Ideas for incorporating interactive content into your marketing strategy

Interactive content is gaining popularity. Read why marketers are obsessed with integrating interactive design into their content marketing strategy.

Internet users send 3.5 million email messages every second and churn out 6 million blog posts every day — yet a coup d’état is underway in the content marketing world. Just as rich media is replacing traditional banner ads, interactive content is replacing static content like blog posts. In fact, 53 percent of content marketers use interactive content, and they plan to increase their use of interactive content this year. Companies using interactive content cite higher engagement rates and a more conducive medium for educating consumers as their top reasons for adopting interactive content.

What is interactive content?

Interactive content is any content that requires the customer’s active engagement beyond simply reading or watching. The beauty of interactive content is that consumers must engage with the content to get results—so it may come as no surprise that the most shared quiz in the last 5 years has gotten a total of 5.5 million social interactions. Whereas traditional content is static in time and space, interactive content changes with time and as people engage with it—it builds on itself.

Four killer types of interactive content

1. Quizzes

Look no further than BuzzFeed, master of the quiz (for example, This Is An Accurate Love Compatibility Test— Take It). The site pioneered quizzes that are lighthearted and fun, but that hasn’t stopped companies and universities like PBS, Amnesty International, and UCLA from adopting the quiz format, too. The American Red Cross created a quiz titled “Do you actually know how to swim?” Although the title seems playful, the Red Cross used it as part of their campaign to reduce the drowning rate by 50 percent in 50 cities.

Why do quizzes matter? Quizzes are successful because they are interactive and fun, and they give answers—even if those answers aren’t serious. According to BuzzSumo, quizzes get shared an average of 1,900 times and have an 82 percent engagement rate. Quizzes drive engagement and reach, produce leads, and yield high conversion rates.

2. Interactive infographics

 Interactive infographics, pictures, and videos are on the rise, too. Virtual reality already is a commercial success, and before and after sliders are trending (for example, These Before/After Photos Show The Scale Of Destruction In Ukraine). The New York Times also offers a barrage of interactive maps, graphs, and infographics (for example, Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count and Can Removing Highways Fix America’s Cities?).

Analyzing and reading data is becoming easy and fun. Sumo analyzed content marketing traffic and found that Americans read only 20 percent of the words on a web page, likely because at least 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced every day (that’s 2.5 followed by a staggering 18 zeros). Interactive infographics present data with animation, video, and responsive graphics to help the reader more easily digest the data. Moreover, the infographics are tailored to the data, improving on stationary infographics, which tend to squeeze any data set into a static design.

3. Interactive white papers

 Think back to grade school: Did you prefer to learn the curriculum by reading textbooks, or by playing classroom games like Jeopardy? White papers are the same as your seventh-grade social studies textbook: long and monotonous. Interactive white papers offer a dialogue that traditional white papers cannot (for example, Digital Banking Made Human eBook). Consider condensing the core content and data from your white paper and repurposing it for videos, quizzes, and infographics.

Learning can be fun. White papers are one of the most effective B2B tactics. They provide great research results and data-centric insights, but they are text-heavy and require too much time to read. Interactive white papers present the research, data, and results without the fluff. They offer a personalized experience and an immersive portal for data-driven content—two key attributes that keep readers engaged.

4. Storytelling

Storytelling marketing connects an audience to the human side of a brand through a creative, dramatic, and emotional story—and explicitly doesn’t sell a product. Google was a maverick of storytelling marketing (for example, Parisian Love and Dear Sophie), but it was Guinness’s storytelling commercial that became an instant success, scoring 30 percent higher than any other beer commercial in the same time frame and raking in 7 million views on YouTube in its first month. In the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, Bupa and PhRMA have created great commercials that serve as perfect examples of storytelling marketing.

The art of storytelling. Storytelling is not a lost art in marketing. In fact, it’s in high demand: 92 percent of consumers want brands to tell stories. And although it isn’t immediately clear that these stories are a form of interactive marketing, marketers cite higher engagement rates, increased brand loyalty, and higher conversion rates as reasons to use storytelling marketing.

Interactive content is giving marketers new ways to strut their stuff, so the next time you want to revitalize a successful campaign, bring it to life with interactivity. Not only does interactive content improve upon a successful equation, it helps your content stand out from the billions of blog posts and white papers that flood the Internet each year.

How will you integrate interactive content into your content marketing strategy this year?