Willing to improve your marketing results? Here are some of the possibilities. Choose a solution to see how Interactive Content can help you get there:
The first and most obvious form to use interactive content is to generate engagement. By encouraging consumers to participate in the experience, you guarantee engagement through content, whether answering questions on a quiz or filling out information on a landing page.
This becomes even more relevant in light of the current market scenario, characterized by challenges marketing professionals face in engaging their audience. In a recent study conducted by Rock Content in partnership with Demand Metrics, 41% of participants admitted to not being able to create sufficiently engaging static content.
An intelligent use of interactivity builds an effective dialogue with your audience. Over time, through encounters that consistently satisfy, people will be used to interacting with your content, leading to long-lasting relationships and value for both sides.
Measuring results and performing tests with your content are necessary in order to ensure an efficient approach that really boosts engagement. For example, identifying which formats perform best with your audience is key to the ongoing optimization of your strategy.
Employ A/B testing to choose among different models and use social media to validate your content. One interesting suggestion is to post them somewhere like Twitter, where organic engagement is more common. The best performers on these channels will likely be the most effective for your company.
One important metric that can show you the relative effectiveness of your site and your marketing strategy as a whole, is the average time on page. Increasing average time on page isn’t a silver bullet, but the likelihood of a conversion or sale certainly increases when readers actually consider what you have to say.
If people are clicking away just as fast as they found you, something’s going wrong. Your content might not be relevant — or it might just not be interesting enough to hold their attention. There’s also the somewhat paradoxical concern where you attract a reader through organic search, but then once they have their question answered, they immediately click away.
By embedding interactive content on your page, you give readers a reason to stay. There’s something else to do, play with, learn from, or otherwise interact with, so some readers will stick around and interact with that content.
Again, average time on page usually isn’t the ultimate objective. But it’s a part of measuring how well you’re capturing readers. And, with the right interactive content, a longer time per page can lead to increased conversions or sales.
Click-through rate, or CTR, is a crucial metric by which you can judge the success of your marketing plan. In fact, increasing CTR is often one of a company marketing team’s ongoing goals. As a refresher, CTR is essentially the number of visitors that click through to a target page (such as the CTA link at the end of a post) after first reaching the original page, compared to the total number who reached the original page.
Say you write a blog post that answers search intent for a common question in your industry. You’re going to end that blog post with a call to action (CTA), right? That’s a good practice, of course, but some readers will tune out long before they get there.
But what if your CTA wasn’t just a paragraph at the end of a text-based post? What if the CTA was actually tied to a piece of interactive content? Save that call to some other kind of click until after the reader has interacted with a valuable piece of interactive content. Once you demonstrate added value, you’ll typically generate more click-throughs, raising your CTR.
You know how lead generation works, right? After reaching and attracting visitors to your channels, you need them to see how your content is relevant to their needs, leading to repeat interactions. Following their first contact, a visitor can already be considered a lead. But remember when we discussed how keeping a user’s attention is becoming increasingly difficult? Proof of this concept can be found in a study by Microsoft revealing that the average human attention span has decreased to a point where it’s currently less than that of a goldfish.
Achieving the engagement you require to generate leads is a challenge and then some. This becomes clear when we observe the results of Content Trends 2019, where 66.3% of companies cite difficulties in producing content that generates buzz. Searching for innovative actions to capture your users’ attention in different ways is now a necessity. And that’s where interactivity comes in.
According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, 87% of Content Marketing specialists say that materials which promote a user’s interaction are far more efficient at retaining users. In addition, if qualified, they’re set to be spontaneously recommended to a third party.
In the same Rock Content study cited above, 63% of the professionals interviewed affirmed that interactive content has a greater chance of being shared by internet users. When asked about the efficacy of static content to achieve this same goal, only 32% answered positively.
So it’s clear that interactivity leads to content that’s more likely to be shared, which naturally improves its organic reach. With that in mind, you simply need to understand how to create value for your visitors to turn them into leads.
Do you have a link building strategy? Even if you don’t yet, you know that getting high quality links to your content is extremely important for your company, right? It’s one of the factors that builds domain authority, resulting in higher search engine rankings.
But how do you convince other sites to link to yours? One option is through partnerships, but you could opt for an even more organic path. Creating resources that provide real value to a specific niche encourages blogs in those areas to recommend you to their readers.
For example, imagine your company is in tourism. By creating an interactive tool to calculate expenses on a given trip, you’ve made your page extremely useful to a diverse audience who are searching for financial planning to travel.
Now, imagine that a well-known travel blog comes across your content and sees how it can offer value to their readers. It’s quite likely that they will write a post about your calculator, resulting in more visitors to your page and strengthening your SEO strategy.
We know that every Content Marketing strategy aims to generate and convert leads. The first step can be achieved through the actions we’ve mentioned, like setting up an SEO strategy and maximizing your visitors’ engagement. On the other hand, conversion can be a more involved process.
It’s necessary to map out the customer’s journey and identify the moment they are ready to be approached for a sale. This doesn’t happen by chance. To reach this point, your lead needs to be nurtured with information relevant to their pain and needs, awakening the idea to obtain a solution for them.
This process of educating your client can take place through a variety of channels, from email marketing campaigns to offering educational material. In all cases, interactivity adds to engagement, as presented in the following study by Ion.
The study revealed that 90% of specialists consider forms of interactive content to be effective at educating a persona, while only 65% say the same about static content. They offer a playful way to share information with a user, resulting in both learning and engagement. To illustrate, think of an interactive quiz that displays answers based on a visitor’s input, in addition to explanations of the feedback.
This is surely more attractive than just reading an article on the subject, wouldn’t you agree? Most interesting of all is that this type of action can lead to other advantages for the company, as we’ll see in the next topic.
For any marketing initiative to succeed, an understanding of the persona’s characteristics is required, based on which stage of the sales funnel they are at. After all, each stage of the buyer’s journey demands a specific type of content to nurture, in order to gradually win over consumers and lead them to conversions.
To achieve this insight, it’s essential that you develop an approach to collecting user data. Interactive content adds to these efforts. Again, consider interactive quizzes. Based on the results of your visitors, you can estimate their level of knowledge on the subject.
As a result, it becomes possible to determine whether the persona already has a strong enough foundation to advance to more in-depth materials or is still in the discovery phase, requiring more explanatory and comprehensive content to be nurtured. And the best thing is that basically any type of information can be extracted through Interactive Marketing initiatives.
Landing pages, famous for exchanging valuable content for contact information, become much more effective when they evolve beyond static. Infographics too. If content is properly structured in an interactive way, you can easily see which parts generate the most engagement among your audience.