Have you heard of interactive content? Do you truly understand its power and significance for the future of content marketing?
We know that ‘Content is King’. Content gets people to engage with you, it can impact SEO, and the success of your business.
It’s no surprise that content marketing drives digital marketing success. You’ve very likely invested time and effort into creating great content for your website.
But how do you stand out when today’s audience is inundated with information?
It’s harder than ever to get people’s attention. Only 45% of clicks to a website get more than 15 seconds of attention. People no longer read everything they come across but rather scan for information.
Getting your audience to engage with you is one of the toughest challenges of content marketing. So, what do you use to get more attention?
Try interactive content.
Interactive content is not new, but it is becoming more prominent. It’s taking over the title of ‘King’.
What is interactive content?
You can think of interactive content as two-way content. Normal written and video content can be static, where people passively consume information. But with this type of content, people engage with it by clicking, hovering, and answering questions.
Interactive content gives people relevant information and makes the process of getting it fun. You’ve already come across this type of content format on different websites. Here are some examples of what interactive content can be:
- Calculators
- Quizzes
- Surveys and Polls
- Interactive Infographics
- Interactive White Papers and Ebooks
- Personality tests and Assessments
- Augmented Reality Overlays
- Interactive Timelines
- Giveaways and Contests
- Interactive 360° Videos and Walkthroughs
Real estate businesses often use interactive 360° video walkthroughs to showcase their properties:
Interactive content is the next level in content creation. It has powerful benefits for your business as it draws people to your website. Let’s explore the different ways in which interactive content helps you and your audience, and why you should use it.
1. Give value to users in an engaging way
Interactive content gives your audience useful and relevant content. It makes difficult information easy to consume. You can break down large content into small and fun pieces. Content interactivity helps make boring information interesting.
Interactive content makes it possible to personalize information for users. This creates a great user experience. You can use quizzes and assessments to get detailed information about a user. This will allow you to create personalized information, products, and services for them.
Using interactive content gives more value to users in membership sites such as online courses and forums. It makes it easier for users to recall their course content and it keeps them engaged.
It also has deeper level benefits to businesses. By using interactive content, businesses are co-creating with customers. This makes customers a part of the brand and creates strong relationships.
A common example of how businesses co-create with customers can be found in the cosmetics industry. Businesses can get insights by crowd sourcing ideas from their audience about skin-care needs.They can also create products based on customer specifications.
Here’s how SkinKraft does it with their SkinID questionnaire:
This builds trust and loyalty in customers as they feel that businesses are listening to them.
2. Build rich prospect profiles
You can give better services to your audience when you know more about them. Use quizzes, assessments, surveys, and polls to learn more about your audience. Interactive content lets you discover what they want and what their problems are. You can also understand how to help them overcome their challenges.
Interactive content helps you build rich prospect profiles. This will help you communicate effectively along every step of the buying cycle. Using interactive content you can:
Interactive content improves the quality of prospect profiling. It can lead to more sales, which have a powerful impact on your business’s growth.
3. Increase social media sharing
Interactive content on social media can help your business go viral. People on social media platforms look for engaging and fun content. Visual content is always popular and gets more shares.
Interactive content can help you get more followers and create brand awareness. It can even convert your audience into customers. When you get the right type of engagement, you’ll be able to achieve your business goals.
Using interactive content can supercharge your social media performance. For example, a fun quiz by Red Lobster asked followers what kind of shrimp flavor they were. The post blew up to over eight thousand shares and created a positive impression of the business.
Social media platforms are great for visual and interactive content. Mix up your usual posts by posting polls and surveys, contests, and quizzes. You can also create an online contest to boost social media engagement.
Nothing gets people excited and talking like a giveaway contest. The idea of winning something for free or for just an online interaction triggers positive emotions. You’ll get more shares, engagements, and traffic.
Not just that, running a giveaway contest is affordable. All you need is a giveaway plugin for WordPress and your giveaway prize, and you’re good to go. This is a simple type of interactive content that has the power to make your brand go viral.
4. Improve SEO
There are two important factors that can help your business rank higher on search engines: Usability and user experience.
Creating the best user experience plays an important role in website ranking. Interactive content helps make user experience better on your site. By providing engaging content, it makes users spend more time on your site. They share your content and return to it later.
This is how interactive content can impact WordPress SEO and search rankings on any website platform.
It is also important for your website to be mobile responsive. Having content like white papers that are not mobile-friendly can frustrate users. You can create interactive content that works well even on mobile screens.
Focusing on making your content interactive gives users a better experience. As users trust your website and spend more time on it, this can affect your site’s authority and trustworthiness. These are some of the factors that can impact how search engines rank your website.
5. Create brand loyalty
Most people are on the internet looking for information. They want to find accurate and real information that is easy to consume.
Landing on the wrong page or being faced with pages of text can be frustrating. Which is why interactive content can be very rewarding. It benefits your audience by making information available in smaller and attractive chunks. It also helps them get personalized information and services.
The Wall Street Journal often uses interactive graphs to simplify complex topics for their readers:
Readers get the information they are seeking faster and with higher accuracy. This creates a good impression on people as they will receive something of value and it helps build brand loyalty.
Brand loyalty is important as it can drive people to recommend your product.
6. Stand out from the competition
These days, the barriers to entry for anyone to start an online business are negligible. But that does mean that you very likely face stiff competition in your domain.
So, how do you stand out?
You do so with interactive content.
You take your content to another level by making it something users can play with. It becomes memorable and your brand gets instantly associated with good content.
When you have great interactive content, you’ll boost traffic which you can turn into leads. This type of content differentiates you from your competitors. It makes you appear more professional and a knowledge expert in your field.
Make sure that you create a blog that supports your business website. This is a place where you focus on topics that help your customers but aren’t all about your brand and products. You can make interactive content using wordpress forms, quizzes, polls, and more. This will help with interlinking content in your website and improving SEO.
7. Boost business revenue
Using interactive content gives your website several benefits. You’ll create value for customers and you’ll understand them better. You will see more traffic coming in and you’ll get more leads.
All of which will lead to greater conversions and sales! Interactive content can ultimately lead to an increase in your business revenue. In a study by Demand Metric, they found that 96% of their participants believe that interactivity impacts buying decisions.
They also found that interactive content helps educate buyers. It can help a business differentiate itself, and it improves social media shares. It is evident that interactive content is necessary for a business to succeed.
Interactive content is the true ‘Content King’
Good content will always remain an important part of a digital marketing strategy. Interactive content is the next stage in the evolution of content marketing. It finds a way to keep users interested when they are exposed to content all the time.
Interactive content makes people work with content actively. They are no longer passive consumers. People put in information and interact with different elements. They get personalized information that actually helps them. It’s no surprise that interactive content is the future.
Help your business grow by getting more leads and by building brand loyalty by using interactive content today.