Why Interactive Content Is the Future of Content Marketing

No doubt you’ve heard the phrase “Content is king”.

However, I beg to differ. I believe that “Interactive content is king”.

An interactive piece of content has essential elements that are vital for businesses. These critical components can:

• Attract an audience
• Increase engagement
• Boost site traffic
• Improve conversion rate

Being a digital marketing professional, I have noticed that companies overlook the importance of interactive content, and later on, realize that they made a big gaffe. Eventually, they observe that their competitors have captured the potential buyers that they could have engaged.

Today, people like you and me (not everyone) spend most of our time on the Internet. Tell me, how often do you read the ENTIRE content on the sites you visit every day?

Well, you know the answer. People in search of information navigate across several websites daily but give their full attention to only a few sites. The reason for such a short attention span is pretty simple. On such sites, there is something that compels them to pay attention and that something is what we call interactive content.

A survey conducted by Demand Metric has shown that interactive content marketing helps businesses to get distinction in the market – especially among immediate competitors.

You cannot escape from the reality that online audiences has become more powerful than ever. Take an example of yours, before buying anything online, you start browsing several sites to ensure you make the best purchase.

If you own a business, what are you doing to attract customers to your product or services? Modern customers love to perform an online search before making a purchase and you need to provide them content to progress that journey.

Interactive content lays a firm foundation for generating and converting leads. Further, it makes your marketing plan livelier and engaging, so it yields magical outcomes for your business.

This blog further contains some critical reasons that stand for “why interactive content is the future of digital marketing?”

Attract and persuade buyers

Interactive content can arrest the attention of online audiences. A study by Demand Metric has unveiled that interactive content is highly effective in educating online buyers. Usually, it contains the most relevant and actionable information that encourages and compels users to buy products immediately.

I’m sure you include calls-to-action on your website to support your digital marketing strategy and attain higher conversions. Call-to-action buttons with a piece of interactive content persuade users to make quick decisions that are beneficial to your business.

(Source: blog.dmi.io)

Help boost business revenues

If you achieve success in attracting customers, then undoubtedly it will boost your sales and generate high revenues for your business. The success of any company is often measured in terms of customers they attract to increase their sales.

A study conducted by Aberdeen shows that companies have increased their conversion rates by more than five times by focusing on content marketing. Thus, you can say that interactive content influences the minds of buyers.

Encourage more engagement and sharing

Interactive content plays a vital role in maintaining the attention of online audiences when they come across your content in search of information. Thus, updating content frequently will allow you to target a wider audience.

Regular updates become all-the-more necessary because you cannot display outdated content all the time. For holding the attention of your followers, you have to change your web content over a course of time to (or “intending to”) feed them with the latest information.

Plus, interactive content ensures more reader engagement, which further leads to sharing of your content – especially on social platforms – in case they consider the content informative and useful.

Here are some excellent examples of interactive content:

• Infographics – One of the most trending styles to deliver information as it offers great engagement.

(Source: Quick Sprout)

• Podcasts – An effective way to deliver content through audio.

(Source: BBC)

• Videos – Help companies connect with online audiences in an interactive way.
• Webinars – Offer great interaction in the form of meeting, discussion, presentation and questions.
• Calculators – Another way to deliver content where you allow people to control parameters.

(Source: Content Marketing Institute)

Boost brand exposure and credibility

Well, it is all about competition, and you cannot take it casually. So you have to focus on getting maximum exposure for your brand along with growing credibility that comes with engagement.

By using interactive content, you can engage audiences to enhance your brand awareness. Once people start noticing your business, you will have a better chance of earning credibility.

I went through a case study of Mediavisioninteractive.com and found that they registered a tremendous jump of 300% in their leads because of improved brand exposure that they achieved through an interactive content marketing campaign.

(Source: Media Vision Interactive)

Complement web design

Interactive content is a significant contribution to a nicely-designed website. The look and feel of a website matters a lot when it comes to holding audiences. However, what actually engages them is interactive content distributed over the web pages.

Have a look at this screenshot from BuzzFeed that depicts how interactive content complements web design.

The screenshot is a simple quiz template that offers a funny way to interact, and it is something that a user can easily relate to.

(Source: BuzzFeed)

Here’s another good one where Deloitte is presenting the summary of a white paper in a unique style, which is enough to attract visitors. It also nicely complements the website at the same time.

(Source: Deloitte)

Generate traffic

Interactive content plays a critical role in enhancing the level of user experience (UX) on your site. If the content published on your site is useful and informative, then undoubtedly your site will receive an enormous amount of traffic. Receiving more traffic will enhance your online presence and make your business attractive and fruitful.

The annual growth in the traffic of unique sites is 7.8x higher for content marketing leaders than followers (19.7% vs. 2.5%).

Generating traffic to a website is always one of the primary goals of any digital marketing campaign, and it can be well achieved through interactive content.

(Source: SlideShare)

Peugeot interactive content case study

For getting a good idea to understand “why interactive content is the future” I would suggest you to go through the case study of well-renowned automotive manufacturer Peugeot.

What I like the most about this study is that Peugeot received 223K page views per publication, which is undoubtedly an overwhelming number to achieve. Further, they received 35 percent of the total visits through mobile; it means they cautiously worked and gave preference to capture mobile users as well.

(Source: Ceros)

Have a look at some more more case studies, and check how you can influence your content marketing campaigns.

Guest Author: Abhyudaya Tripathi is a digital marketing expert with over 8 years of experience, and presently he is an Associate Director at ResultFirst Organization. He is extremely passionate about making information seekers and quest lovers aware of digital marketing. His area of expertise covers everything that comes under the umbrella of digital marketing that is content marketing, search engine optimization, social media optimization, conversion rate optimization, web designing & development, and other related domains.

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