It’s fair to say that content is even more important these days than it was a few years ago. For content creation teams, the challenge is increasing all the time. With so many competing organizations out there, all pumping out regular content, how do you make yours stand out?
Being more interesting is the name of the game. But how can you give your visitors a unique experience? How can you make sure they remember your organization’s brand? The solution could lie in interactive content.
Interactive Content – What Is It?
Although interactive content isn’t ground-breaking or new, it’s become a lot more prevalent in recent years. The above statistic shows how important it can be in any organization’s content marketing strategy.
The style of content marketing is increasingly taking shape. More brands than ever are starting to experiment with its potential. But what exactly is interactive content?
Interactive content is essentially any user experience with interactive elements that allow visitors to participate and learn useful results or answers. Like other content marketing types, the most successful interactive examples solve the customers’ problems before promoting the brand.
Interactive content should allow users to jump in and interact while enjoying themselves. They should gain insight with no feeling that you are targeting them throughout the experience. Essentially, optimizing your brand’s conversion rate should always be your secondary focus when creating interactive content.
When you develop interactive content, you should gauge success by the average length of session time or total shares. Click-through rates are far less important. This type of content isn’t about the brand itself, and it isn’t about generating direct leads. Rather, it’s about giving your target audience value. Aggressive CTAs, underhanded sales pitches, and pop-up solicitations have no place in interactive content.
What Are the Benefits of Interactive Content?
There’s one thing for sure – statistics show that modern consumers have a genuine love of interactive content. As you can see below, it’s far more effective than static content when attracting the consumer’s attention.
It isn’t too surprising that more content marketers than ever before are adopting this style of content for their brands.
In fact, visual content has proven to be 40 times more likely to receive shares on social media platforms. Not only that, but it can increase the rate of conversion by as much as 86 percent. Evidence shows that consumers watch 360-degree videos almost 30 percent more than regular videos. More importantly, twice as many viewers watch them to the end.
It’s fair to say that it isn’t just content that’s king these days – it’s interactive content. Consumers want interaction with brands. Active engagement with services and products before purchasing them is imperative.
Customers want to watch videos, view product images, and experiment with interactive content. This allows them to get a good idea of what purchasing the service or product would be like. With this in mind, text-heavy, static content just isn’t enough as a standalone strategy. In today’s digital marketing environment, interactive content represents the catalyst that brands require for success.
The table below shows some of the top benefits of adopting interactive content for your brand.
.
Here, we look at some of the primary reasons to consider including it in your content marketing strategy.
Generating Higher Rates of Engagement
Evidence shows that while around a fifth of consumers read content, an impressive 80 percent watch videos. Interactivity doesn’t just enhance conversions. It also encourages consumers to share. Even basic interactive content types elicit reactions. This immediately makes them more engaging when compared with written articles.
There is fierce competition these days in every niche and every industry. This is why content marketing is now less about which words you choose and more about the experiences that you create. It’s hard to make your brand stand out from the crowd. Therefore, optimizing it to offer an immersive and engaging experience is key.
Often, organizations utilize interactive content as a magnet to collect leads and e-mail addresses. People subscribing will usually have an interest in your brand. They are already more engaged and, therefore, have a greater chance of converting.
Capturing More Data
The modern age is a data-driven one. Data collected about users online are, potentially, a marketer’s most important information. The more relevant and accurate data an organization can gather, the more optimized a marketing campaign can be. However, organizations face the challenge of finding an effective way to harvest that data. After all, they must gather it without losing the respect and trust of potential customers. With recent data breaches having damaged consumers’ trust in corporations, people are more cautious when sharing their details online.
Interactive content can help with this. It can grab the consumer’s attention. If it can offer a more personalized experience, you can persuade people to provide their information more easily.
Increased Brand Loyalty
Surveys, polls, and quizzes are just some examples of excellent interactive content. You can use all of them to capture lead data. In turn, this allows you to generate more personalized content.
Gathering data via interactive content allows you to learn as much as possible about the target audience. This enables you to create more content the audience will enjoy. Taking this highly targeted approach to content marketing establishes authority and trust. As a result, your audience will grow and will return over and over again for more.
Driving Greater Brand Awareness
Awareness of interactive content creates an exciting buzz about your organization. Your brand name gets out there. It becomes memorable, and when users are ready to purchase a product or service, they remember you. Interactive content differentiates your brand from its rivals so it can drive even more brand awareness.
Using Interactive Content to Bridge the Gaps
Organizations use interactive content to obtain leads. However, they can also use it to fill gaps in their content marketing campaigns. Interactive content fits into all parts of the marketing landscape.
