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As people grow increasingly inundated with digital information in today’s world, interactive content such as polls, quizzes, and clickable infographics helps you better capture the undivided attention of your target audience.
Marketers have been well aware of the importance of content marketing for some time. But not all content is created equal. According to Demand Gen’s 2019 report, interactive content garners twice the engagement static content gets.
It’s a top choice when pulling content ideas from the content bucket.
So what defines interactive content?
Content types that create two-way interactivity between the brand and its audience can be considered interactive content.
As opposed to stagnant text or images, this style of content demands the audience’s action to be consumed.
Here are eight interactive content types marketers should know about to skyrocket online engagement:
Clickable Infographics
Infographics are more likely to be read than chunks of text. Clickable infographics are even better, allowing readers to digest even smaller parcels of information at one time at a pace they control through their own interaction.
The simplest way to make an infographic clickable is using the web tool Thinglink, which lets you add links anywhere on your infographic.
This way, readers can look further into the information, and you can drive traffic to other site pages.
D3.js is a more advanced tool that lets you animate data in various ways, such as highlighting, spinning or collapsing sections of the infographic when the user rolls over them. They can also make infographics scrollable.
Interactive Microsite
A microsite is a simple, user-friendly interactive website centered around a single marketing campaign. It has its own domain and acts as a free resource, tool, or experience sponsored by your brand.
A fun example for car enthusiasts is the TimetoGetIn website made by Porsche, which lets users customize their own Porsche vehicle model and view it in real-time in 3D as a 360-degree interactive model.
More famously, Office Depot built the award-winning microsite ElfYourself, which has gained traffic year after year since December 2006.
Users upload a picture of their face (or a friend’s face), and a personalized mini-film is generated that they can share in holiday jest.
Polls
What makes polls interactive is that users must participate to view the results of all who responded.
Polls also leverage the fact that readers are more driven to engage when posed with a question.
Consider a question your readers need an answer to and create a poll that lets them answer in a single click. For example, if you’re a digital marketing agency, ask users to rank the top strategy, they currently prioritize and use the most.
Virtually all social media platforms enable you to create polls, so be sure to incorporate them into your social engagement strategy. You can also embed interactive polls inside your blog posts using WordPress plugins like YOP Poll and WP-Polls.
Tools that Generate Personalized Data
With the help of a savvy coder, you can create a unique online tool that drives evergreen traffic and engagement on your website.
Tie it into your product or service in a way that’s useful for your targeted audience.
For example, if you sell an online training program for business owners, you might create a calculator that determines the potential return on investment (ROI) your training could provide.
If you’re a web design agency, consider making a tool that generates personalized color schemes or runs diagnostics on a web page’s performance.
The makeup company bareMinerals took it a step further, creating a mobile app that helps users find their perfect foundation shade by snapping pictures of their wrist and face.
Quizzes
Quizzes provide value to your audience in a way that can serve the goals of virtually any marketing campaign. With the promise of revealing a personalized answer, they’re enticing to click on.
Plus, they help build brand authority and capture email leads.
If you’re a consulting business, you might create a quiz to assess target clients’ strengths and weaknesses.
The quiz results can tell them where they should focus their efforts going forward and how you can help.
Using quiz-making plugins for WordPress like Quiz Cat, TryInteract, or WP Quiz, you can build a quiz into your website that requires users to enter their email addresses to receive their results.
The makeup subscription service BirchBox has a “What’s Your Makeup Brand Spirit Animal?” quiz that matches participants with the best makeup brand for their beauty style.
Airbnb even has a Trip Matcher quiz to help globetrotters decide where to go based on their “travel personality.”
Interactive Stories
Storytelling recruits the reader’s emotions and holds attention longer, which is why content marketers utilize it a lot.
Even better, though, is an interactive story. It gives the reader the content in smaller, more manageable chunks and keeps readers clicking for more.
It can also make stories more personalized if readers can choose different outcomes in the story. Nonetheless, interactive stores can be as simple as adding animation to a narrative that incorporates both images and text.
Weglot is a web design tool that makes your website multilingual with no coding needed, and its website is a powerful example of digital interactive storytelling.
By prompting the reader to scroll and click, they’re taken through a visually compelling run-through of how the tool works and why it’s essential for businesses today.
Another way to leverage interactive stories in your content marketing is to use a free tool like Doodly or Animaker to create an animated video.
Select your stock-generated characters, scenery, and music to get your message across visually.
Branded Games
Building a branded game is a growing strategy companies across all industries are using to capture mobile users’ attention.
Branded games foster brand loyalty and can reward players with unique discount codes for high scores.
One example is Louis Vuitton’s retro-style Endless Runner game. It’s played on the brand’s website and requires the player to dodge oncoming obstacles on a New York City streetscape.
Nike’s Run Club app gives runners a voice inside their head that feeds encouragement and motivation from elite athletes during a guided run. They can also customize music playlists and track metrics like pace, distance, elevation level, and heart rate.
Filled with mouth-watering depictions of KFC’s food, “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger-Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator” is a free game in mobile app stores starring Colonel Sanders.
The user follows a storyline that involves earning a culinary degree and the admiration of the Colonel.
Live Video Q&A
Hosting a Livestream Q&A session with your audience is a cost-effective way to boost engagement.
While the engagement isn’t evergreen since it’s contained within the time spent streaming live, it still creates a lasting piece of content.
Give your fans the details in advance about when and where the Q&A session will air and encourage them to come with questions.
Real-time interaction with your audience is useful for listeners and for you, since you can learn about your audience’s concerns and tailor your content to their specific needs.
In addition to taking questions and answering them, you should also ask one or two questions throughout the live stream and ask viewers to respond in the comments.
If you make live Q&A videos a regular thing, your audience will build up an appetite for these sessions.
You may find yourself bombarded with helpful questions every time, allowing your content to “create itself” in a sense.
Boosting Engagement with Interactive Content for Better Marketing Campaigns
Interactive content is working, and it isn’t going away. Start by going back through your static content and ask how you can repurpose it in a way that gets your audience more actively involved.
Lori Ballen is a real estate agent in Las Vegas. She’s a digital marketing specialist, speaker, and marketing coach and loves to share her “Ballen Method” to generate website traffic and leads online. Lori’s specialties are SEO content writing (ranking on the search engines), social media strategies, and affiliate marketing. Need a website? Contact Lori’s brothers Jeff and Paul Helvin at Ballen Brands.
