But making your content stand out is harder than ever. Today, people are so inundated with content that they don’t read unless they are truly engaged. They often scan information and move on if the content doesn’t hook them immediately. Getting attention and engagement from people happens by making interactive content. It’s an effective way to make your business stand out from your competitors.
Interactive content doesn’t treat people like passive recipients. It allows your audience to play with content and be a part of the content creation process. It’s no wonder that interactive content is a rising trend in content marketing.
How effective is it? Here are a few interesting facts about interactive content that points to its potential to transform businesses.
These are persuasive studies that show interactive content improves engagement rates and conversions. Interactive content increases the time users spend on a website and builds trust. Adding interactive content to your website will help you stand out online.
So, what does interactive content look like? It is very likely you’ve already come across it.
Some of the most commonly used interactive content includes:
- Quizzes
- Polls
- Personality tests
- Calculators
- Interactive maps
- Timelines
- Online games
- Webinars
- 360-degree virtual reality walkthroughs
- @mentions and hashtags on social media
You can also create an online contest as part of your interactive content marketing strategy. There are many different content formats in interactive content. You can use any format that makes sense for your business. You can even combine different types of content to create stunning communications material.
Why interactive content for businesses?
Interactive content can make uninteresting information look stunning with images, videos, and sounds. It’s especially useful for creating educational content and numbers-rich reports and presentations.
Non-profit organizations can start a website and use interactive content to spread their message. Interactive content is a powerful way to create awareness about the environment and social causes. It can also help your business accomplish several marketing goals:
- Build brand loyalty
- Increase traffic to your website
- Get more email subscribers
- Build rich prospect profiles
- Increase sales
- Differentiate you from the competition
- Increase subscribers
So, how do you get started? Interactive content sounds complicated to make. Fortunately, there are several online tools that make it possible to make a website more interactive easily.
Let’s dive into the different types of interactive content that you can use to produce meaningful content.
Quizzes
This is probably the most common type of interactive content that any business can make. It’s engaging because it challenges users and they get a sense of accomplishment from creating a quiz. It will also increase the amount of time users spend on your site. In this way, interactive content can impact traffic, SEO, and conversions.
You can use quizzes and create a contest. Ask your audience on social media to answer the quiz and get a chance to win. This is an effective way to promote your brand on social media. Combining interactive content like quizzes with a contest on social media can help your business go viral.
Online education sites and other membership site platforms often use quizzes to make content memorable. They are very useful to educators and trainers. Entertainment websites use them to great effect and get plenty of engagement on social media.
One of the best tools that you can use to create different types of interactive tools is Apester. It has a drag and drop builder that makes it easy to build your own quiz which you can launch on different platforms.
Polls
Polls are simple interactive content marketing tools that are very easy to make. You can set up a poll on Facebook and Twitter in minutes. Your business can use polls to make users feel like they are a part of the brand by asking them for their opinion.
It’s a powerful tool that is especially effective on social media. Instagram’s business platform allows businesses to combine polls with video stories. This has a substantial impact and creates higher engagements.
Source
This kind of interactivity crosses different types of content formats. It makes use of videos, captions, and a poll. Using polls shows that a business cares about what users thinks and makes the user a part of the brand conversation.
You can use polls to co-create content and products with your audience. Try sparking a conversation with a poll. You can crowdsource insights on products and services from your audience using interactive polls. You’ll be able to listen to what your audience is saying and even apply it to your business.
You can create polls on Facebook and Twitter for free. However, if you want to create attractive polls for your website, Opinion Stage is a great online tool. It has features that make it easy to build interactive polls. It also has email marketing integrations that make it easy to capture emails.
Interactive stories
Interactive stories make use of written content and visual content media to create mesmerizing experiences on a website. Content in interactive stories is dynamic. As you move your mouse or click on different parts of an image, relevant captions appear. Or you could be scrolling through text to trigger images and sounds that enhance the experience.
Source
Interactive stories create beautiful and memorable experiences with content. This type of content keeps users engaged for very long periods of time. It is a great way to make users enjoy learning about complex subjects.
Interactive stories are useful for journalism sites, educational sites and non-profits. They can tell an impactful story to reach out to their audience. Businesses can also use interactive stories to share their company background and values.
Interactive stories make visitors spend more time on your website, which impacts your website’s ranking. Such content is also visually appealing and can also lead to more backlinks that help with SEO.
ThingLink is a powerful platform for creating visual stories. It has solutions for different domains like education, marketing, and corporate training. ThingLink offers a substantial discount for non-profit organizations. It also has competitive prices for other domains.
Interactive reports and infographics
Interactive reports and infographics are often used as part of business intelligence tools. They present complex data in a visual format that’s highly interactive.
This makes boring but important statistical data easy to consume. Using interactivity in reports and presentations keeps your audience engaged.
Interactive reports also allow decision-makers to filter content from visual data. They can extract specific data that impacts future business decisions. Interactive reports can often summarize large textual documents into a few images. You’ll be able to present clear and engaging reports to clients. You can also build links using infographics.
Interactive reports and infographics are important for businesses, governmental agencies, and media bodies. They can affect policies in these places and also inform the public about important issues.
Source
Infogram is an affordable and reliable platform for creating reports. You can also make stunning presentations and infographics. It has great collaboration and sharing features and is a good option for creating numbers-rich content.
Interactive Calculators
Interactive calculators are very useful for businesses that provide financial and insurance services. Businesses can embed interactive calculators into their websites to capture user information. Interactive calculators allow users to calculate things like ROIs and insurance premiums.
Calculators make such websites feel more authentic and trustworthy to users. They showcase the business’s expertise and willingness to help. It builds trust and confidence in the business and will help improve conversions. Calculators show customers that users gain from working with your business even before they’ve signed up.
Calconic is a great platform to help you build interactive calculator widgets for your website. It has a free version and its premium versions are extremely affordable. You can use it to easily create calculators to help your customers.
Make your business grow with interactive content
When you use interactive content, you’re doing more than conveying information. You’re telling your brand story in a unique and creative way. Interactive content shows that your business has put in thought in the way you communicate with your audience.
It can help create rich profiles of your business’s customers and how to best take care of their pain points. It also allows customers to share their opinions and ideas and feel like they’re contributing to the brand story.
Other clear and self-evident advantages are more traffic visits and higher engagements. You’ll be able to track an increase in conversions by adding Google Analytics to WordPress or any other platform you use.
Creating interactive content is easy to do, thanks to many powerful content marketing tools available online. You can work with interactive content and make meaningful experiences for your customers.