With more than 4 million blog posts published every day, the online marketplace is an overly crowded landscape. It’s now more difficult to attract attention to your brand and sell more products/services. This is why you need interactive content in 2020. Content marketing is one of the best ways to find and engage your target audience. But most marketers are doing everything wrong. Just posting your content hoping your target audience will visit your website, won’t work.
To keep up with the growing competition and the ever-changing needs of online users, you need to offer them eye-catching and engaging content. This is where interactive content comes in. A 2016 research showed that 88% of content marketers agreed that interactive content is effective in capturing consumers’ attention and it sets them far apart from their competitors. As we approach 2020, we can safely assume that the use of interactive content has risen. But how do you create interactive content in 2020? Read on to find out.
What is Interactive Content?
Interactive content is simply content that requires the active engagement of your target audience by encouraging them to take desirable actions. Some of the actions your users can take include submitting an email for frequent updates, taking part in a quiz, clicking to reveal more information, and so much more. Unlike the conventional content where your users just read an article, watch a video, or listen to a podcast; interactive content goes the extra mile to get your users hyper-relevant feedback and results. Marketers get the chance to actively engage their target audience with experiences that not only capture insights but also provide them with useful information.
To meet the increasing demand of content consumers, more and more businesses are incorporating interactivity in their content to maximize user engagement and increase conversion rates.
Why Use Interactive Content in 2020?
For a successful conversion, you need to interact – you need to get your audience to participate in the process. To understand interactive content better, it’s important to know how it can benefit your business. Below are some of the top reasons why savvy businesses are leveraging interactive content than ever before.
1. Shareable and Virality
Because of its engagement, interactive marketing is easy to share on social media. You can even offer rewards to users who share your content on social media. As a result, you’ll increase the number of people who see your brand, boost your leads, and bolster your ROI. Compared to static content, interactive content is not only more shareable but it’s also more scalable, especially on social media. For instance, you could create a giveaway or contest where entrants have to share your content to earn points. This way, your business will be in front of thousands of social media users without doing the heavy lifting or paying for social media ads. With increased brand exposure, comes brand loyalty.
2. Improved SEO
Interactive content creates endless possibilities for white-hat SEO strategies. For instance, since the content is more shareable and attracts more links, it’ll have a positive impact on your site’s SEO ranking.
Additionally, some types of interactive content such as polls, calculators, contests, and infographics are embeddable on websites. For endless link building opportunities, consider creating a valuable interactive experience that other websites in your niche can embed. Interactive content also keeps users on your webpage longer than static content. Google favors sites with higher dwell time by ranking them higher.
3. Customer Feedback
Customer reviews can break or make your business. In fact, more than 50% of consumers select businesses based on reviews. Without feedback from your customers, it’s difficult to make improvements to your marketing tactics. What’s more, misunderstanding your target audience’s needs and wants can be harmful to the profitability of your business.
Fortunately, interactive content offers a painless and fun way to get real-time feedback from your customers. Surveys and polls are a great way of gathering important information about your business from a customer’s perspective. With the available customer data, you can adjust your products and marketing strategy accordingly. Customer reviews are also powerful social proof elements for your business. You can use them as testimonials or stats on your website.
4. More Conversions
It’s important to get traffic to your website. But what happens if users don’t click anything on your site? It’s a lost opportunity for your business to engage a potential client. Interactive content will help you utilize these opportunities. By allowing an exchange of interactions, this type of content creates a personalized, user-focused experience which is always good for business. This engagement makes visitors more comfortable to take the next step in their buying process.
5. Customer Education
Consumers don’t like it when you straight up pitch to them. Most of the time, it’s because they aren’t quite there in the buying process. Probably, they’re just trying to get some information about a product/service. And this is one area where interactive content comes in handy. You can use it to talk about your product in several ways. When trying new things, people learn best through experiential learning where they can sample, test their knowledge, and receive feedback. Interactive content will offer this primary education and help you add value to your target audience.
6. Personalization
The last thing you want to do is make your online customers feel like faceless entities without personalities who are being sold something on a website. Luckily, with interactive content, you can offer your customers a more personal and intimate experience on your website. Interactive marketing approaches a consumer as an individual with specific needs, wants, and goals. The aim of the interactive experience is to satisfy these personal elements. Through quizzes, calculators, surveys, and polls, you can give every customer a voice. You can even take the personalized experience a notch higher by allowing your customers to pick their own journey with an interactive video.
How to Use Interactive Content in 2020
You can use interactive content as a blog post, on your landing page, email, social media page, or as paid media ad. It can also be integrated into any e-commerce web platform or content management system (CMS). Some popular examples of interactive content for 2020 include:
· Graded Quizzes
For example, the social media pages of many soccer teams engage their fans by asking some trivia questions about the team. Fans with the correct answers get special prizes.
Ecommerce Recommendations
Before you start your online shopping, some makeup websites ask quick, simple questions about your skin undertone, color, and condition. Once you’re done with the questions, they provide you with the most appropriate makeup products for your skin type.
Reveal Marketing
You can offer your customers coupons by holding a “scratch to reveal” promo on your website.
360° Video Tours
Real estate companies or travel agencies can give their online followers a 360° video tour of a listing or an exotic destination.
Surveys
This is a good way of knowing the needs and wants of your customers. You can also create a survey to know what your customers think about your products/services.
Polls
When you’re unsure of the brand design for a new product, you could give your customers a voice by creating a poll and letting them decide.
Calculators
A loan lender may use this feature to help customers estimate their monthly/annual mortgage payments.
Galleries
Visual content is always powerful. A photo gallery can transform your website into a dynamic platform that attracts visitors, retains them, and even converts them.
Interactive Content in 2020: What to Expect
As more brands adopt interactive marketing, here are some key trends we’ve predicted for 2020:
1. Increased Live Streaming
With the increasing popularity of live streaming, more brands are likely to form media partnerships to engage and raise brand awareness in real-time through live streaming.
2. More 360° Videos
With the introduction of spherical or immersive videos, 360° videos are becoming more popular. In 2020, more brands will adopt this technology for content marketing, especially those in the real estate, automotive, and travel industry.
3. More Gamified Videos
Over the last couple of years, online gaming has grown into a multi-billion industry. Since videos with interactive, game-like elements engage more people than conventional videos, marketers will likely churn out more gamified videos.
Stay on Top of the Game With Interactive Content in 2020
For years, interactivity has been a major part of advanced digital marketing. Today, in the content marketing world, it’s starting to pick up steam. While static content is still an important part of your website, you’ll need to diversify your content to survive the steep competition in 2020. Tap into interactive content marketing to differentiate yourself from the pack. But keep in mind that creating interactive content is time-consuming, expensive, and requires a lot of customized development. So, to reap the rewards of interactive marketing, you need to push yourself out of the comfort zone. Remember, your customers are counting on you to foster a relationship with them. You can only do this by providing them with content that’s highly engaging, conversational, and personalized – interactive content. For more information on how to utilize customer data in 2020, check out this blog.