At Brandon, we’ve named interactive content as one of our top trends. While there are many reasons why interactive content has moved to the forefront of content marketing trends, one statistic stands out:
Interactive content has been shown to deliver two times more conversions than traditional content
If you’re interested in harnessing this more effective way to capture consumers’ attention then read on. We’ll be digging deeper into interactive content marketing and why it’s important, then dive into some leading interactive content examples that could help foster more success for your brand or business.
What is interactive content?
In contrast with passive content, which most users casually consume by reading or viewing before moving on — or simply scrolling past — interactive content invites interaction from those who encounter it. Rather than presenting static words or pictures that sit idly on a page, interactive content beckons user participation and active engagement. And as a result, it tends to be much more attention-grabbing, presenting clear opportunities for brands to catch more consumers’ eyes and encourage added engagement.
Interactive content is typically served to consumers online or in some other digital format, enabling real-time participation and a back-and-forth dialogue of sorts. Examples of interactive content can include quizzes, polls, online calculators, e-books, videos, animated infographics and more, each offering some sort of opportunity for users to directly engage with the material being presented.
Why is interactive content important for brand-building?
The digital nature of today’s media formats has enabled a range of new capabilities (with instant interactivity ranking high among them) that traditional forms of media such as newspapers, radio and TV simply can’t deliver. For brands, this presents a huge opportunity to capture more attention and encourage deeper consumer engagement.
Seizing the opportunity is about taking your content from being passive — waiting for engagement — to making it active and facilitating engagement. This can be accomplished by adding elements such as animation, interactive polls and quizzes to your content, or by incorporating interactive tools such as calculators and decision trees to help make it easy and engaging for users to discover information. Further, when you take traditional content like a blog, e-book or infographic and invite people to interact with it more directly, it can be much more fun and more engaging for users.
Ultimately, for brands looking to grow, interactive content beats out traditional (static) content for a trio of primary reasons:
- By allowing users to directly interact with and play a role in the direction of the content they’re consuming, it’s more engaging for them.
- Via polls, quizzes and other information-gathering tactics, it can be leveraged to encourage more consumer feedback — which can be invaluable in guiding brands’ decision-making.
- It’s been proven to boost conversion rates.
8 powerful types of interactive content
Some of the leading types of interactive content that your brand can leverage today to spur added consumer engagement — and more conversions — include:
1. Quizzes
Capable of entertaining and educating audiences of consumers, quizzes and questionnaires grab users’ attention with a hook inherent in most of us: a desire to test our knowledge.
Brandon pro insight: For brands, quizzes and questionnaires can also be harnessed to capture zero-party consumer data, for example, by asking for a user’s email address and messaging opt-in before providing the quiz results.
2. Calculators
Especially beneficial for financial institutions such as banks, credit unions and other loan providers, online calculators can be used to show consumers how a business’s offering can affect their budget or benefit them financially. And according to more than half of professional marketers surveyed, online calculators deliver their highest levels of effectiveness when consumers are actively contemplating making a purchase during the consideration stage of the marketing funnel.
Brandon pro insight: Online calculators are critical in cases where determinations of the rate or price a consumer must pay for a product or service is complicated, such as with mortgages or other long-term, interest-accruing loans. They can enable prospects to clearly grasp difficult-to-understand mathematical concepts and/or know exactly what their monetary commitment will be when making a complicated financial move.
One strong example of a Brandon-produced online calculator can be seen in ShopFluency’s savings calculator. This online tool adds interactivity while letting potential customers easily see how much ShopFluency’s services can reduce their cost per acquisition, plus how significantly the company’s offerings could boost their ROAS and new customers per month.
3. E-books
While digital books have been around for a good while, today’s e-books can include interactive content such as videos, slideshows, graphics and animations to add more allure, visual appeal and opportunities for reader engagement.
