Why Interactive Content Marketing is the Future of Marketing

You get up and begin scrolling on Instagram earlier than getting away from bed, liking a buddy’s image of her new Vans. Whereas driving to work, Taylor Swift performs on the radio. Bored at your desk, you open up Tumblr and reblog a bunch of memes that solely probably the most internet-literate folks would perceive. After strolling by a mirror, you surprise if it’s time for a brand new hair shade. So, you pull up a hair dye shade quiz on-line to assume it by.

No, this isn’t a flashback to 2014. That is the current day.

Because the age-old saying goes, historical past repeats itself. The identical issues that mesmerized us again within the day are bouncing again—they usually’re coming again within the type of interactive content material. As of late, manufacturers like Instacart and Turbotax are embracing interactive content material as a advertising and marketing technique, creating BuzzFeed-like content material to maintain their clients engaged.

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What the heck is interactive content material?

In contrast to a static commercial or social media submit, interactive content material requires lively participation from the viewers. Interactive content material creates a extra memorable and immersive expertise, making the message extra more likely to hit dwelling with its viewers . From quizzes and polls to video games and augmented actuality experiences, interactive content material gives a singular option to talk with clients and drive engagement.

Kinds of interactive content material

Listed below are some content material concepts to bear in mind when constructing your interactive content material advertising and marketing technique:

• Video games: You may create video games to advertise a services or products in an interesting method. For instance, a restaurant may create a sport the place customers have to finish totally different challenges associated to cooking or getting ready meals, with the restaurant’s model and menu gadgets prominently displayed all through the sport.

• Quizzes: Quizzes supply a enjoyable and interesting option to educate potential clients about your corporation, services or products. By asking questions associated to your business or product, you possibly can interact your viewers whereas accumulating useful information about their pursuits that may enable you to personalize your advertising and marketing efforts.

• Calculators: Calculators will be notably helpful for companies that promote services or products with advanced pricing buildings. As an example, if your corporation sells photo voltaic panels, you could possibly create an internet calculator that helps consumers estimate their potential financial savings based mostly on their location, vitality utilization and different elements.

• Polls: Polls are a easy however efficient option to interact clients whereas gathering details about their preferences. By asking multiple-choice questions, you possibly can rapidly collect insights about your viewers’s opinions and tailor your advertising and marketing efforts accordingly. That is arguably the simplest interactive content material to create, as a result of a number of social media platforms have polling instruments.

• Digital actuality: Digital actuality experiences enable clients to work together with a model in a singular and immersive method. By making a digital atmosphere that showcases your services or products, your corporation can create a memorable expertise that helps differentiate your model from rivals.

• Surveys: Surveys may also help you perceive your clients’ wants and preferences in higher element. By asking open-ended questions, you possibly can acquire deeper insights into your clients’ motivations and tailor your advertising and marketing efforts accordingly.

• Dynamic displays: Dynamic displays, corresponding to webinars and reside streams, will be helpful for educating clients a few services or products. By providing useful insights and experience, your corporation can place itself as a thought chief within the business and construct belief together with your viewers.

• Simulations: Simulations supply clients an interactive and practical expertise of a services or products. By permitting clients to check out your services or products in a simulated atmosphere, you possibly can assist them image themselves utilizing your services or products day-after-day.

• Product demos: Interactive product demos enable clients to see your product in motion moderately than simply studying about its options or advantages. This may be particularly useful for software program companies, the place the options and performance of a product could also be tougher to convey by conventional advertising and marketing supplies.

• Picture sliders: Picture sliders are an awesome device for evaluating pictures. In case you’re promoting a cleansing product, you could possibly use a before-and-after picture slider to show the transformative results of your product.

• Interactive maps: Interactive maps are a preferred content material format for visualizing places or routes. Merely embedding Google Maps in your footer will be useful. Customers can zoom out and in, click on on markers and enter their location for instructions. Interactive maps can enhance native search engine optimisation and supply a customized person expertise, making it simpler for purchasers to work together with your corporation.

