Traditional content marketing strategies are no longer enough to captivate audiences and drive meaningful engagement. Enter the world of “interactive content” a content marketing strategy that holds the potential to revolutionize your marketing efforts.
By combining the power of interactivity with a well-defined content marketing strategy, businesses can forge deeper connections with their target audience, boost brand awareness, and ultimately drive conversions.
What is Interactive Content?
Interactive content refers to any form of content that actively engages the audience, encouraging them to participate and interact rather than passively consume.
It can come in many different formats, such as with calculators, quizzes, video experiences, polls, surveys, etc.
In addition, interactive content generates first-party audience data, which is incredibly valuable.
Users who interact with your content typically share personal information which makes it easy to gain direct insights about their wants, needs, behaviors and much more.
Interactive content is in direct contrast to passive engagement, like you’d normally find with traditional social media, where your follower is simply given information by scrolling through your timeline (and likely not remembering much about your brand or marketing message).
Since interactive content is more fun and engaging, and it requires active participation from the viewer, it’s far more memorable and impactful than nearly any other form of content.
In fact, interactive content may be the key to breaking through crowded markets, acquiring new leads, and positioning your brand up, front and center!
It can take various forms, such as quizzes, surveys, calculators, assessments, polls, and interactive infographics. By providing an immersive and personalized experience, interactive content grabs attention, increases dwell time, and encourages social sharing.
Interactive Content Benefits
Interactive content is mainly used for the upper end of your marketing funnel, but with a bit of creativity, it can be used anywhere.
With that; here are just a few benefits of incorporating interactive content into your marketing strategy:
#1: Quickly Increase Brand Awareness and Engagement:
Interactive content is used to increase overall brand awareness and dramatically boost engagement.
Unlike traditional media, interactive content is entertaining, provokes curiosity, and offers a very high entertainment value.
It also entices people to read further and engage with the material because it has a “sticky factor”—far more so than most other media formats.
#2: Better Lead Generation and Conversion Rates:
The increased engagement of interactive content will have a positive effect on your lead generation, and subsequently, your overall conversion rates.
This makes perfect sense, as you’re kick-starting their customer journey on a high-impact note by encouraging authentic engagement throughout every step of your funnel.
Furthermore, a well-crafted piece of interactive content will provide just the right amount of information to get your customer thinking about your product, and your brand.
This will help build desire and anticipation for your products or services, as customers realize how your business can help them achieve their goals.
The key to effective interactive content is that each piece works towards further introducing and educating prospects about your brand.
#3: Valuable Data and Consumer Insights:
Interactive forms of content are better equipped for data collection (and subsequent optimization activities) in comparison to traditional media formats.
For example, when checking the stats from a blog post on a traditional, static website, the metric that’s most indicative of engagement would probably be the intersection of people who scrolled to the bottom of the page, and people who spent longer than 30 seconds on the site.
Even though the above examples would give us a pretty decent estimate of how many people read the blog post, it doesn’t tell us if they processed and understood the content.
In other words, we simply wouldn’t be able to know if they gained anything valuable from reading the blog post.
On the other hand, interactive content can reveal in-depth information that will help you better understand your audience.
Interactive content can collect views, clicks, and interactions within every element of your material.
With all this information, you could easily identify friction points in your customer journey, discover commonly asked questions, recognize pain points, and gain some qualitative insights into your customers themselves.
#4: Improve the Overall Customer Experience Using Infotainment.
There’s a reason things like quizzes and questionnaires keep being created for all kinds of different audiences. They’re engaging, personalized, but can also be educational and informative, and that entertainment-value combination makes people want to participate.
They can’t get enough of them!
This is called “infotainment” and it’s a huge part of content marketing that you’ll want to pay close attention to.
Yes, your content is meant to impart some kind of value, and it’s usually information about your product or services. But just because you’re teaching your target audience about your brand doesn’t mean you have to be formal or strictly sale-focused!
Well-crafted, highly-engaging interactive content stimulates both visually and conceptually, which helps hold a customer’s attention and creates a more impactful touchpoint.
Customers are far more likely to walk away feeling that they’ve gained something valuable and continue exploring your brand on their own if you entertain them throughout your content strategy.
Furthermore, this feeling of gaining value will reflect well on your brand and likely put you in a position of power within your market.
In fact, carefully curated interactive content can transform a new business into one that’s considered an authority in the market simply because they captivated their audience and held their attention long enough to solidify their brand!
Conclusion
Interactive content grabs a user’s attention and keeps your audience engaged for a longer period of time.
It’s better at generating leads than static content, and by creating interactive experiences for your website visitors, subscribers and potential customers, you’ll be able to quickly establish and maintain a strong relationship with your target audience at every stage of the sales funnel!
