5 Reasons You Should Invest in Interactive Content

5 Reasons You Should Invest in Interactive Content process.st/interactive-content May 9, 2019

The following is a guest post from Etee Dubey, a full-time content marketer at Outgrow and parttime dreamer. In her free time, she catches up with her reading and often finds herself explaining the meaning of her eccentric name to people around her.

Every ‘emerging marketing trends’ list has one thing in common- the dilemma of choice for marketers. And frankly, we understand if you get a bit confused with so many options flying around.

Which content marketing trend will give you the best ROI? Which one suits your company the best? What is a ‘trend’, anyway?

All of these questions might bug you. And in all fairness, they are absolutely valid.

So how do you select the one that works for you?

You research. A lot. And then some.

In this post, we will try to help you come to a conclusion regarding interactive content. We thought it was only fair considering that almost every ‘trends’ list includes interactive content.

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Why should you invest in interactive content? To answer this question, you have to ask yourself one simple question:

What do you want to get out of producing interactive content?

There is an endless barrage of blogs and ads fighting for the attention of customers.

According to research, there are around 2 million blogs published every day, and we’re not even counting the social media posts and ads made live. So, how do you catch the attention of a generation that has an attention span less than that of a goldfish?

Catching the reader’s attention is not the only reason to invest in interactive content, however. Perhaps you want to generate more leads, or maybe you just want to increase your brand recognition. Your motive for creating interactive content determines the type of experience you create.

5 reasons for creating interactive content Let’s dive a bit deeper to understand the different reasons for creating interactive content.

1. More engagement than passive content As mentioned before, a lot of marketers turn to interactive content for more engagement. In fact, interactive content is known to get 2 times more engagement than passive content.

Furthermore, conversion rates from interactive content are nearly 30% higher than your run-of-the-mill landing pages. Why? Because users benefit from the personalized results page.

In short, a consumer is more likely to engage with interactive content because it provides real value.

If your primary goal is engagement, make sure your interactive content is visually appealing.

Humour is certainly a major factor in content engagement and shareability. It’s also important to bear in mind that creating interactive content around trending events can increase content engagement.

Take this example for instance. Suppose the Winter Olympics are coming soon and it is trending on social media platforms. You can create an effortless interactive experience like this:

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2. Increase lead generation Every marketer knows that lead generation is one tricky task to take on. However, if you add interactive content to the mix, it feels like a walk in the park.

Why do we say that? Well, interactive content garners leads by providing the prospects something in return. It builds trust by answering your customer’s most pressing questions early on in the buying cycle. Suppose you own a company that provides software solutions.

A calculator like this one could be a fun way to increase your leads/subscribers as it helps them in return.

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That’s not all.

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When building interactive content for lead generation, follow these simple rules: Try to find out more about your audience beyond name and email. You can use this information to categorize them into specific segments including territory, industry, budget, outcome/result etc. For instance, if you’re a health & fitness company, a quiz like this can gather valuable customer information for you.

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3. Improve SEO Your SEO optimization efforts shouldn’t just stop at focus keywords. Interactive content can help you boost your search rankings as well. User experience and usability influence the search engine ranking of content. Interactive content increases the interest of the audience through amazing visuals and active participation. For instance, if you work for a bank, you can create an interactive calculator like this:

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This will inform the user about how much they would have to spend to buy a new car. This is more likely to attract more traffic because it will provide real value to the customer through personalized answers. Moreover, interactive content has the capacity to go viral. What do you get when you mix all of these aspects together? Let us give you a hint.

Higher traffic= Higher search rankings.

Furthermore, interactive content is extremely mobile friendly. Why is this important? Well, in the last two years, web searches from mobile devices have surged and now make up roughly 56% of all searches. We’ll let you do the math. Or would you like an interactive calculator to do that for you?

4. Enable a more refined retargeting strategy Retargeting is reaching back out to customers who have shown interest in your service/product. We have already touched upon the enormous amount of personalized data you can derive form interactive content. This data can be used for remarketing through social media ads.