• Interactive infographics: Interactive infographics can present clients with an interesting option to find out about your corporation or one thing associated to it. You should utilize them to current advanced information or ideas in a method that’s straightforward to know. For instance, for those who’re within the enterprise of promoting natural produce, you could possibly create an interactive infographic that reveals the advantages of natural farming and the way it differs from conventional farming strategies.

What are the advantages of interactive content material advertising and marketing?

Maintaining with the newest tendencies isn’t the one purpose you must attempt interactive content material advertising and marketing—removed from it. Let’s talk about just a few of the advantages of interactive content material advertising and marketing that will help you determine whether or not it’s a match for your corporation.

Virality potential

There’s a good purpose why BuzzFeed-esque quizzes and polls are viable choices for entrepreneurs: the statistics are there to show their potential to massively scale. Again in 2014, the quiz “What Metropolis Ought to You Really Stay In?” from BuzzFeed reportedly earned greater than 18 million views and greater than 2.5 million Fb likes. Probably the most-read story from The New York Occasions in 2013 wasn’t a profile or an investigation, however a quiz referred to as “How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Speak.”

Interactive content material advertising and marketing may have much more potential within the years to return. information from the final two years, Mediafly clients who used interactive content material noticed a 94% larger improve in content material views than static content material.

It’s no shock that this form of content material performs so effectively—it’s compelling not solely to eat but additionally to share. Simply assume again to what number of of your Fb associates used to share what Disney princess they had been in keeping with a BuzzFeed quiz or their Sporcle outcomes on what number of nation flags they may determine. “You may hold [results like these] to your self, however most individuals need to brag about it, they usually share it,” says Shachaf Rodberg, Wix’s advertising and marketing development analyst.

Information assortment

Upcoming cookie bans could also be taking part in a job within the development of companies embracing interactive content material as a advertising and marketing technique. Advertisers, social media platforms and different third-party web sites have lengthy used cookies to trace shopper conduct and acquire their shopping information.

Third-party cookies are extraordinarily helpful for entrepreneurs however fairly invasive for everybody else. Cookies can report years of your internet historical past with out you understanding, and it’s all too straightforward for ill-intentioned events to entry all that delicate information. Safari and Firefox have blocked third-party cookies to guard their customers, and Google plans to do the identical by 2024. As a result of interactive content material advertising and marketing typically asks members to reply private questions anonymously in change for leisure and schooling, it gives the right various to invasive cookies that will develop into out of date within the coming years.

Model recall and loyalty

Interactive content material advertising and marketing may also be extremely efficient for constructing model recall and loyalty, particularly if the expertise is memorable and interesting. For instance, a well-designed interactive sport can depart a long-lasting impression on a viewer. The viewer, in flip, will affiliate your model with a enjoyable expertise. Equally, interactive content material that encourages person participation, corresponding to polls or quizzes, can create a way of group, constructing model loyalty within the course of.

The important thing to interactive content material advertising and marketing? Placing the shopper first

So, how will you create your personal interactive content material advertising and marketing technique? Rodberg suggests enthusiastic about it from the patron’s perspective. “From a entrepreneurs perspective, it is all about gathering useful first-party information about your clients and non-customers alike,” says Rodberg. “The magic occurs while you truly give attention to the kind of questions and content material that truly enrich the lives of the reader.”

It’s necessary that you just’re providing one thing of worth moderately than simply creating clickbait. “The battle for our consideration is already taking its toll,” mentioned Rodberg. “One of these content material can simply add to the noise.” Take into consideration methods to make use of personalization to tailor the content material to your audience’s curiosity. How are you going to use your experience to supply them with useful insights and information that may improve their information or decision-making processes?

So long as you retain that in thoughts, utilizing interactive content material to market your corporation is a promising technique for partaking clients and driving loyalty. It’d make it look like the web is so 2014 once more, however relaxation assured, interactive content material advertising and marketing is a step towards the long run.

Take a look at this weblog of content material advertising and marketing ideas for extra concepts.

5 examples of interactive content material advertising and marketing

Relating to interactive content material, the chances are limitless. To get your inventive juices flowing, try the content material advertising and marketing examples under.

