The next step in the domain of content marketing is the development and use of interactive content. As 88% of marketing experts agree that it helps brands stand out from the competition, brands are increasingly incorporating this element into their digital marketing strategies.
While the many forms of interactive content will certainly be familiar to you, the recent emphasis on utilizing them to help improve a brand’s reach and engagement with its audience has been a relatively recent trend, and one that should be observed and followed closely.
For those unfamiliar with this new practice in digital marketing, our team has created this guide to interactive content marketing that will help you get up to speed, including:
- The purpose of an interactive content marketing strategy
- Types of interactive content and how each can be used
- The benefits of using interactive content
- How you can incorporate interactive content into your current marketing strategy
The Purpose of an Interactive Content Marketing Strategy
Interactive content is any media that communicates with an intended audience through their participation. Compared to static content like blog posts, social media profiles, or non-personalized landing pages, interactive content is much more dynamic and engaging to potential customers, which is why it is found to be more effective at gaining and retaining them.
The main purpose for you to utilize an interactive content marketing strategy is to produce a user experience that gives potential customers a way to tangibly interact with your brand. This helps them create a connection even before they’ve learned about the products or services your brand offers. Their interactions are also a source of feedback for your brand, with several vital metrics that can be siphoned from them.
Interactive Content Types and How To Use Them
There are several different types of interactive content to choose from for your brand. Before going into more detail about what interactive content can do to improve your digital marketing strategy, you must survey some major types available to you.
Each type varies in its advantages and has differing effects, but all of them will help drive results one way or another for your brand. Here are some types of interactive content to consider and how to use them as part of your strategy:
Interactive Quizzes
A quiz is one simple but effective type of interactive content to use in your brand’s strategy. To your audience, quizzes are a fun and easy way to learn how well they know topics with which your brand is involved. Like online personality tests, customers will learn about themselves but also about you.
On the other end, quizzes provide you with plenty of data that can then be used to further improve your strategy over time. Develop quizzes that ask entertaining questions and provide answers that indicate potential customers’ needs and preferences, as well as how close they are to your target audience.
Interactive Infographics
An infographic that includes dynamic features and animations is another type of interactive content. It communicates knowledge in an efficient manner, which can be a very effective way of engaging with your audience. Compared to reading long lengths of text, many people prefer to absorb information through such well-designed infographics and find it easier to remember.
For your brand, this means more engagement and traffic, as well as authority. Having a webpage or sending emails with an infographic that shows well-presented statistics can do a great deal toward making your brand seem more official and influential.
Interactive Video Content
Videos are already immersive for audiences. However, with the addition of interactive elements, engagement for a brand’s video can increase exponentially. Interactive videos can help bring audiences closer to the intended experience a brand provides, thus increasing the potential of gaining them as a lead or conversion.
Brands can build playlists of linked Youtube videos that could be organized into choose your own adventure narratives or elaborate presentations of their products and services, allowing you to create a carefully-curated experience for potential customers to learn about your brand in a fun and engaging way.
High impact ads can be built with interactive video components, inviting users to engage directly with your brand and learn more right from the video itself. And 360-degree videos allow potential customers to have immersive experiences with a product, service, or destination you offer, letting them scroll across their screens to look at all angles of a particular object or place to get a better view of it.
Interactive Product Recommendations
A product recommendation engine is a simple but highly effective piece of interactive content that helps direct your customers to the specific products or services that you offer. Email interactive product recommendations or post links to them on social media and you’ll find it draws interest from numerous users.
While a big name brand like Amazon has more advanced versions of this interactive content type, powered by A.I. and machine-learning algorithms, smaller companies can also implement a product recommendation feature, as there are well-designed assessments or quizzes that identify customer needs and preferences.
This simplifies your customer’s purchase journey even further, helping them find what they want and need, and thus increasing your leads and conversions, all through this one piece of interactive content.
What Are the Benefits of This Type of Content?
Interactive content has several advantages that will improve a digital content marketer’s strategy. While we may have touched upon some of them in the previous section, here’s a more detailed overview of how interactive content will benefit your brand:
Better and More Active Engagement
Static content makes users passively interact with it, whether by reading a blog or watching short videos. Interactive content compels them to engage with it for a chance to gain relevant information that’s related to your brand.
Thus, on average, potential customers will spend more time with interactive content and are more likely to share aspects of themselves that can help you formulate better, more personalized strategies.
If the interactive content offered is especially compelling, users are also more likely to share it around across their channels, extending its effective reach even more.
Provides Instant Gratification
Interactive content such as product recommendation engines and responsive infographics helps potential customers get to the information they want or need faster. Providing this experience of near-instantaneous fulfillment makes your brand all the more credible as the best choice for them to go with. Thus, making their purchase journey faster and easier through interactive content provides you with better results in the end.
