Interactive content can create better engagement and builds bonds with your brand, which also helps to differentiate your brand from the rest. Therefore, it plays a very important role in content marketing today. Below are some tips to boost your engagement rates with interactive content.
So, you’re a business that boosts exemplary products and services. Also, you’ve got an ample amount of audiences and a solid customer base. That sounds a lot like a great deal already, doesn’t it?
But you’ve got one tiny problem…
And it involves your engagement rates and how dismal it looks at the moment. Because as we all know, having great products and services are pointless if no one’s bothering to get them.
Consequently, if your audience is big, that’s not exactly saying much if your bounce rates are too high and evidently, nobody’s bothering to purchase your products or avail of your services.
So, what’s your problem?
You’re doing great SEO, also your website along with the landing pages is as user-friendly as it can get.
Well, sometimes the problem lies in areas where you least expect them. Perhaps it’s your content.
Nowadays, getting people’s attention is a great feat, but it’s not enough. Because the process doesn’t stop there. The next move involves cooking up ways to keep it.
Interactive Content: The Answer to Your Worries
Content marketers are often delegated the task of content that tickles people’s curiosities, caters to their needs, and eventually benefits the business. For this reason, there shouldn’t be any funny business on quality or any corner-cutting.
Above all, audience is everything. To a content marketer, it’s your world.
Similarly, it’s worth noting that 60% of B2B marketers and 56% of consumer marketers identify engaging content creation as one of their biggest challenges.
Also, we don’t need to mention how short people’s attention spans are nowadays, and how easy it is to fall victim to getting sidetracked by the frequent influx of various pieces of information. So, simply putting it, creating content that engages is a hurdle for more than half of content marketers out there.
To sum up, if you’re struggling, just know that you’re not the only one.
People want to involve
Where before frequent updates to the blog and constant social media posts were enough, it’s no longer the case for the new digital marketing landscape. Static content is not sufficient to engage your website visitors and boost their retention time in your landing pages or your website.
You need content that will resonate. Content that people can relate to.
It’s just not about the ‘what’ either. It’s about the ‘why,’ the ‘where,’ and the ‘how.’
Social media and the usage of mobile have officially dominated how people experience the digital world. Therefore, your new brand of audiences wants content they can interact with and relate with. They want something that has a ‘me’ factor. Because, truth be told, people want to involve themselves.
New definition of content
On top of being expected to actively think creatively, the competition also multiplies with each year that passes. It’s worth noting that the development of interactive content has been in the process — as early as 2013 or older.
Interactive content is not on the rise. It’s the definition of the type of content people want in this day and age. It’s a two-way street.
91% of buyers in the B2B world prefer interactive content to plainly static visual or textual content (DemandGen Report).Interactive content produces 2x more conversions than static content (Kapost).Content that’s interactive generates 4-5 times more views on a single page than ordinary content (LinkedIn).88% of content marketers report that interactive content gives them an edge against the competition (Business2Community).10-30% of the content in 2018 is interactive (DemandGen Report).
3 Reasons to Bother Having Interactive Content
As we’ve mentioned, interactive content isn’t on the rise. It’s thriving, and it’s demanding your attention. Not only is it one of the best ways to get your brand’s message across, but it also opens all sorts of opportunities for interaction with your target audience.
1. Social Media is the Home of Interactive Content
You don’t need to look far and wide for a site that would broadcast your interactive content. Social media is accessible and at your hands already. And since social media is the main vessel of various types of interactive content, it’s one good reason to start coming up with the former.
Let’s not forget the fact that social media is one of the best ways to attract attention and even more ROI out of interactive content.
2. Interactive Content Generates Conversions
It’s no surprise to learn that people have shorter attention spans nowadays. Just the idea of spending a couple of minutes on reading site content is enough to make them turn away.
Interactive content opens exciting and brand-new ways to engage with their target audiences and as a result, generate conversions like you haven’t seen before.
60% of brands that made use of interactive content like apps, calculators, quizzes, assessments, etc. saw up to 70% more conversions compared to static content.
3. Content for Interaction Must be Responsive
Mobile usage has risen and has successfully overtaken the number of desktop users. So, it’s a no brainer that, like your static content, your interactive content must also be mobile-friendly — responsive across all mobile devices.
It’d be a shame for a user to abandon a quiz just because they had to resort to pinching and zooming stuff on mobile.
With more than 1.2 billion people accessing the internet via their smartphone, it’s confirmed that 61% of these users would have better brand opinions if they provide high-quality mobile experiences.
