Unless you have been holidaying on the moon for the last few years, you can’t have missed the buzz around interactive content. It has been called the future of digital marketing because compared to other techniques, it truly enables real-time audience interactions with your brand.

Think about it. As kids, most of us loved classes where we got to create or do things. Interactive installations draw the most crowds at museums and zoos. Human beings thrive on and learn from interactions. You certainly would have tried online assessments or fun quizzes, and easily shared your email ID at the end to get your ‘assessment’. Then there are interactive infographics, calculators, polls or surveys, contests, image galleries, brackets, podcasts, webinars, and much more which serve the essential purpose of digital marketing – actions.

Scott Brinker, ion interactive and Chiefmartec.com author, explains, “You can think of interactive content as lightweight ‘apps’ for the web. Like apps on your smartphone, they offer a useful functionality in a small, easy-to-use digital package. But unlike smartphone apps, you don’t need to explicitly install them. They’re just embedded into your website, and they work in any modern web browser.”

Meaningful and relevant interactive content drives engagement your audiences enjoy or find useful. As a brand that’s exactly what you aim for. Therefore, it is not merely content consumption that’s taking place. There’s participation leading to results and knowledge which are useful to people. It just elevates the user experience without any hardsell, while also capturing valuable audience behavior and data for the marketer.

How interactive content fares better than other forms

Aaron Dun, SVP, Marketing, SnapApp:

The sea of content out there is vast. This poses a challenge for marketers in terms of locating exactly where their audiences spend time. Putting content out there in a space full of noise means that the probability of being heard is low. Thus, to get your audience hooked to your content it must offer exclusivity in value, format or experience. Enter interactive content, and that probability of being heard goes up drastically.

Interactive content drives active participation of your audience by incorporating engaging elements -- like questions -- that require interaction. This is in direct contrast to more passive engagement, like reading or watching content, where a marketer can’t really be sure that a prospect is paying attention. This represents a value exchange between audience and marketer – the audience gets content they find valuable in exchange for key insights marketers want.

This win-win value exchange means interactive content boasts impressive ROI – marketers see 2-5x better conversion rates with interactive content vs. static.

And being heard is the beginning of your audience engagement. Content is secondary to your audience as they seek fun or/and answers. Once you give them that, an affinity develops that leads to trust and brand resonance with high recall. How many static blog posts, white papers or eBooks can you recall? Content fatigue creeps in, right? But, we all recall interactive blog posts which enhance our knowledge or help us assess ourselves. Sometimes, it can be as simple as ending a collateral with a contest or quiz. And it does not need to be serious and complex. For instance, something as elemental as a quiz on personal preferences works. It makes your audience feel that you love to have a conversation or interaction with them, and that goes a long way in them coming back to you for more. More so, such content goes viral quickly as you make the audience feel that they are a part of the bigger picture.

81% of marketers think that interactive content draws attention of readers.

Shachar Orren, Chief Storyteller, Playbuzz:

A cocktail of enriched media, participatory narrative, and visual storytelling sets interactive content apart from the rest. A compelling story is never easy to develop but jaded as it may sound, nothing good comes easy. Whether you’re a marketing and sales professional for a chocolate brand or one that provides CRM solutions, when you create a story that’s worth telling and repeating, you will always have happily - engaged audiences.

Interactive content is the not-so-secret ingredient that helps brands boost audience engagement and social share rates, overcoming the many hurdles of today’s content consumption habits, including: decreasing attention spans, ad blocking, and more. As an interactive content authoring platform, Playbuzz helps brands and publishers do just that.

Marketers can not only add interactive elements - such as flip cards, ranked lists and more - to the assets they create and distribute, but can also use specific storytelling tools, like polls and quizzes, in order to approach their audience in advance and gain insights regarding topics they want to test the waters on. By conducting an engaging user survey, you will know exactly what to focus on when creating their collaterals. With platforms like Playbuzz, marketers can add these elements easily and without learning many new skills. For example, they can easily add video to their content without having to learn video-editing.

At Playbuzz, we insert our own interactive elements into webinars, reports, speaking presentations, sales pitches and more because we know that audiences everywhere quickly lose interest in static content, and crave a meaningful dialogue that makes them feel heard.

Overall, publishers and brands using our platform to create all sorts of textual assets garner above industry standard performance metrics, including a 70-90% average completion rate (compared to the industry average of 20%), and 2-4-minute-long sessions on average (compared to the 15 second industry average).

Janice Caston, VP, Global Marketing, Toluna:

Driving B2B buyer’s journey through interactive content

If you’re a B2B marketer, establishing a relationship with key decision makers of organizations is something you prioritize Though decision makers would like elements of fun in interactive content, their ultimate search is for answers, solutions, and information for better decision making. Traditional approaches to lead generation and conversions may not hold ground today and thus, a lot of B2B marketers have hopped on the interactive content train. And the train is gaining popularity because of its timeliness and speed!

Deepening audience understanding is the starting point for making our marketing content more interactive. Our marketing automation tools provide us data to learn what interests customers and how they engage with our content. Leveraging these insights enables us to create more effective, interactive content.