Suppose you build an outcome quiz to target leads. You can segment users by the answers they give or outcomes they receive. Consequently, you can retarget them on the basis of that information For example, suppose you own a sports clothing e-commerce store. You can launch a quiz called “Which Famous Footballer are You?”. If a lead gets ‘Christiano Ronaldo’ as his/her outcome, you can retarget them through Juventus F.C. merchandise. Alternatively, you can retarget them through ads that feature Ronaldo signed sports gear. The possibilities are endless!

5. Gain more insightful feedback Every company that aims to improve itself understands the importance of feedback. This feedback could be from employees or customers. However, most people aren’t interested in filling out a boring form when they can simply choose not to.

How do we get around this mess? We create boring HR forms through interactive content.

What do your employees think of their manager? Are your customers happy with your tool?

What suggestion do they want to give to the company management? One Outcome Quiz can collect all of that information.

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How can you optimize your interactive content for feedback collection? First of all, choose the right type of interactive content to collect feedback. You have many options but let us list them out for you.

2 types of interactive content designed to receive feedback 1. Surveys & Polls You must have seen those Yes/No polls floating around in Instagram stories. Whatever your answer may be, we’re pleased to inform you, you just answered a poll.

According to some sources, the average response rate for the survey is 24.8% Add the magic of interactivity in it, and the percentage increases exponentially.

Interactive polls can be helpful in optimizing your company’s management and ensure regular company-employee communication. Furthermore, it can be used for companycustomer communications as well. You can use these polls to find out the customer impression of the company product.

Improving the tool becomes easier when you have a clear idea of what to improve.

Moreover, interactive surveys can be used to generate leads by adding the CTA form right before the results. The potential leads have to divulge their contact information before they see where they stand with respect to their peers’ opinion. Plus, your sales team gets to know the preference of those potential leads on the basis of their answers.

Just have a look at this poll.

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Imagine the value of this information to a company that provides digital marketing services.

Oh, and we haven’t even talked about the best advantage of an interactive poll- Instant social proof.

Finding out where you stand against your peers has the prerequisite of your peers attempting that poll.

2. Chatbots A chatbot is a tool that allows the company to conduct conversations with a user without the need for human personnel. Basically, it handles all the grunt work so the employees can use their time for more productive purposes. Moreover, this experience can be seamlessly integrated into a pop-up, chat, or any custom embed.

Just take this stat into consideration- 53% of people are more likely to shop with businesses that they can message. Chatbots kind of become necessary in this situation.

Have a look at this Chatbot Premade. Say, you’re a hotel owner and you want to collect feedback from all of your clients. One way to go about it is- with the bland old white form.

Which can only get you so far.

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Another option is to set up a chatbot. It will ask the clients a simple set of question, and record their problems if they had any.

Furthermore, chatbot experiences can also be used as an ‘Out Of Office’ bot that continues to collect feedback even if the human resource is not present. It can include questions that provide valuable information about the leads to your sales team. Consequently, you garner an enormous amount of valuable information from the lead’s perspective.

Using Process Street checklists to get the most out of your content Process Street is a simple workflow management tool that was built to help businesses create, execute, and optimize their workflows.

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By documenting your workflows in digital checklists, you are instantly creating an actionable workflow in which tasks can be assigned to team members, automated, and monitored in real-time to ensure they are being executed as intended, each and every time.

The point is to minimize human error, increase accountability, and provide employees with all of the tools and information necessary to complete their tasks as effectively as possible.

In the context of interactive content, a great use case is to use a pre-made template like the Advanced Content Promotion checklist to track and manage how you are promoting your content so as to maximize exposure and engagement.

You can customize the template to your heart’s content so that it matches the way you and your team get the job done.

After putting in all the effort to create great content, the least you can do is make sure it is being promoted to the extent it deserves.

Each task included in the checklist can contain various details in the form of text, a variety of form fields including sub-checklists, and rich media so each individual working on the process knows exactly what is required and has access to relevant information.

If you need to make a change at some point to refine the workflow, Process Street’s template editing system allows quick and seamless edits on-the-fly, without disrupting existing workflows.

You can sign up to Process Street for free and start building your own checklists right away, either from scratch or off one of their many pre-made templates.

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