01. Spotify

In case you need assistance discovering the right playlist to match your vibe for the day, Spotify may also help. The music streaming service’s temper quiz options 5 fast questions, together with queries like “How did you begin your morning?” and “How do you wish to calm down at dwelling?” In case your responses counsel that you just’re on the chiller finish of the spectrum, the quiz might level you to a playlist of acoustic covers. In case you’re preparing for an evening out, it would counsel a playlist of dance jams.

02. Sephora

With the explosion of the sweetness business over the past couple of years, it may possibly really feel overwhelming to sift by all of the skincare choices on the market. With its skincare finder quiz, Sephora helps clients discover a good match for what they’re searching for. The quiz principally capabilities as a Sephora salesperson would, stating just a few product choices based mostly on the shopper’s wants, age and priorities. What’s notably intelligent about this quiz is customers can merely click on “add to basket” on the consequence they like greatest.

03. Mint’s Grocery Funds Calculator

Mint’s Grocery Funds Calculator is an interesting piece of interactive content material that helps customers work out how a lot to spend on groceries. By inputting just a few information factors about household dimension, projected variety of meals eaten out and dietary wants, customers can obtain a really useful whole price range. Customers may toggle on a spectrum of spending habits, starting from thrifty to beneficiant. This interactive content material ties properly to Mint’s private finance product, recognizing a standard want for his or her clients and offering an evergreen device that gives noticeable worth.

04. Adobe

The Artistic Varieties quiz cleverly weaves in its promotion of Adobe Artistic Cloud with the chance for designers and customers to find extra about themselves. Relatively than bombarding customers with a product hyperlink on the finish of the quiz, Adobe enhances the expertise by showcasing eye-catching 3D graphics between every query, fueling creativity and galvanizing customers to begin designing.

However the advantages do not cease there. Upon receiving their quiz outcomes, customers are supplied with digital property that they’ll simply share on social media. This not solely encourages customers to have interaction with Adobe’s services, but additionally amplifies model consciousness by social sharing. By taking a user-centric strategy and offering worth past simply the promotion of its merchandise, Adobe successfully connects with its viewers and establishes a optimistic model picture.

05. Marriott

Marriott makes use of this visually stimulating, interactive infographic to supply households journey locations in Scottsdale, Arizona. It capabilities like a “select your journey” sport with a dotted line that leads by your responses to the outcomes. What’s particular about this piece of interactive content material advertising and marketing is that you just don’t should restart it if you’d like a special reply. When you’ve clicked on each reply, the web page turns into a static infographic which you could save for later.

06. Wendy’s

Through the use of a ballot to ship a joke about Elon Musk asking followers if he ought to resign as CEO, Wendy’s manages to make its followers really feel like they’re in on the joke. It labored—over 60,000 folks weighed in and over 5,000 folks preferred the ballot. The social media supervisor took issues a step additional by responding to feedback, holding the tone sarcastic and witty. This strategy helped Wendy’s construct a stronger reference to its viewers and created a memorable interplay that would probably result in elevated model loyalty.

07. Bloom Power

Bloom Power’s energy outage map offers useful info to potential clients, serving to them assess their danger and inform their vitality resiliency technique. The map permits companies in California to rapidly see the variety of blackouts and clients impacted of their space, and perceive the potential impression on their operations. By offering this info in an interactive and interesting method, Bloom Power can showcase its experience and place itself as an answer supplier for companies seeking to safeguard their operations from energy outages.

08. Lacoste

Situated on the within of a crocodile’s mouth and decked out in inexperienced, Lacoste’s digital retailer is a singular and memorable piece of branding. As an alternative of merely scrolling by limitless pages of attire, clients can now immerse themselves in a hidden world and uncover their subsequent favourite t-shirt. The digital retailer offers a brand new degree of engagement and interactivity, permitting clients to discover the merchandise in a enjoyable and playful method. By creating a singular and immersive purchasing expertise, Lacoste is ready to stand out from the competitors and create a long-lasting impression with their clients.

By Emily Shwake

Wix Weblog Editor