lnteractive Content

Introduction

Interactive content is any kind of content that requires direct engagement. 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! In this special report, we’ll:

· Break down why interactive content in your content marketing strategy is something you must consider if you want to add value to your business and maximize your outreach.

· Show you how to incorporate interactive content into your content marketing strategy.

· Help you better understand what you need to do to take your business to the next level with highly-engaging, share-worthy interactive content campaigns!

Let’s get started!

Level Up Your Business with Interactive Content

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!

Interactive Content Strategy

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.

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.

In the next chapter, 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.

Examples of Interactive Content

Now that you know how to work interactive content into your content marketing strategy, it’s time to start creating!

Below, we’ve compiled a list of ideas to help you get started with interactive content:

Quizzes & Questionnaires:

Quizzes are a popular and flexible type of interactive content, and can be used at a variety of stages in the customer journey. They can also help you acquire new leads and customers. This is because interactive content can be highly customized and tailored to provide personalized results suited to each user in a way that static content like blogs simply can’t.

Quizzes and questionnaires also add a sense of entertainment as well as accomplishment for the end-user, and can also help to identify pain points, as well as test their knowledge about specific topics. They are also powerful tools at helping you uncover any potential barriers to sale, while keeping people engaged throughout the customer journey.

You could also create a poll-style quiz so that customers can see what everyone else is buying or interested in.

This type of interactive content, where users or visitors can see recent purchases from others, can work double-time, as it helps encourage action while tapping into the FOMO that often drives sales.

It’s truly a powerful way to use interactive content to take your business to the next level!

Besides the value of data collection from quizzes, they are also typically shareable, which means they could gain more traction once they spread through social media because they’re entertaining and relatable. In other words, they’re shareworthy. Here are a few examples of well-crafted interactive quizzes:

https://www.thezebra.com/resources/driving/how-much-car-can-i-afford/

https://www.styleseat.com/blog/what-color-dye-hair/

Calculators:

Like quizzes, calculators require user input to deliver information. Calculators will take a string of text that’s entered by the user (usually numbers), perform mathematical operations, and then display the results on the screen.

While calculators are usually financial in nature (think marketing software and property valuation), they can also be applied to many other niches.

For example, you may not associate fitness with math, yet plenty of fitness and exercise websites have calculators to help users calculate body mass index, body fat percentage, and total daily energy expenditure.

So, if there’s any kind of mathematical calculation somewhere in your customer journey, you’ve got a great opportunity to create highly-personalized interactive content! This calculator from Apartment Guide is a great example of how calculators can be used to educate users by using data input that is highly personalized. Check it out here:

https://www.apartmentguide.com/blog/how-much-rent-can-i-afford/

Another great example is the monthly food budget calculator found here: https://mint.intuit.com/blog/food-budgets/monthly-grocery-budget-calculator/

Solution Finder:

A solution finder is a mix between a quiz and a calculator.

The purpose of a solution finder is to help users navigate a large and complex catalog of products. It uses multiple-choice questions and text input fields to help diagnose a problem or recommend a product.

They’re usually found on insurance websites, but lately, the beauty industry has also been picking up on interactive solution finders.

This is because research has shown that consumers are overwhelmed with the number of options available, and need help narrowing down their options.

If that sounds like your customers, consider putting together quizzes like the ones on Sephora to help guide your customers toward the products that they’re most likely to enjoy.

Assessments:

Assessments are like quizzes, but are generally more educational because they give a score based on correct and incorrect answers. They’re meant to help users test their knowledge on certain topics.

If you’re working in a niche where customers would benefit from your expert guidance (something legal in nature, for example), assessments are a great way to help them see why they need you.

But that doesn’t mean that assessments are only for serious matters! You could have a trivia-style assessment about your brand and can reward users who score high enough with a small discount code, for example.

Dynamic eBooks:

Interactive eBooks let you include rich media like videos, GIFS, and animations. They can also include quizzes, accordion content, and a variety of other clickable elements.

Visually and conceptually, dynamic eBooks are much more stimulating than traditional text-only eBooks that are commonly available. So, they’re more likely to hold a customer’s attention. You can create dynamic flip books with a powerful tool like FlipGuardian. Check it out here: https://flipguardian.com/

FlipGuardian makes it easy to:

· Give readers the ability to preview your content then introduce a Lead Gate to add targeted and engaged prospects to your favorite autoresponder service.

· Offer readers an opportunity to preview paid content then transition them into buyers using the built in Pay Gate.

· No complicated software or plugins to install and nothing else required.

· FlipGuardian is point and click simple and it's all in the cloud, meaning you can login at any time to create/manage your campaigns (from anywhere with an Internet connection) in just a few clicks.

Infographics:

Infographics are visual representations of a concept. They usually use a combination of graphics and text to convey information.

Infographics have been a popular content marketing format for years, so there are loads of free tools that make designing infographics super easy.

Creating infographics on your owned platforms allows you to make them interactive. You can add clickable elements that open new sections, add elements that appear on hover, or even make the infographic navigable.

When executed properly, these interactive infographics can help break complex topics down into digestible pieces.

They’re also more engaging than regular infographics because the clickable elements add an element of surprise! If you need help creating infographics, check out this detailed guide:

https://venngage.com/blog/how-to-make-an-infographic-in-5-steps/

Dynamic Whitepapers:

Traditional whitepapers are a type of long-form content like blog posts and eBooks. However, they focus on complex topics and are quite often more technical.

Because of their length and density, they tend to be difficult to get through (i.e. they’re super boring!). This is why traditional whitepapers aren’t used frequently and are slowly dropping off the radar.

On the other hand, interactive and dynamic whitepapers alleviate the monotony of traditional whitepapers by offering clickable elements and rich media.

In doing so, the customer experience of reading the whitepaper becomes much more engaging because they can only get the information they’re seeking by interacting with the whitepaper.

As a result, you’re able to address the complex topics that are difficult to cover completely in a blog post or eBook without losing engagement. And you’ll help move them down the funnel by resolving their doubts and concerns!

Maps and Timelines:

Adding context to your storytelling using maps and timelines can help legitimize your brand and increase your overall authority.

This is why big companies have maps that show their physical locations, or timelines that highlight how long they’ve been in business as well as how their company has evolved.

Furthermore, when combined with the interactive infographic, maps and timelines can be great educational tools to break down large and complex concepts.

Interactive Videos:

Interactive videos come in many forms, such as turn-based video games, where users can influence the direction of the story by making certain choices.

The ability to choose the path of the story takes the video to a whole new level of engagement because it makes the experience incredibly immersive.

For example, Netflix has been investing heavily in interactive video, with Black Mirror Bandersnatch and its collaborations with Headspace. However, you don’t need to invest a lot of money to create an interactive video experience.

One budget-friendly approach to interactive videos is to use a YouTube end screen template to create “choices”.

For example, the last shot of your video could be a fork in the road. To let your viewers choose their path, you would use the YouTube end screen to recommend two different videos, one for each path that they could take.

The most important thing is to focus on the story! This is because viewers are more likely to remember a simple video with a good story, over an expensive video with no plot.

Live Chats:

Social messaging tools like live chats and chatbots are fantastic ways for online businesses to create personalized customer experiences.

Since they’re technically messaging platforms outfitted for businesses, social messaging solutions are an active engagement between you and your customer since you’re essentially having a two-way conversation.

Final Words

In closing, 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!

Remember, it’s important to start with a clear 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.

To your success,

Resources

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