Aaron adds:

In a world where Millennials are becoming part of the B2B buying committee, marketers need to consider the new sales journey. Millennials tend to be “sales avoiders” – they conduct extensive research on vendor solutions before engaging sales, and reach out late in the process. This means valuable, engaging content throughout the funnel is essential for engaging the Millennial during research. (Learn more about the impact of the Millennial buyer in our recent research)

Interactive content is valuable at all points in the buying journey, and can help accelerate them through the funnel. For example, you can start with a personality assessment to get attention at the top of the funnel, quickly qualifying (or disqualifying) prospects; at the bottom of the funnel, tools like product pickers or interactive video demos are good to support final decision making.

In the B2B buyer's journey, interactive content offers an opportunity for data collection, engagement and behavioral insight at every stage.

Shachar remarks:

The B2B decision making cycle is a long and challenging one for marketers, and the combination of interactive content and native advertising can assist, and enhance, their efforts every step of the way.

By strategically distributing interactive branded content items, marketers can provide prospective customers with information during the need, recognition and research stages of the decision-making cycle, while gathering data regarding their target audience through interactive queries. Adding a clear CTA button to the item will help bring the cycle to completion and lead the customer to make a purchase or download, while the shareable nature of interactive content will encourage readers to serve as brand ambassadors and spread the word to other relevant audiences, like their social circles.

For building awareness, quizzes’ or calculators are effective interactive content formats. Calculators function by applying a set of formulae to the inputs of the participant. This way, you make the decision maker aware of how you can help them increase ROI or customer lifetime value, reduce cost, and more such stuff that matters.

For engaging with B2B prospects, configurators have proved effective. A configurator allows your audience to configure sets or parts of your offerings as a package according to their needs. A ‘build your own pizza’ in the B2B context. This way, they can choose exactly what they need. In addition to that, microsites, assessments, and interactive white papers are also helpful in maintaining engagement. And, yes, since your configurator has been used, a qualified lead is already in place.

Acceleration and nurturing of leads can happen through similar curated collateral. Offer them interactive white papers or eBooks based on their configurator interaction to truly personalize their search for content and support informed decision making

For conversion, interactive content can be most effectively used to bring the outcomes alive for the potential user. Lookbooks, demos and walk-throughs, simulation, calculators, research, testimonial galleries and even games or wrap-up quizzes are possibilities at this stage. One may ask, why games and quizzes at such a critical stage? Because over-personalization with long-form content at this stage can actually delay the decision-making process.

51% of marketers believe that calculators are highly-efficient during the ‘evaluation/consideration’ stage of buyer’s journey.

Janice adds:

We match content to what will best resonate with customers at each step in the buying journey based on prior engagement. At an early stage, our focus will be creating a rapport while a satisfied customer will get entirely different messaging. For instance, we customize case study content based on the individual customer experience.

Who is making it happen and how

There’re plenty of instances where brands have benefited from effective interactive content (in some cases, they have created history).

Google and Coke teamed up with an epic campaign in 2012 – Buy the World a Coke. An emotional, nostalgic ad infused with technology allowed people to buy someone a coke anywhere in the world. In reply, they received a ‘thank you’ video. Interactions between people were used by Coke and Google as their digital content.

Aaron offers an example and says:

This approach, where interactive content is central to marketing strategy vs. a one-off activity, has been very effective for SnapApp customers. For example, Paycor, a multi-service software solution for human resources management, successfully integrated interactive content across the funnel, creating pieces that made sense based on where a buyer was in their journey. The result was 3,700 views of their interactive assets within 90 days, and crediting 23% of revenue from all digital marketing activities over two months to a single interactive campaign.

French automobile company, Peugeot, has created a stir with its interactive brochure. It aimed at improving the perception of the brand, reach the mobile audience, and generate web traffic. Named e-Motion, the brochure gets published thrice a year on Peugeot’s site, Facebook page, and email newsletters. The brochure worked wonders with stunning numbers to show for. It has 35% of total visits coming from mobile devices, reaches 92,000 visitors, gets an average of 223,000 views per publication, and receives 35,000 web clicks (inclusive of all Peugeot properties).

Quizzes have also helped brands in delivering exciting new engagement and experiences to their customers. Manufacturers of appliances for data recovery, Unitrends, drew traffic to its site via its Facebook page with the help of a personality quiz. A series of 5 fun-questions answered by people told them which backup and disaster recovery (BDR) superhero they were. The fun element in the quiz result was accompanied by product recommendations by Unitrends on homepage visits. Fun, subtle, effective!

Providing another instance, Shachar says:

Opus Energy, the UK’s largest independent supplier of electricity and gas, reached out to SMEs via an interactive item that piqued their interest and raised brand awareness.

Opus Energy timed an interactive content campaign with Rio Olympics 2016. A personality quiz focused on the management style of SME executives by asking them questions on their leadership, attitude, and more. The results paired the executives with an Olympic sport based on their style of work. Entertainment and value were delivered together through personalization as the quiz witnessed 47,000 engagements (timing campaigns with global events always generates interest and excitement).

Heavy Construction System Specialists (HCSS) used a bracket by conducting a tournament where it asked audiences to submit their favorite projects and subsequently vote for them. It garnered instant attention with 292,000 votes and 117 projects. Result – an 800% increase in HCSS web traffic!

Go interactive

The list of these examples can go on and the reason for such successful campaigns is simple. Targeting the right audience, initiating the right interaction, and creating the right engagement.

As a marketer, when you’re being relevant, exclusive, unique, fun, timely, and informative with your interactive content, results follow because no one can ever imagine or live in a world without interactions. Just one consideration here – ‘learn more’ always before ‘buy now’!