[citation needed] In 1999, Salesforce.com was founded, allowing marketers and salespeople to directly affect and guide potential customers through their company's sales process using Salesforce's cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) technology.
[citation needed] With the advent of content marketing in the late 1990s and the founding of Hubspot in 2006, interactivity has seen a fundamental change from simple two-way communication to gamification and beyond.
As interactive marketing relies on having a means of open communication with customers, social media channels have been a large part of this strategy, usually headed up by a company's marketing or customer success departments.
The most common application for interactive marketing is using it as a lead generator in a sales funnel.
Consumers tend to trust those who are designated thought leaders in their industry, so this strategy can bring in many inbound leads, coming through gated download pages, for example, that they are nurtured via more content created specifically for them off of the information they've previously shared.