Finally, by empowering clients to explore solutions independently, you establish yourself as a trusted advisor rather than a salesperson. Interactive tools create a positive first impression, building trust that translates into long-term relationships.
You have to promote yourself constantly, but your interactive content becomes an excellent hook for consistent lead generation.
As any B2B sales and marketing professional knows, a successful transaction takes anywhere between 3-10 high quality touchpoints. These touchpoints have varying levels of detail – education, pitching, refining, pilots, trials, and so on.
Consulting thought leadership content such as interactive maturity models and quizzes achieve a lot. They not only generate leads at the top of the funnel, but also connect to the middle-of-the-funnel (sales pursuit) and bottom-of-the-funnel (sales).
So you can rest easy knowing that you have “funnel” in place.
If you offer consultative and expertise based services or products, then you should explore interactive content as your primary lead magnet.
Once you have that, then every hour that you spend writing a blog post or creating an infographic will map back to the systematic structure that supports your primary interactive content.
Once you have that going for you, your interactive content becomes what is called evergreen content – it keeps working for you!
Standing out isn’t about creating more content—it’s about creating the right content. Interactive tools offer a way to connect with your audience, showcase your expertise, and generate high-quality leads that align with your business goals.
If this approach sounds reasonable to you, then there is nothing better than testing it out! Get started for free and craft your first assessment. We are here to help you be successful.
