With the continuous rise of content marketing, it has become increasingly important to set yourself apart from your competitors. This article explores interactive content and its potential benefits through concrete examples.
One of the leading tenets of content marketing is that the success of your website depends on the quality of its content. To attract your target audience, your content must be user-friendly, entertaining, informative, relevant and optimized for search engines.
Content marketing is definitely on the rise, so it is important to differentiate yourself from your competitors to make the most of your content. A quick illustration: according to Hubspot, in 2020, 70% of marketers were actively investing in content marketing, and most marketers were measuring the success of this content in sales. Smart content design will make you stand out from the crowd.
One way of achieving this is through interactive content.
What Is Interactive Content?
One of the easiest ways of understanding interactive content is by comparing it with static content. Static content is like a monologue: you present content — let’s say, a text, a picture — to your audience, who can only passively consume what you show. Interactive content is a dialogue: to fully experience the content, the audience needs to actively engage with it, either by clicking on specific buttons or by answering questions. By providing interactive content, you invite your audience to step out of the role of the passive consumer and become an active participant. Interactive content hence transforms the creation and consumption of web content into a uniquely collaborative experience.
Examples of Interactive Content
You have likely already come across interactive content. Let’s look at some concrete examples.
Quizzes
Interactive quizzes invite your audience to test their knowledge or give their opinion about a subject. Particularly well-known are personality quizzes, which allow users to find out more about their own character traits. One such quiz is used by clothing brand Hush, a “style personality quiz” which determines users’ individual clothing style. Users can then share their results and receive tailored recommendations from the Hush online shop.
Polls and Surveys
Like quizzes, polls and surveys identify users’ preferences, opinions, and interests. They are also an excellent way of gathering customer feedback. For example, online retailer Grey’s Teas regularly runs polls to find out more about their customers’ tea buying and drinking habits.
Calculators
Interactive calculators are online tools which calculate results based on the data users input. Halifax offers one such online savings calculator, which computes how much money users need to save each month to achieve their savings goal by their desired deadline.
Infographics
Interactive infographics present navigable interfaces which allow users to modify certain parameters to trigger dynamic data visualizations. Online collaboration app Podio provides an interactive infographic of daily habits of creative people, for instance, where users can click on different variables to discover the daily habits of famous creatives.
The Benefits of Interactive Content
Now that you know what interactive content is, and having explored some concrete examples, you might be asking yourself: what are the benefits of implementing interactive content?
Easier Data Collection
Interactive content allows you to collect valuable data about your audience by effectively incentivizing users to provide information while they consume your content. Asking the right questions in quizzes, polls, and surveys can reveal a lot about your audience’s demographics, product preferences, buying trends, and pain points.
For example, polls allowed Grey’s Teas to find out that their customers prefer to drink black tea in tea bags — this is valuable information that can be used to inform the company’s future marketing and sales strategies.
Increased Engagement
In content marketing, engagement refers to the actions users perform which signal that they found the content to be relevant to them, such as liking, sharing, or commenting. Well-crafted interactive content has the capacity to boost engagement.
Let’s look at the style quiz again. The retailer creates a narrative around the user’s answers which not only include customized clothing recommendations, but also tailored playlists and book recommendations. The quiz capitalizes on its potential to create rewarding experiences tailored to users’ preferences and needs. This creates appealing content which motivates users to share their results or the quiz on social media.
Lead Generation and Conversion
Lead generation is the process of turning a website visitor into a potential customer; conversion is the process of turning that potential customer into an actual customer. Strategic positioning of interactive content can help you in these processes.
A bank which offers an interactive savings calculator, for instance, not only provides a relevant and useful service, but also positions the institution as an expert in their field. Results are tailored to the user’s unique situation, generating a sense of satisfaction and interest which encourages lead generation. In the Halifax example, to further incentivize the target audience, well-placed CTAs prompt the user to sign up for a savings account, stimulating conversion.
Conclusion
Interactive content can thus be a compelling component of your marketing strategy. Collaborative experiences create engaging and customized content to attract visitors to your website, engage with your brand, and convince them to become customers, while at the same time facilitating data collection.
Do you want to know about content marketing? You can find more articles about digital marketing on the TCLoc Master Degree’s blog.