5 Engaging Types of Content for Better Engagement
Fortunately, there’s no shortage of the types of content that you can create for better engagement opportunities with your audience. And as technology continues to evolve, we’re certainly going to be seeing a lot more interactive types cropping up in the years to come.
Quizzes, especially ones, that involve questions that will answer some interesting part of yourself always garner a lot of attention. Take a personality quiz, for instance. I’m willing to bet that even you get a kick out of a quiz that goes along the lines of, “What these optical illusions say about who you are.”
Your key to success when it comes to putting together an engaging quiz is to appeal to people’s love of finding out something unique about themselves, first and foremost. What you need to take into account next is curiosity.
Choosing a topic
In general, you need to choose topics that are trendy and timely. Another option is to go with the ideas that are classic or timeless in terms of humor. You can even try creating quizzes that revolve around the interesting aspects of your company. It can be your way of highlighting your most unique selling points.
Formulate titles that ask questions. It sets the tone and drums up the right amount of interest that would subconsciously encourage your target audience to participate.
And of course, include as many interesting visuals as possible — even if this piece of content is mainly question-based. Don’t hesitate to show off proper humor either, and don’t make it too long or too short.
When the quiz is over, offer some form of reward. Either a great deal at one of your products or services or some form of downloadable content if you’re a B2B service.
Social Media Contests for Followers
No human hardly ever resists a challenge — especially if it’s one that looks relatively easy to win. Quite honestly, who doesn’t love to win?
Social media contests are the perfect opportunity to amplify your brand reach and how your products will more effectively reach your clients and customers. You’ve probably heard of contests that reward winners with simple to extravagant giveaways and some actual campaigns that generate loads of media buzz.
It’s a win-win game
You can’t deny that social media is a strong component in your overall marketing strategies. It’s actually a win-win. Your audiences get awesome prizes and you get to build relationships with your clients while increasing your brand exposure.
In a nutshell, launching a social media contest that gets followers talking includes:
Goal and budget setting: Every endeavor starts with setting objectives and figuring out exactly how much budget you can spare for the goals you want to meet.
Plan the rewards and the contest itself: It’s a no-brainer. Both the prize and the premise should be a hook that gets everyone on board. Truth be told, you’ll waste your time in a contest that doesn’t hold audience interest either. You need contest entrants that will turn into returning customers or clients.
Choose social media channel: Determine the social media channel that would serve your contest the best and one that would host it the most effectively. You can use as many social sites as appropriate. It depends on the size of your contest, your goals, and your contest premise really.
Decide on frequency and length: Will your contest stretch on for a month? Or perhaps just a few days or one week to drum up the urgency. Will this be a recurring contest held annually or twice a year, or a one-time thing?
Make your contest rules clear: Lay down the rules of your contest. You need to make the legal requirements crystal clear to avoid unwanted circumstances bound to crop up.
Engage and promote consistently: Drum up some hype! Don’t post about it one time and leave it there for people to find. As much as possible, you need to plug it in every social media post every chance you get. It’s useless if no one knows about it.
Polls & Surveys
When you come up with new ideas for content, do you write about things that primarily interest you, or do you take your audience’s opinions into account?
Writing and coming up with polls and surveys benefit both you and your clients. You get a bunch of new ideas for topics you’d probably never thought of before, and your audience gets an opportunity to tell you what they think.
You want to provide content that’s engaging and will catch their attention? Well, the best way to go about it is to just ask them. It’s like getting inside their head. At least this way, you’re not inclined to grope blindly in the dark trying to assume stuff that they’re interested in seeing.
You actually don’t have a shortage of distribution channels to choose from. The survey isn’t just limited to your landing page or your website. You can have them in:
Your own websiteIn pop-upsEmail newslettersSocial media channels
How to create questions?
In creating your survey questions, here are a couple of tips that you can’t go without.
Avoid yes/no questions: Not everybody is genuinely interested in answering questions in a survey — especially if they’re aware it’s for a survey. They want it done as quickly as possible. you don’t want results that are full of biased ‘yeses.’ So, structure your questions with options based on how you want them answered.
Be content with short: Aim for 10 questions or less; the shorter, the better. Too many options and too many questions will only confuse your respondents and won’t get you the results you’re after.
Cover all options for respondents: Yes, you need to consider the answers that you want to see, but don’t overlook the options from your audience’s point of view. You can add other responses like “not sure,” “I don’t know,” “same as always,” etc to ensure you get precise responses. You don’t want any of your respondents clicking on the answer just because they don’t find other options.