Creates a Personalized Experience With Authentic and Engaging User-Generated Content
Some forms of interactive content, such as contests and incentives for social media mentions, help create a base of users that are loyal to your brand due to its quality and uniqueness.
Rewards for their recognition of your brand then form a more personal connection to it and thus create an experience of it that is distinct to them. This then elicits others to seek the same, generating more content from your users while expanding your brand’s reach at the same time.
Allows for Better User Feedback and Data
Because of its ability to directly connect with potential customers and the variety of ways it can do that, interactive content allows your brand to collect more precise data, with different metrics to choose from. Unlike passive content that hardly involves much interaction, interactive content indicates when a consumer has used it, and the different ways in which they have interacted.
Its immersive quality also helps convince users to provide their info to personalize the experience further and make it more suited to their tastes. As a result, using interactive content will provide an ever-expanding array of zero-party and first-party data and direct feedback you can use to continually improve your overall digital marketing strategy.
Increases Conversion Rates
In addition to providing data to help enhance future strategy, among the most important benefits of interactive content is that it can help produce more leads and increase conversion rates for your brand.
By its very nature, interactive content more effectively engages with your potential customers, establishing your brand and its authority in their minds, as well as taking them through their purchase journeys faster and more efficiently, thus putting them closer to becoming a conversion. In the end, this means that interactive content can help drive revenue and enhance your brand further.
How You Can Incorporate Interactive Experiences Into Your Strategy
Unless you have dedicated resources to work out how to integrate interactive content marketing into your overall strategy, it can seem rather difficult. However, there are a few essential things you can do to make things easier and begin to earn the benefits of interactive content sooner rather than later. Below are some ways to incorporate interactive experiences into your digital marketing strategy:
Use an Interactive Content Tool or Interactive Content Platform
Make it easier for your brand to start using interactive content creation in your overall strategy by using interactive tools and platforms that are specially designed to produce them. These won’t just make it easier to implement interactive content into your strategy, but also save you quite a bit of money compared to hiring a specialist to create interactive content for you.
Use interactive content tools along with your old content to create new, responsive versions of them, keeping consistent with your brand’s strategy, but presenting things in a fun and compelling way.
Consider interactive content production platforms to create interactive infographics, maps, and videos, or text-based tools which can generate content such as quizzes, polls, surveys, and online forms with a simple, sleek layout and design.
Review How Other Companies in Your Industry Are Using This Type of Content
A fundamental method of effectively implementing nearly any new element in your brand’s strategy is to look at what other companies are doing with it beforehand. This will help you generate ideas for what types of interactive content you want to use and how you want to use them.
This method will also show you the differences in how each type is implemented, as well as what your preferences will be when you start to generate and use interactive content for your brand.
Finally, you can also learn what your competition isn’t doing with their interactive content and how you can innovate to set yourself apart from them. Differentiating yourself in this regard will ensure your content strategy remains consistently successful for years to come. In some cases, you may even be surprised to find that a low number of businesses in your industry include interactive content in their content marketing strategies.
Identify Areas Where You Can Repurpose Old Content To Create a Better Content Experience
As stated before, you can use the static content you’ve previously created when developing interactive content, which will help you maintain consistency with your brand’s strategy, as well as allow you to recycle old content.
This will not only be less work than completely generating new interactive content from scratch, but it will take what you have and improve upon it, creating a fresh content experience for those familiar with your brand, as well as for new consumers as well.
Start by recognizing what old brand content is best suited to being converted into interactive form as well as the one product or service you provide that would most benefit from implementing an interactive content marketing strategy.
Solidify Your Content Marketing Efforts by Creating an Immersive Experience
The simple inclusion of interactive content within your digital marketing strategy will not only help rejuvenate the content you already have in place, but it will almost assuredly do so while bringing in new leads, conversions, and thus, revenue. And hopefully, with the information provided to you from the guide above, you’ll be able to quickly get started on selecting what types of interactive content best suits your brand’s audience and how you can begin to implement them into your current strategy.
In addition, with the help of a holistic advertising partner such as AUDIENCEX, you’ll be able to effectively implement and promote your interactive content strategy across the full digital landscape. Our teams provide strategies that are tailor-fit to your brand or agency’s desired outcomes, powered by futureproof tech and informed by in-depth data, to help your content and messaging perform across every channel. Alongside our full strategic, media and creative services, we offer seamless programmatic access to 24+ DSPs spanning display, CTV, native, video, audio, DOOH, search and social, all optimized with actionable insights, intelligent targeting, analytics and audience tools, and more. If you’d like to learn how we can help you achieve real results with effective digital advertising, reach out today to get connected with a member of our team.