You must have noticed that many websites ask you to take part in quizzes or polls when you visit them. Why do they do it? This is a way to enhance their user enaggaement because people rarely spend much time on static content.
In fact, it’s said that interactive content is the future because of it’s high engagement ratio. For instance, one mediafly study found that interactive content has 52% more engagement rate than static content.
So, if you want to know how to leverage the benefits of inreatcive content and boost your business, follow our lead.
What is Interactive Content?
In short, intertcive content is a type of type that allows you to directly participate in the experience rather than passively consuming information. Some examples are visual assistants, mini-games, quizzes, online polls, chatbots, augmented reality, online calculators, interactive videos, etc.
The landing page of a website can also be interactive when it initiates interactions, such as requesting the user’s email address.
9 Examples of Interactive Content
1 Polls and Surveys
Everyone likes to give an opinion and it’s in our nature to feel the urge to express our thoughts. Why not use this tendency to facilitate more engagement from your users?
Online polls and surveys are popular among users who love to voice their opinions. Digital polls and surveys work as a great tool to acquire insights about buyer behavior which helps to adopt an efficient marketing strategy.
An example is asking for people’s opinions to choose a name for a new product. If you ask your buyers how you may improve a product using online surveys, it will help you find user pain points and earn consumer loyalty for your brand.
There should be ample scope to launch new polls or surveys on your business on short notice. To involve a larger audience with your brand you can launch online polls and surveys on social media such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc.
2 Interactive Landing Page
A landing page is the entry point of your website where you welcome your visitors and encourage them to take your services or buy your products. Your prospective clients reach there when they click hyperlinks that you made available in different SEO blogs, emails, or digital advertisements.
Now how can you make a landing page interactive? Well, there are many ways you can do that. Look at this sign-up window that pops up whenever a user reaches the landing page of a website.
Using this pop-up window, the website is trying to turn the visitor into a regular subscriber and also is trying to collect his email address for future use. If you use a similar popup window on your landing page you can force the user to interact either by providing the email address or clicking the cross button.
Try to make your landing page more interactive by providing different call-to-action elements Sign-Up Now, Book Your Order, etc.
3 Quizzes
You can easily grab someone’s attention by challenging him with quizzes. It works most of the time since we generally take pride in proving our depth of knowledge in quizzes. That is why websites frequently use quizzes to survive in the cutthroat competition of catching eyeballs on the internet.
Another valuable use of online quizzes is to get insights about the user’s buying preferences. They help generate new leads for your business by giving you an idea about changes in consumer behaviors. This information can facilitate you to make an offer to the client in the future that they cannot resist.
The optimum way to get the best out of your quizzes is to promote them on different social media platforms. If the quiz topic is interesting enough it will get you a high volume of traffic and will also increase brand awareness.
4 Interactive Infographics
Infographics are visual representations of any information and when you let the users interact with them they become interactive infographics. Clickable charts, diagrams, and maps are some examples of interactive infographics.
Imagine a map where the user can click on any city to know the statistics like population, literacy rate, transportation mode, etc. Users love infographics because it is more convenient when information comes in an illustrious and entertaining way.
In this infographic, the writer is asking the viewers to rate his presentation by clicking on any of the smileys.
5 Interactive Videos
We love to watch things with motions, so we easily get glued to videos whenever we come across one. Interactive videos are more powerful in capturing our attention since we actively decide the next course of the video. There are some areas of the video screen where you can click and initiate some actions in an interactive video.
An example of interactive videos can be 360-degree videos, where you can choose the angle of view. Sometimes a single fiction video can have multiple versions of how the story moves ahead and the viewer gets the chance to decide the next course of action.
You can also integrate texts with a video and make it interactive. For example, there can be some areas on the screen to show specific information related to the video content when a viewer clicks on them.
A survey of a video production company found that 37% of companies incorporate both interactive and 360-degree videos in their marketing strategies to get a better hold on the market.
6 Contests and Games
You can significantly increase user engagement to your website or app by embedding some gaming elements since things become more interesting if there is a contest and something to win.
You can reward your users with some points every time they purchase something from you and later they can use those points to get special offers from you.
You may use a leaderboard on your website to display the top ten clients with their amounts of points. It will bring competition among your buyers and encourage them to buy more.
You can understand how effective gamification can be to make your online business successful by the example of Duolingo- a language learning platform.
The interface of the Duolingo app is based on a gaming theme where you complete training of a level to reach the next one. Learners of a particular language are always in competition with each other and continuously getting promoted or demoted in the leaderboard.
No doubt many users will take the competition seriously and spend a lot more time on the platform to get to the top of the chart.
7 Augmented Reality
Nowadays many top brands are using Augmented Reality to expand their market share. Fortune Business Insights reports that the AR market is expected to reach a whopping $97.76 billion by 2028.
As you can see in the graph chart, the market size of AR can increase by almost 16 times in 2028, compared to that of 2021.
AR is the technology that mixes the virtual world with the real one to enhance the visual experiences of a user. A promising use of this technology in your online business can be to demonstrate how a product would look and fit the exact environment where the prospective buyer wants to use it.
Imagine that you sell dinner tables online and sometimes buyers become unsure whether it would look good in their dining space and avoid buying from you. With the help of AR, you could demonstrate exactly how your table would look in the consumer’s dining space.
A famous example of augmented reality is the Pokemon Go game where different imaginary characters show up on the map of the app and people reach the exact location in the real world to find that Pokemon character.
The image shows a gamer trying to catch Pikachu- a famous Pokemon Go character on a street in New York City.
