Every marketing team shares similar goals. They want to reach new customers, boost engagement, and increase conversions. Interactive content achieves all three objectives with ease.
In the last decade, there has been a fundamental shift in marketing. Gone are the days of one-sided conversations, where brands talked at people from billboards and TV screens. Now, businesses focus on how they can start a conversation with customers and engage them over a lifetime.
By design, interactive content requires active engagement — more than reading, watching, or listening — to access the full experience. It harnesses the power of FOMO (fear of missing out) to entice users to take action and reveal a hidden message. It invites them to join a two-way conversation. It has the power to guide your customers on a journey that gets them where they want to go without feeling you are marketing at them.
Right now, many marketers are holding back on investing in interactive content. Clients grumble about the cost, managers worry about the time, and, silently, you might be concerned that it won’t pay off. But, the numbers don’t lie.
According to LinkedIn, interactive content generates four to five times more pageviews than static content. Not convinced? Kapost reports that it generates double the conversions compared to passive content.
Interactive content even beats out static content in educating consumers about a product or service. Inc. ranks it at 33 percent more effective. When customers interact with your content, they spend more time on your website and engage more with your brand. The more they engage, the deeper the brand affinity grows.
So, how can you start incorporating interactive content into your marketing campaigns? Here is a list of five common types of interactive content, as well as some examples to guide your strategy.
- Polls give your customers a voice. When Instagram added the poll feature to stories, it offered a new opportunity to gather real-time feedback. How you use that feedback is up to you. You can snag a sale by offering two solutions that might solve a common problem — think asking your followers if they have dry or oily skin — and provide a link to the right product based on their answers. Or, you could use polls to crowdsource decisions, like a radio DJ asking listeners to call in and vote for their favorite song.
Whatever your goals, the important thing to remember is your followers want to be heard. Let them tell you what they want or need from your business.
- Quizzes can entertain, engage, and, eventually, convert your customers, driving greater brand awareness during the process. Buzzfeed is certainly not the first to rely on the interactive nature of quizzes to drive engagement, but they have perfected the art. One of the most viewed quizzes earned them 20 million unique visitors.How do they do it? Quizzes gain traction through social shares. People love to share the results because they say something about their personality and who they are. Or, perhaps, because they provide a valuable business insight, like this assessment from FedEx. More shares lead to more traffic, and more traffic comes with increased brand awareness and, eventually, more sales.
- Interactive infographics turn the popular storytelling format into a collaborative experience that allows users to uncover new information through clicks or animations. But wait, aren’t infographics already one of the most sharable forms of content around?Yes, but this piece from National Geographic demonstrates how interactive content can create a richer experience for the user. Imagine reading through a whitepaper detailing the locations and schematics of the proposed building projects. It would appeal to a small, niche audience. Whereas, allowing users to scroll through an outline of New York City mimics the feeling of looking out onto the skyline with an expert architect pointing out the recent changes to the historic view.
- Interactive video puts the user in control of what would typically be a passive experience. Some examples allow you to co-create the story, similar to a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, like this recruitment video for Deloitte.
On the other hand, R&B artist Usher used the interactive content format to compel viewers to keep watching a music video highlighting police brutality. If you move your eyes away from the screen, the music video pauses and the following message appears: “Don’t Look Away.”
- Calculators help demonstrate how your product or service can solve problems for potential customers. Instead of writing a lengthy description or providing complex case studies, you can simply ask a few questions and show the customer what level of service is profitable for them.ion interactive has a great calculator that uses your own metrics to determine how much lift you could see by using interactive content on your website.
Now that you know how to engage your customers with one of the year’s biggest marketing trends, you can start building your interactive content strategy today.
Want more posts like this? Subscribe to infernotes to get our latest blogs right in your inbox!