The article explains the benefits of interactive content for digital products and considers 6 ways of applying it for better user experience and higher conversions.
If Your Brand Isn’t Ordinary, Why Should Your Content Be?
Do you know how many ads a customer is bombarded with in single a day? 10,000! Yes, the American Marketing Association says that, on average, a consumer gets a whopping 10,000 brand messages a day, all fighting for his mind-space.
What is that one thing then, that could make your content stand out from this sea of brand messages aimed at the unsuspecting customer? Definitely not dry whitepapers, never-ending e-books, or technical videos.
High-quality content today is no longer about how well you say what you want to say, but more about what kind of experience you leave your reader with. And if you want to capture their attention, you’ll need to do more.
You’ll need to entice them with content that is interesting and easily digestible. Tempt your audience with a powerful and engaging content experience that’ll draw them into wanting to know more about your brand.
This kind of interactive content invites a response from the audience, asking them to express their preferences making the process a lot more dynamic and interesting.
According to recent research conducted by Ion Interactive and the Content Marketing Institute, companies show a 66% rise in conversions with a switch to interactive content. Wondering how?
Read on to discover ways to use interactive content and transform the content experience of your customers!
Image from Moose
3 Compelling Reasons To Use Interactive Content
Greater Audience Engagement
Whether it’s teens you are targeting or seniors, interactive content takes care of them all. The very nature of interactive content – even mediocre content for that matter, tickles the inner child within us all into clicking through the content, in anticipation of a reward of sorts.
So, it all boils down to how creative you can get with ways to use interactive content so that the overall experience provides your user with a sense of satisfaction that can lead to conversion.
Better SEO Results
Among the many benefits of making your content interactive, stimulating a high SEO ranking is one of the most noteworthy.
Giving the customer the steering wheel of the content experience differentiates your content by keeping people active on your page and reducing bounce rates, thereby bumping up your SEO rankings.
More Efficient Data Capture
No one likes being flooded with needless marketing messages and people are usually wary of handing over their email address to companies they don’t know.
With creatively designed interactive content like an interesting and relevant quiz or a survey, however, not only do you have the results as valuable data that you can leverage for business, consumers also feel more confident about sharing their email address with you, as they seem to be able to give your company some credit for having created credible and engaging content.
Photo by Moose
6 Ways to Use Interactive Content
There are many ways to use interactive content to create a rich and relevant content experience for a customer. Let’s look at a few of them.
Charts and Infographics
Numbers and statistics have a way of putting people off and readers like to be able to visualize complex data in a more understandable and relevant form. Which is where interactive content like infographics and charts come into play, helping readers visualize numeric data, effortlessly, while keeping things interactive and engaging.
Really successful use of this kind of content can be seen in ‘Geek’s Guide to London’, an animated infographic that recommends places in London for geeks to visit, enticing users with its great design and interesting ‘Geek Tips’.
Calculators
Customers like this nifty marketing tool! No fluff, and just plain data.
A calculator lets users get precise answers with just a small effort. It’s easier for marketers to let the consumers use the calculator before making their buying decision, instead of writing tons of content describing a product or service hoping to convince them into buying their product.
Kaufman Rossin, a CPA and financial advisory firm, offers a US tax calculator for foreign-owned corporations allowing them to be able to easily compare federal taxes with those in states with heavy foreign capital investment.
Interactive Videos
Videos are popular marketing tools and they create a sort of a win-win for marketers and consumers alike, as not only do they give marketers greater freedom to get creative with their messages, but even consumers seem to enjoy videos from brands.
Interactive videos can take your marketing game up by several notches with interactive elements such as hotspots that are tags that the viewer can click on to get to another section of the video or a website.
Maybelline New York’s recent attempt at this form of content marketing proved to be a great success with their interactive tutorial video good enough to draw-in not just the target audience, but also people who just stumbled upon it by accident.
Polls And Surveys
Among all the ways to use interactive content, these are the most direct ones. They’re a tried and tested method to engage your audience and capture data while allowing them to participate in the content experience that your brand has shared with them.
And they’re also fairly easy to incorporate. All you need to do is to send the relevant forms (that you can get off websites like Google Forms) to potential clients through email or social media channels.
But a crucial point to remember is to keep them short, for them to be successful. Make them longer and you may risk getting nothing if overwhelmed customers decide they’ve had enough.
The user-friendly health survey from Castlight accomplishes this perfectly. It speaks of the behavioral health crisis in America in dynamic slides that look attractive and engaging, driving people into completing the survey.
Interactive Emails
Marketing emails can be made interactive and more engaging with the use of hyperlinks, gifs, and animation, that encourage readers to take certain actions. They need to be creative and give the readers a reason to click on the hyperlink and look at the offer, go through the product pages or fill out subscription forms.
The popular brand Burberry, for instance, uses an attractive interactive slider to display various products that its customers can interact with to see more content.
But care needs to be taken with the use of gifs and images so that the emails are able to stand out and draw attention without being too flashy for your readers’ eyes.
Self-Assessment Tests And Quizzes
Self-assessment tests are an extremely popular marketing tool that takes very little time to complete and require very little background knowledge. These also happen to be easy to navigate and fill out and give actionable advice at the end of the test which gives them instant credibility. making them a great marketing tool to introduce new products or to increase client pool.
A fabulous example of an interactive assessment is 16Personalities, a self-explanatory website which offers uncanny insight into people’s personality profile.
Don’t Stay Static. Go Interactive. Click Yes To Agree!
Static content is growing stale. Your readers aren’t always looking for a direct answer, but may just be just skimming through articles and posts looking for something light, interesting or educational.
Nudge them into your direction with something out-of-the-box. Give them a game for instance, that challenges them gently. Get them involved and give them a reason to be invested in your content by making the entire experience, fun, interactive, and personal.
Remember, the content market is saturated and your readers’ attention span is short. Make this initial engagement worth their while and the data they give you, significant enough for you to be able to leverage, for the success of your brand initiative.
Increase your rate of successful engagements and conversions, by putting to use different ways to use interactive content, and more importantly – by keeping your reader at the heart of the content experience.
About the author: this is the guest article by Koushik Marka, the founder, and CEO of Studiotale, an explainer video production company. He is passionate about helping brands grow with video and has expertise in video marketing, 2D animation, and vector illustration. When he is not working, he loves playing video games and traveling.
Title image from Flamenco pack on Ouch, the gallery of free vector illustrations
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