Avoid causing confusion: Make it blatantly and plainly obvious. Only make use of concise language that steers clear of steering up a misunderstanding. The job that you have to set for yourself is that you communicate the point of the survey with every question as clearly as possible. So, review them as many times as possible.
Interactive Pop-ups
Let’s take a close look at what your business’ website is for all over again. It exists so you can tell your audience about your brand — what it is and why it exists and what your customers are getting out of it. That’s a lot of information right out of the bat already.
But what if your audiences are in a hurry? What if they’re there expecting to see what they need? And if they don’t see it right away, then that’s another bounce on your analytics board. Of course, you don’t want that.
This is where the need for interactive pop-ups come in.
Advantages of using pop-ups
Strategically crafted and timed pop-ups on your website, mobile or otherwise, give your website an edge. That’s because they:
Grab attention: Let’s face it. Most people hate reading nowadays, which makes attention-stealing pop-ups or content all the more relevant.
Are flexible: Your pop-ups don’t have to clog people’s desktop views or mobile. You actually have choices on how they work and what will trigger them. You can have pop-ups when people enter your site or right before they leave. Pop-ups can be triggered through actions or when your visitors scroll the page.
Highlight the important bits: The very nature of a pop-up ensures that you’ll be drawing your target audience’s sights to what’s important.
Are good for conversions: Pop-ups have potential to convert visitors at a rate of 3%, on average. That’s a big number when you think of thousands or hundreds of people coming to your site. Well-designed pop-ups have a 9% potential.
So, in essence, to create interactive and effective pop-ups, they need to have a purpose and should match the look and the overall feel of the entire website. In addition, they should be placed in the right location and should come out in proper frequencies.
And to figure out how you’ll make it all work, focus on segmenting your audience in order to deliver customized pop-up messages for your audience to interact with.
Interactive Videos
Marketers make use of interactive videos in order to:
Help people sign up to a company event.
Redirect prospective clients to the site’s homepage.
Promote the products that are on sale and ones that you want to get purchased first.
Wideo reported some stats that they found on Forbes Insight. And it says that 65% of those who view videos click through provided links to visit the vendors’ website.
Keep their attention
Interactive videos, which are a form of video marketing, can pay off in terms of better and longer engagement. People are attracted to narratives that involve their decision-making — where they can decide for themselves which paths to take. And that similar principle is what’s applied to interactive video production.
Viewers direct the flow of a video by clicking on-screen objects, or interacting with the site by answering questions and purchasing products — all of it happening within the video. It cultivates an immersive experience. And that means your level of interaction with visual elements isn’t just limited to virtual reality simulations.
Interactive videos speak straightforwardly to consumers by giving them a greater degree of control on how they experience things.
47% of your viewers will stick around longer for an interactive video than an ad from a linear video.Interactive videos are also 32% more memorable, and viewers are 9x more likely to intent for purchasing.
Boosting Engagement Rates with Interactive Content
Content is the meat of your marketing strategy, and when they’re personalized and strategically crafted, they build credibility, broadcast brand message, and cultivate healthy relationships between seller and customer. Plus, it helps you guide your customer down the engagement funnel.
It’s your turn!
We can stay here and talk about interactive content all day and all the practices you can execute to ensure that your efforts pay off. But at the end of the day, exemplary interactive content creations fall on you and your marketing team and how you execute them.
Don’t stick with just one: Much like static content, interactive content comes in many forms. So, implement as many of them as possible, so long as it fits your agenda and will help you achieve the goals you need to reach.
Listen to your target audience: Nothing is worse than coming up with strategies just for the heck of it, with no real intention to answer a need. Building content founded on guesswork is a recipe for failure, so always listen to what your audiences need from you. Conduct surveys, check your analytics results, observe follower behavior, master your social media listening.
Personalize the experience: 56% of marketers believe that personalized content creates higher engagement rates. This helps your customers remember your brand, knowing that you customized the experience to their needs. Plus, it optimizes the buyer’s journey.
Involve your clients and customers: The importance of making use of user-generated content is not a question. Involving the opinions of your target audiences is always a good idea, and they would be all too happy to get involved in the process. It earns your brand goodwill, a better online presence, a large number of customer-client interaction.
The types of content have changed. But it has and always will be a solid foundation for a lot of people’s overall marketing strategies.
So, make your interactive content fun and engaging, simple and intuitive, all while strategically weaving your desired message into what you aim to convey.
For sure, creating interactive content is a lot more complex than developing good old blog posts. But you can’t afford to miss out on the benefits that interactive content can offer. It’s also here to stay. So might as well give it a strategic go.