When the gamer comes close to the precise location, the Pokemon characters appear on his screen and the gamer needs to throw balls and capture them.
8 Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
No matter how appealing and elaborative your website texts are people will always have some queries. Rather than sending emails or texts, many users will prefer a dialogue to get a piece of information.
It may not be an economically feasible idea to employ a big team of customer managers to have dialogues with the clients and provide them required information. The solutions for this problem are chatbots and virtual assistants.
These interactive contents can talk with the user almost like a human. You can this type of interactive content to answer all the commonly asked questions like the type of your services or the price of a product, etc.
You also use a virtual assistant on your website or app to help the users accomplish any specific task like booking an appointment or setting a reminder.
9 Interactive Calculators
Interactive calculators take data from the consumer and perform customized calculations for them. You integrate these calculators into your website or app to let the users make calculations like budgeting, tax calculation, product pricing, market forecasting, etc.
If you are selling floor tiles online and frequently your users want to know how much will it cost to buy tiles for a specific area. Instead of doing the tedious calculation again and again you can provide them an interactive calculator to let them do their math.
Calculating the area of a floor and the tiles’ specifications, the calculator can instantly tell a user how many tiles he would need to buy and how much he has to spend for them.
Interactive calculators help users to do specific computations like the total cost of a service, the monthly premium of an insurance policy, etc. Online businesses can earn authority and brand value if their interactive calculators are relevant and helpful to the users.
8 Benefits of Interactive Content
A study by the Content Marketing Institute found that 66% of marketing professionals think that they were able to attain higher user engagement by using interactive content. Do you wonder what is so magical about them? Here are some of the reasons for the effectiveness of interactive content.
1 Creates Personalization
Interactive content helps you to address the users directly and initiate a personal connection with them and when a consumer sees that a brand is addressing them directly they feel the intimacy too.
A common use of interactive content is providing customized services for consumers and this personal approach of service helps to create a loyal client base.
2 Helps Win the Social Media
A strong social media presence is a prerequisite for any successful online business and interactive content can help your business a lot to make your social media appearance interesting and engaging.
If a user scores high on a quiz or top a leaderboard of a mini-game, they are encouraged to share the good news on social media and it creates brand awareness for your business.
3 Enables Customization
Interactive content provides information for a user to provide them with customized solutions for their specific problems.
Moreover, you can use interactive content to understand buyers better and suggest a more befitting service.
If your online business sells hair fall solutions you can use interactive content to detect the type of hair of a user and instantly suggest the right product.
4 Brings Audience Insights
Every consumer interaction brings you some new information about consumer behavior and also you can learn about the pain points of a product straight from the horse’s mouth.
To make the most out of interactive content you should store and analyze all the interaction data using a database management system.
Only after a thorough analysis of the user data you know how to improve your product or services and this helps you add value to your brand reputation.
5 Helps You Set the Right Goals
When you know in which direction the market is moving and what the consumer is thinking, it becomes easy for you to set goals for your business.
The correct use of interactive content can let you know about any slight change in consumer behavior right when it is happening.
If an online survey tells you that more people now prefer a dark-colored floor for their house, you should change your production plan to cash in on this information.
6 Creates Direct Connection
When a business has a direct connection with its buyer it can sense every little change in the behavior of the consumers. Only buyers can tell you what they like to buy a product when they want to buy it, and more importantly, why they may not buy it.
All the interactive content helps you establish and maintain a direct connection with the buyer and keeps your business safe from any unusual market behavior.
7 Promotes Credibility & Brand Value
Your online business can become credible only if you can serve your clients with the products and services that please them the most.
Interactive content can give you the right knowledge about consumer behavior and thus help you gain credibility when you use those insights to produce the products buyers need the most.
When the users of your website and app share their achievements in different contests and games on your website, it helps your business earn brand value.
Moreover, your business can become an authority in the industry by regularly posting valuable blogs, podcasts, infographics, and quizzes.
8 Increases Conversions
Smart interactive content generates leads for your business which can help you find new buyers even when the market is experiencing a downturn.
Interactive content creates a sales-friendly atmosphere on a web page and prompts a buyer to make a purchase. The intuitive interface of interactive content helps increase the conversion ratio of your website.
How to Make Your Interactive Content More Effective
1 Incorporate them in Your Marketing Strategy:
Make sure your interactive content is fully integrated into your overall marketing plan. Make use of it to engage potential leads, create brand awareness, and reinforce your larger marketing objectives.
2 Promote them to Increase Reach
You may need to promote your interactive content like quizzes and online polls to utilize them properly, especially in the initial phase. Emails, social media campaigns, paid advertisements- use whichever can make your interactive content popular.
3 Use the Data
Every day your interactive content brings a bulk of data that you need to process and analyze to get the recent market trends. You should have a smart database management system to store and retrieve the data proficiently.
4 Keep them Simple
Remember that users roam the internet with a little patience and attention span. If you make the functionalities or the interface of the interactive content difficult to understand they may just ignore it, no matter how useful it may be.
5 Make it Intuitive
The design of interactive content must not be very different from the industry standard. A user should know how to proceed right after they come upon an interface element.
6 Keep Room for Exploration
You can ensure longer attention of the users if there are some hidden surprises for them. Remember that opportunities for exploration can keep a user spending more time with interactive content.
7 Apply Human-Centric Design Approach
When designers design a solution to solve a real problem of real people, it is called Human-Centric Designing. Your interactive content should address a specific problem of the buyer to create a sense of relevance in the users.
Final Remarks
Ensuring growth for an online business may not be that difficult if you know how to integrate interactive content into your websites and apps. We hope this article will help you promote your online business using the magic of interactive content.
