Content marketing is undoubtedly critical for the success of your small business.
Interactive content encourages your users to actively engage with your content instead of passively consuming it.
This gives your small business an amazing opportunity to achieve a deeper relationship with your customers, understand them better and quantify your leads.
If you put interactive content at the center of your content marketing strategy, you’re bound to achieve great results.
Since implementing any novelty can seem hard, we’ve made a list of interactive content types that you should try to excite and delight your customers.
Quizzes
Quizzes are great multimedia tools that can greatly benefit your content strategy.
Their main advantage is that, unlike images, texts, or videos, quizzes are interactive.
This makes them valuable content marketing assets.
When you use quizzes to interact with your audience, you have the opportunity to collect data from quiz-takers on their customer wants, likes and dislikes, and use the insights you’ve gathered to create new content that will cater to those needs.
The best example of using quizzes to deliver a powerful marketing strategy is BuzzFeed.
The website has had a top 40 Alexa ranking in the USA and remains extremely successful at reaching new audiences.
Thanks to user-centered quizzes like “Which town should you live in?”, BuzzFeed has managed to reach dozens of millions of users.
Like any great content, quizzes are also extremely shareable.
When paired with a well-thought-out lead generation strategy, they have the potential to reach new audiences. This makes them valuable content marketing assets.
Interactive Calculators
Calculators are a fantastic way to demonstrate the value of your business to your audience and generate leads as a result.
When you use calculators to compute an answer relevant to solving your audience’s problem, you showcase the practical value of your solution.
This puts you in the right position to convert even casual visitors to your website into clients.
With calculators, you also collect data that the users are entering and use it to understand your audience better.
For example, imagine having a free custom app that helps users by calculating how much money they could save by using your product.
On the one hand, the user immediately begins to connect the solution you offer with their pain point and perceive how they could benefit from implementing it.
On the other, and perhaps more importantly, thanks to those calculator results, in addition to demonstrating how your service could help them, you will have gained input data from the user and created a viable lead to convert.
In short, you benefit the client and the sales team with this simple element.
If you want your content strategy to succeed, adding interactive calculators to your content toolbox is a great way to find out more about your audience, showcase value, and capture leads.
Polls and Surveys
A poll is a gateway for meaningful interaction between your business and your audience. Everyone likes to feel like their opinions are heard and it’s even better when you can use those insights to the benefit of your company and the service it provides.
Polls and surveys are quick and interactive elements which can help you get single-question answers from your audience and add value to your business.
If they’re well written, they’re going to spark interesting interactions with users and provide valuable insights on particular topics from your industry.
A great poll or survey experience will grab the participant’s attention, make them pause and think for a moment, and interact.
To make the interaction feel natural, it is also a good idea to follow up with the lead after they have interacted with you.
For example, influencers regularly use Instagram polls to enhance their marketing strategy.
Influencers and Instagram experts utilize sticker polls to organically reach enormous audiences, increase engagement and collect user feedback for market research.
The data they get also includes the total number of views and votes, which helps them get an overview of their reach.
You should view polls and surveys as powerful tools for your brand’s marketing and lead generation and use them alongside your social media strategy.
Panoramic and 3D videos
Panoramic and 3D videos offer an immersive experience that sparks customer interaction better than regular videos.
Since videos are some of the most important ways to promote your brand, you should take them to the next level by making them as interactive as possible to create a unique and impactful user experience.
Increased conversion rates will be the result.
Such videos excel at capturing the users’ attention in a short amount of time and leave them with a more long-lasting impression.
Unlike traditional video ads, 3D videos offer a sense of size, orientation, and distance that make your product seem more tangible.
This makes such videos the perfect interactive tool for presenting your product to your audience.
For example, Hong Kong Airlines released a 360-degree video for marketing purposes, and it was 35 times more effective than the same ad in a traditional 2D format.
If you want to supercharge your content marketing strategy and provide your audience with shareable, interactive content, panoramic and 3D videos are a must-have in your content toolkit.
Interactive Educational Content
Educational eBooks, webinars, and similar content keep your audience engaged for hours, provide value and generate opportunities for leads.
They are highly interactive and, if used properly, a valuable asset for your business.
Similar to a sales pitch, interactive educational content reveals problems and provides solutions, and as such, it is an ideal tool for successful soft sales.
Even if you don’t close the sale, the seminar will still leave you with volumes of useful data that is sure to help your marketing team.
A report by DemandGen, available for download here, has found that uses are most willing to register and share information about themselves in exchange for webinars (51%), survey reports (50%), and white papers (40%).
Therefore, knowing how to host a seminar is critical for creating an amazing learning experience that generates leads and provides the kind of value that helps you nurture relationships with the participants.
When it comes to engaging with your audience, interactive educational content is the crown jewel of your content marketing strategy.
Conclusion
When you create content that sparkes engagement and shows value, users will want to do business with you. In this post, we’ve talked about the potential of interactive content for your business.
These include:
- quizzes
- interactive calculators
- engaging polls and surveys
- panoramic and 3D videos
- interactive educational content
This doesn’t mean traditional forms of content, like blogs, videos, or images, are no longer relevant, but rather that you can always push for ways to enrich your content marketing toolkit.
Encouraging more interaction with your audiences is a great way to do it.
If you want to supercharge your content marketing strategy, start thinking about what kind of interactive content will be the most effective for your small business.
