Engage Your Audience with Interactive Content

In this next installment of our series on major trends in communications for 2022, we’re talking about interactive content as part of a strategy that works in tandem with emotional marketing and ephemeral content.

As we discussed in our piece on ephemeral content, one of the top tips for ensuring your content has an impact is to involve the viewer’s input in some way. Whether it’s taking a quiz or a survey, or playing a game that supports what you’re sharing, allowing your audience to interact with your content creates an immersive and memorable experience.

Interactive content is the next level in content consumption and engagement that lets viewers interact with the content instead of passively viewing it. Previously, the engagement tactic for most social media, e-mail marketing, blog posts, and multimedia content was to encourage viewers to like, reply, or share to engage and spread the word. Interactive content is a more rewarding, real-time way for your audience to feel engaged and connected to your brand.

Interactive content invites the audience to become part of the content, giving them a voice and choices to make. When done well, it can heighten brand interest and loyalty. If used with ephemeral content – like a survey that lasts 24 hours and seems exclusive to customers who keep an eye on your brand the most – they feel cherry-picked for their feedback. It’s a good feeling, which is exactly what emotional marketing is intended to elicit. It makes customers more likely to keep engaging and following through on calls to action.

Here are three major ways to put interactive content to work for your campaigns:

1. Liven up your content with games.

If budget allows – and with independent developers providing widely available, tailor-made options – a branded game can become the flagship of a campaign. It doesn’t have to be complex. Something as simple as a nicely animated “choose your own adventure” type game gives the audience something fun to do while sparking interest in what’s being marketed.

This cements your brand as one that’s worth watching for unique content. If you follow it up with a discount or coupon at the game’s completion and a solid call to action, they are more likely to explore what you’re offering since they’re already engrossed and invested.

2. Use quizzes to learn about your readers.

Quizzes, surveys, and giveaways are still effective ways of drawing your audience into your content. It welcomes them to share their thoughts and opinions and feel heard and valued. Surveys or questionnaires are particularly useful because they also gather actionable information on customer sentiment. They can also identify where customers experience friction in the conversion or sales process.

When utilized on websites, quizzes help potential customers navigate through products and service options by filtering views based on their answers. This customizes their experience as they progress and makes it feel like their unique needs are being considered. Most people like to feel special, and this sort of interactive content achieves that well. A great example of this is the “Foundation Finder” tool on the Clinique website.

3. Engage with multimedia content.

Infographics remain a highly effective way to present information to your audience. Visuals make details easier to remember than flat text. Now, interactive infographics that let viewers engage with moving parts or combine reading with video elements are an especially good way to increase information retention and engagement.

Any way you can find to give your viewers something more to do than passively consume your content will bear fruit for your campaigns. Interactive content has been used by large brands for some time and has often gone viral on a global scale. Adidas’ “Impossible is Nothing” campaign in 2007 that featured David Beckham is a stellar example of interactive content and emotional marketing working in tandem. The video ad drew the viewer into Beckham’s story, while their website invited viewers to draw their own stories with a tool on the site and share them with others. It was a viral sensation.

The success of campaigns like this has been a good indicator that this is how audiences want content delivered, but outside big brand budgets, it’s been difficult to do. With polls, quizzes, and other forms of interactivity now available for free on many social platforms or to embed on websites with inexpensive tools, interactive content marketing can be the way forward for all.

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