Brandon pro insight: By adding interactivity to the e-books hosted on their websites, brands can hold consumers’ attention there longer, delivering positive impacts for commonly used website-evaluation metrics such as session duration and average time on page. Further, interactive e-books have been shown to increase reader retention of the topic at hand — providing a clear advantage in efforts to boost brand awareness. One example of e-books’ propensity for boosting reader retention can be seen in statistics showing that e-learning can deliver a five-fold increase in students’ retention of the subject matter being covered.
4. Infographics
Infographics, too, have been around since long before the emergence of interactive content. But by implementing tech tools in the digital world, brands can create modern infographics that add interactive elements, such as moving animations or graphical changes that appear and disappear as the narrative progresses, and/or visual content that morphs to fit into and advance the storyline.
Brandon pro insight: According to research, 85% of professional business-to-business marketers are already using interactive infographics in their marketing campaigns, or say they have plans to use them in their future campaigns.
5. Solution finders/questionnaires
Brand-provided solution finders/questionnaires use an online question-and-answer session/decision tree to help consumers identify their needs, then guide them to the best product or service to meet these needs. Solution finders/questionnaires are typically less focused on entertaining consumers than the typical online quiz is, and thereby tend to employ more serious language than online quizzes do, then lead their users to more in-depth information about the recommended solution(s).
Brandon examples: Wastequip’s Brandon-produced container selector tool uses a question-and-answer session/decision tree to add interactivity to the brand’s website while helping prospective buyers find the right Wastequip-built container for their needs.
6. Landing pages
Brands have long used landing pages to gather leads and to help generate conversions. And by adding interactivity to a landing page — via nearly any of the tools mentioned in this list — a brand can make the experience more interesting, keep visitors around for longer and (hopefully) increase the page’s conversion rate.
Brandon pro insight: A common mistake that many brands make is creating overly copy-heavy landing pages, which can lead to high bounce rates. In fact, research shows that landing pages that incorporate copy sparingly deliver conversion rates more than 3% higher than those featuring too much copy. (In the business-services sector in particular, landing pages with fewer than 100 words deliver 50% more conversions than those with 500-plus words.) And of course, adding interactive elements such as videos and infographics to landing pages is a great way to convey a lot of information with fewer words.
7. Videos
As Americans’ persistent video-viewing habits demonstrate, videos already have immense appeal among U.S. consumers. And by adding interactive elements to video content, brands can leverage this strong appeal and crank it up a notch. For viewers, such interactivity can improve the user experience by enabling consumers to quickly and easily get more details about something they might see in the video that piques their interest.
Brandon pro insight: Leading video-hosting platform YouTube makes it easy to incorporate interactivity in video content posted there by adding clickable info cards to videos. These can be used to direct viewers to other videos, to websites where they can get more information about the products or services seen in a video, or to online e-commerce destinations where they can buy featured products. In addition, our in-house video production capabilities are available if you need help bringing videos to life for your brand.
8. Maps
By adding interactivity to digital maps, brands can increase the appeal of these assets by making them fun and informative for viewers to review and explore. A few of the many possibilities here include creating a map that provides a tour of your business campus, that highlights your business’s culture, that showcases area attractions, or that educates on regional (or organizational) history.
Brandon examples: A couple Brandon-created examples demonstrate the enhanced user appeal and functionality that interactivity can add to online maps. One, this interactive map created for next-generation commerce park Camp Hall, shows website visitors a range of the infrastructure-related advantages the industrial park’s campus in the Charleston, South Carolina, region offers to businesses that locate there. And this interactive map for Brandon partner company Eight Oh Two gives visitors a quick and fun look at affiliated office locations throughout the eastern U.S., along with outlining some of their capabilities and highlighting a few nearby attractions.
Is your brand ready to harness the latest trend in content that more effectively grabs consumers’ attention and generates two times more conversions than static content? At Brandon, our team of data-driven marketing experts and experienced content producers is here to help you incorporate more interactive content into your marketing arsenal. From crafting videos, infographics, quizzes, or any of the interactive content tactics described above, we have the integrated digital, creative and production resources to take your content to the next level.
To get started, contact us today.