If you’ve ever taken a “What should my next job be?” quiz, done an online assessment to figure out which Friends character you resemble most, or used a calculator to determine the monthly mortgage on your dream home, you’re already familiar with interactive content.
Interactive content stimulates engagement and evokes a reaction from the end user by using responsive digital media to create a two-way conversation with your brand. Different types of interactive content include animated infographics, assessments, calculators, contests, games, live chats, polls, surveys, and quizzes, plus some assets that aren’t usually in this category but can be upgraded with interactivity such as videos, timelines, white papers, and e-books.
Marketers using these types of content are creating interactive lead capture tools that are highly engaging, offering a ton of value to end users and drastically increasing ROI. To put it simply, they are using interactive content for lead generation to boost results.
By breaking the mold of traditional form fills for content downloads, marketers are seeking creative ways to gather information about prospects’ pains, challenges, goals, and thought processes to vastly improve lead scoring, buyer persona alignment, prospect qualification, and buyer’s journey strategy.
According to a survey of 20,000 marketers by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) on interactive content:
From calculators to interactive infographics to taking quizzes, only interactive content will turn a website visitor into a website user by allowing them to answer questions, make choices, and explore scenarios. Interactive content enables organizations to educate their audiences by inviting them to participate in an experience—a key to securing engagement and encouraging folks to come back for more.
To put it plainly, “interactive content lets users personalize and participate in it.”
One of the reasons interactive content is so powerful: the tailored result it provides to end users. By actively participating, users are given specific results in real time that address their problems, challenges, or ideas. These results can range anywhere from how to lower monthly payments on a mortgage to how to utilize your artistic side in your future career to comparing insurance policies based on your personal needs.
It all comes down to those conversion rates—and interactive content will drastically improve conversion rates across your website. According to the same CMI survey mentioned above:
Interactive content is more appealing than static content in that it has the ability to attract and educate folks who might become future buyers. In addition, interactive content:
By engaging with customers and starting conversations, interactive content helps pinpoint the exact challenges and objectives of customers, thus assisting organizations with how to best present the products and solutions to meet a buyer’s needs.
It provides better data metrics, allowing organizations to quickly and easily identify which leads are ready for conversion and which require more nurturing.
Interactive content provides immediate value with personalized experiences and clients who are willing to divulge even more information, thus completely removing the friction associated with lead forms.
Interactive content works for many of the same reasons that social media is so popular. People love to share their opinion, have fun, compare, compete, and test themselves.
As the landscape of traditional content marketing becomes increasingly crowded and the preferences of buyers change as technology evolves, it’s no longer OK to simply inform buyers. It’s imperative to connect with them on an emotional level by providing content that engages rather than serves out information on a one-way street—and that is exactly why interactive marketing is so effective.
Just look at some of these statistics:
The top four most effective types of interactive content are assessments, calculators, contests, and quizzes.
Assessments are great evaluation tools that usually include questions about a particular topic, behavior, or a simple test of knowledge on a particular subject. Here at SmartBug, we’ve developed our own interactive assessment to help marketers evaluate how their marketing strategy stacks up. Assessments are a fantastic way to acquire new leads and increase your email database list.
And if you really want to create forms, surveys, and quizzes that people enjoy answering, ensure you’re leveraging a tool like Typeform. By staying focused on helping customers garner more thoughtful responses and higher completion rates, they take your assessments to the next level. Bonus? They are free to get started.
Check out a few examples of our assessments:
You’d be hard-pressed to find someone not interested in money—which may be why online calculators are so popular. From mortgages to taxes to insurance to student loan debt payoff and everything in between, calculators are an extremely helpful and succinct way to show your prospects what they’ll gain by using your product or service. Check out HubSpot’s ROI calculator to see an example of what folks can expect to receive based on their initial investment.
Check out one of our top performing calculators:
Contests have been around since before the dawn of the internet and continue to be a go-to tactic of many marketers for many reasons. Prize-driven contests incentivize folks to participate, and they’re a great way to increase brand awareness and social engagement, growing the size of your email lists exponentially.
Various types of contests include:
Bonus Tip: Want to really up the ante on your contests? Give them a punch with video. There is no one who makes it easier for marketers and sales teams to make a splash with video quite like Vidyard. The truth is that although email is far from dead, it can be boring. Vidyard makes it easy to create and send videos with just a few clicks that can really take your interactive content campaigns to the next level.
If you’ve ever had a terribly long commute or a particularly dull day, you may have run across an online quiz or two that helped you pass the time. Interactive quizzes are a great way to collect an immense amount of information and convert prospects into leads.
Much more entertaining than a web form, quizzes offer interactive, personalized, and relevant content that builds strong relationships with prospects and gives them something of value before you ever ask for anything in return.
One type of quiz is the “product recommender” that asks a bunch of questions and, based on the user’s replies, makes a product recommendation that will fulfill that user’s needs.
If you aren’t currently utilizing interactive content, you most definitely are engaging in traditional content marketing and probably have a team member adept at developing blogs and other forms of one-way content. So you may be asking yourself, is it worth it?
If cutting through the noise of all the content that is already out there, jumping ahead of your competition, and engaging on a personal level with your prospects are listed anywhere on your marketing goals for 2022, then we’d say yes, it’s absolutely worth the investment.
This post was published in 2019 and has been updated since.