Interactive content has become an essential component of any successful digital marketing strategy. With its ability to captivate and engage users, interactive content offers a unique opportunity to drive traffic, increase conversions, and build brand loyalty.
However, to make the most of interactive content, you need a well-thought-out interactive content strategy that incorporates key elements for success. In this article, we will explore these crucial elements and provide insights into how to leverage them for optimal results.
Before diving into how you can start creating highly-impactful interactive content, it’s important to formulate a plan of action.
In other words, you need a clear objective and a solid strategy.
Interactive Content Strategy
Like any other marketing strategy, you’re much more likely to be successful if you take a targeted approach. That way you’ll also be able to avoid spending a lot of time on unnecessary trial & error.
Here are a few key steps to keep in mind when creating an interactive content strategy:
1. Define your Customer Persona
A customer persona is a fictional character that’s based on your target audience. In other words, it’s an outline of your target audience.
Personas should be an important part of your interactive content marketing strategy. By creating a clear outline based on your average customer’s wants and needs, you’ll be able to create campaigns that are highly targeted and effective.
You’ll also be able to communicate with your target audience in a way that appeals to their core values.
Furthermore, you’ll be better equipped to demonstrate exactly how your business can enhance their lives, and help them achieve their goals.
Here are a few key points that you should focus on when creating a customer persona:
Demographic-Based Information:
- Age
- Gender
- Occupation
- Education
- Nationality and/or cultural background
- Marital and/or family status
Activities:
- Day-to-day life
- Hobbies
- Most used media and platforms (website, email, text, TV, radio, etc.)
- Favorite brands and stores
- Shopping habits
If you’ve never created a customer persona before, now is a great time to start!
There’s a variety of research methods that you can use to begin gathering information for your customer persona.
Here are a few great ways to started with collecting first-party data:
- Surveys
- One-to-one interview
- Focus group
- Targeted quizzes
- Lead forms
- Behavioral Data from your website
- Social Engagement
- Chatbots
Note: First-party data is the information you collect from your own sources. This could be information provided by visitors on your website, customer surveys, or even social media followers.
Once you’ve collected the data you need, you can then create your customer personas, but don’t rush into this!
You’ll want to make sure you have sufficient information from a mid-size pool of prospects before you create your customer outline.
That way, it is bound to be more accurate than what may be revealed through the early stages of data collection.
Make sense?
If you need some more guidance on how to create a customer persona, we recommend this article: https://rockcontent.com/blog/buyer-persona/
2. Start Small by Repurposing Existing Content
Using your customer persona, identify content that you’ve already created that can be repurposed into something interactive.
In doing this, you’re able to create your first pieces of interactive content much faster by using a topic that you’re already familiar with. This reduces your upfront investment as well!
Furthermore, try to choose an evergreen or high-performing piece to repurpose.
Later we’ll cover different examples of interactive content, but here’s a short list of content that can be repurposed into interactive formats:
- Blog posts into interactive infographics
- eBooks into interactive video lectures
- Emails into interactive emails
3. Integrate Interactive Content with your Marketing Funnel
Another way to make sure that your interactive content is adding value to your marketing strategy is to integrate it with your existing marketing funnel.
This means using different forms of interactive content in a way that aligns with the user’s needs at each stage of the customer journey.
Let’s take an online zero-waste grocery store as an example. Shopping for groceries online is nothing new, but the zero-waste aspect is going to be a friction point for new customers.
So, to create brand awareness, they could create an interactive online video about how shopping in their store works.
This would alleviate one of the pain points they identified in their customer personas, which was that people were nervous about shopping by weight online.
At the bottom of the funnel, they could then create an interactive solutions finder.
For example, customers would put together a meal of their choice, and the results would give them a shopping list to cook that meal. To take it a step further, they could even add that list directly to their shopping cart.
As you can see, each piece of interactive content was created to address the pain points at a specific stage of the customer journey.
In doing so, the business has created highly specific targeting that’s more likely to resonate with the right customers at the right time.
4. Ask for Contact Information
One of the hardest parts of digital marketing is collecting contact information from prospects.
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to ask for a visitor’s contact information, especially after you’ve given them a great experience with a piece of interactive content!
For example, it’s common practice to require an email address in exchange for quiz results or scores. But this is a common pitfall for businesses as they fail to mention at the beginning of the quiz that customers must give their contact information to access the results.
For most, it feels manipulative, and so it’s no surprise that many users exit out without providing their information.
So, it’s important to be upfront. Make sure that you clearly communicate the fact you will be collecting their email address as early into the process as possible.
5. Optimize, Optimize, and Optimize!
Lastly, don’t forget that interactive content still falls under the umbrella of content marketing. This means that optimization is imperative.
Thankfully, interactive content often allows us to collect a wide variety of information that will make it much easier to optimize your campaigns, especially in comparison to traditional media.
For example, if you find that people tend to drop off halfway through your quiz, that could mean that it’s too long or that there’s an issue with a particular section.
If this quiz was in a downloadable PDF with no real way to collect data based on usage, you would have never known that people were dropping off halfway through.
On a wider scale, the overall performance of your interactive content can also help you fine-tune your customer persona as it will help you understand what they find interesting, useful, and worthwhile. And what they want more of.
Carrying over our online zero-waste grocery, for example, their customers might love the interactive video and quiz. But they could completely shirk a new eBook because they simply have no time to download and go through an eBook on zero waste shopping.
When it comes to optimizing your content, essentially making it more interactive, here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Interact with Infographics
- Communicate your Ideas through Videos
- Match Content to your Audience at each stage of the customer journey
- Focus on Conversational Marketing
- Make sure your content is share-worthy
And finally, whenever possible, personalize your marketing.
Final Thoughts
Remember, it’s important to start with a clear interactive content strategy that’s based on your top goals.
Take some time to decide on what your objective is for every piece of interactive content before you create it and you’ll maximize your chances at being successful.
To boost engagement, consider the pain points in your customer journey and focus your content on turning those pain points into opportunities to educate your audience, and encourage action.