Interactive Calls to Action drive a higher click-through rate and more conversions when compared with static CTAs. This is because they encourage engagement from the user. You can also integrate interactive content into blogs. Organizations that use quizzes that they can embed directly into a blog post can use them to gather leads. Doing this allows interactive content to serve a dual purpose.
Interactive content is also highly effective when incorporated into a social media marketing strategy. Interacting with, liking, and sharing others’ content has already primed users for engagement. When you promote interactive content on your social media platforms, you tap into this potential.
Organizations can even incorporate interactive content into e-mail strategies. Since it is still relatively new, companies that use this strategy stand out easily from their competition. This allows them to achieve a better click rate.
Forging Stronger Connections with Existing Customers
All organizations must attract new customers. However, they mustn’t forget their existing ones either. Having a strong base of referral and repeat business is essential for marketing success.
How can you ensure existing customers remain happy? You can use several content types to energize current users. Forums, events, and customer newsletters all form part of this. Yet, you can also integrate interactive content into this customer cycle.
Interactive polls, for example, are ideal for finding out how current customers are doing. Virtual surprises for their birthdays and interactive upgrades and offers all catch the eye. Essentially, interactive content connects, builds loyalty and trust, and keeps existing customers engaged with the brand.
Which Interactive Content Types Are Most Effective?
The above infographic shows that there are many types of interactive content. So, which should you choose from your organization’s marketing strategy? Which will work best for you? Let’s take a look at when and how organizations can use some of these options.
Interactive Infographics
Not so long ago, people considered infographics to be the type of content that was most shareable. However, these days, there’s a lot more competition. Virtually everyone is making infographics. That means publishing them isn’t enough. Instead, organizations must involve users in the process, and they can achieve this by adding interactive content into infographics.
Interactive Videos
The chart above shows that videos have long been a valuable component in marketing strategies. But as time has gone on, it has increasingly played a larger role.
By design, watching a video is an immersive experience. This makes it an easy form of interactive content to include in your marketing strategy. Videos allow marketers more creative freedom when it comes to brand messaging. They allow them to engage customers in ways that still imagery and text can’t accomplish.
Surveys and Polls
Surveys and polls are among the most common forms of interactive content, particularly on social media. Organizations can set them up rapidly and gear them to collect helpful audience information. This includes consumer feedback about customer service, services, products or content, audience insights, and purchasing preferences. Surveys and polls have been around for a long time. As the oldest form of interactive content, they remain valuable since customers see them as fun, enticing, and unobtrusive.
Calculators
Organizations should construct an interactive calculator to solve a specific problem and give an immediate answer. This ensures instant gratification for the user. When it comes to generating leads, this interactive content type is ideal. With little user effort, they offer pure data, so users get precise results to make decisions.
Interactive White Papers and eBooks
Both eBooks and white papers pack a lot of information into a compact and concise design. However, these text-heavy, long-form content forms can be dull. This is where interactive content can come to the fore. You can supercharge these pillar pieces of content via interactive elements to be more fun, engaging, and shareable. This makes them even more valuable.
Interactive E-mails
E-mail allows your organization to communicate with a customer one-on-one instead of publicly broadcasting the message directly. This gives e-mail the edge, even in today’s digital and evolving landscape. Interactive e-mail is even more effective at communicating with customers. Embedded videos, charts, polls, and games drive even better open rates, as well as better engagement. Evidence shows that adding interactive content to e-mails increases click-to-open rates by as much as 73 percent. Meanwhile, adding a video can boost click-through rates by up to 300 percent.
Data Visualization
The human mind is capable of processing images much faster than it can process text. Humans are visual creatures. Leverage this to your benefit. Take large amounts of data that are difficult to digest and turn them into aesthetically captivating interactive visuals.
Contests
Consumers love contests. If you have prizes they desire and an audience willing to share the campaign, contests are excellent interactive content. Contests boost brand awareness. They also engage more people on social media platforms. Not only that, but they also allow you to obtain more e-mail subscribers, as well as new customers,
Brands have run simple contests on social media platforms for years. All people had to do was like, comment, and share the post to enter. With video, it’s now possible to make contests even more interactive by using the power of UGC (User Generated Content.)
Augmented Reality
Extended Reality (or XR) is a new concept starting to open up to content marketers. It comes in three forms: VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), and MR (mixed reality). All three are still in their infancy when it comes to interactive content marketing. However, it’s likely that, as time goes on, all three are going to become major players in this arena. The companies that adopt them first will almost certainly have the edge over their competitors.
Should Organizations Use Interactive Content Instead of Text-Based Content?
There are many benefits to incorporating interactive content into your organization’s content marketing campaign. However, that doesn’t mean that you should forgo all text-based content completely. Text still has a clear place in any marketing strategy. However, with the drive toward immersive experiences, interactive content must take a more central place within your written word.