Interactive content is not a recent trend. Many brands and businesses, on the other hand, have just recently realized the value it may provide to their entire messaging, awareness, conversions, and other aspects.
So, are you looking for a technique to increase the number of visitors who visit your website?
Your best bet might be interactive material. Here’s how to add it to your website and get the results that you’re looking for.
What Does ‘Interactive Content’ Mean?
Before you get started with interactive content, you’ll need to consider what that means for your site. What does it mean to add interactive content to your site?
When you create interactive content, it’s something that the user will be immersed in fully. That means they’ll be active in using the content, the whole time that they’re on your page. There are so many ways that you can make the process interactive, too.
For example, you can write a blog on a topic, and that’s going to be useful content. The reader will be able to get a lot from it if its well written. However, if you really want to immerse them in the topic that you’re writing about, you can add in interactive elements. That will get them more involved and interested in what you have to say.
What Counts As Interactive Content?
So, if you’re going to use interactive content, what makes it different to the regular content that you create on your site? It’s all about getting the user involved, so they have a part in creating the content, or getting the results that they need from your content.
Rather than just having them read a post or blog, you’ll have the reader take part in the process. It doesn’t have to be a large part of the content, a small interactive element can make all the difference. If you’re starting out small, then you could add clickables to the content, to reveal information underneath them. That counts as interactive content, and is a start at engaging users.
You can then expand into more interactive options. Some of the most common things you’ll see online right now are quizzes. These ask the customer to answer a few questions to get a result. That’s useful both to you and the customer, as you’ll see below.
Other examples of interactive content can be cost calculators, interactive ebooks, webinars, and more. It’s any content that asks the user to interact with it, beyond simply reading the words on the page.
Why Use Interactive Content?
You’ll have seen interactive content popping up all over the internet in the last few years, and not even realized it. Many site owners are seeing just how useful it is to them, as it brings a lot more engagement overall.
What you may not have considered is that interactive content will actually bring you more data on your audience, and that’s something that you’ll want to put to good use. That includes data such as click through rate, sessions viewed, preferences, and so on. Of course, you can also find out a wealth of useful info from the responses they give you in the content.
Once you have that data, you can use it to shape your future content and marketing efforts. The more you have, the more you can identify what it is that the customer wants from you.
Related: Quick Ways To Increase Conversions Through Your Website
How Your Audience Will Benefit
You’ll benefit from using interactive content, but what about your audience? When creating any content, you want it to be useful and engaging to them. If you manage this, then you’ll be offering them the best experience and they’re more likely to come back.
Interactive content is a benefit to them, as they can actually get more from it. With certain types of content, they’ll be able to solve problems that they have with it. For example, let’s say you’re selling headphones. You want your customer to be able to buy the right headphones for them, and that can be hard as you have so many options.
The solution is to create a short quiz on your site, to get an idea of what the customer wants. You can ask them a few questions, such as whether they want over or in ear headphones, their price range, and whether they want wired or wireless models. With that data, you can then show them all the models they sell that suit them.
In this example, the customer benefits as they save time on searching for the right headphones, as you’ve taken all the legwork out of it. For you, you now have data on what that customer prefers, and that will shape your future decisions.
1. Start with your target market
No matter what you do when it comes to your content marketing strategy, you want to look at your target audience first. You should already have some idea of who your target market is, as you’ll have done research before creating your products. You can put this to good use as you decide how you’re going to create that interactive content for them.
What would they like? What is their vision of good content? Start by creating a persona which incorporates elements of your target audience’s personality and behavior. Then strategize which type of interactive content would work well for that persona and by default, your target audience. You should be able to pick out the right kind of content for them, and craft it to make it more likely that they’ll interact with it.
2. Be authentic, unique and useful
Interactive content needs to be unique, for one. Something that differentiates your website from all of the others. Maybe it would be an interesting calculator, a new quiz or something similar. While the format can resemble other popular and well-used format, the content itself needs to offer something fresh and new on the market.
Next, your interactive content needs to stay true to your brand and company. Just imagine if a financial advisor website had a quirky personality quiz – would it suit their brand? Most likely not. It wouldn’t draw the right kind of attention or drive the necessary results. However, a calculator might work or even a quiz, but related to finances. This is the point, the content needs to follow the familiar brand voice.
Finally, no content is any good without proper usefulness. You can have as many clickables, quizzes and spinning wheels but if none of those provide use for your readers, you won’t get much out of them. Before you make any decisions related to your content ask yourself why would anyone spend time doing that. If the answer is ‘fun’, you are on a wrong track.
3. Create a good structure
Formatting needs to be done for the interactive content as well. It provides your readers and visitors with an opportunity to scan your content in order to decide whether anything in there is useful enough for them.
So, you should use all of the formatting options:
- Headings
- Subheadings
- Bullet points
- Bold or italic text
- Plenty of white space
- Short paragraphs
You should also be aware of incorporating the right UX design to make everything flow smoothly. This makes it easier for the user to read through the content, and make the decision to interact with it in the first place.
4. Pick a format that suits your audience
There are numerous formats for content and interactive content alike. You need to make sure that you know what your audience is looking for and then you need to pick a format that would provide both use and entertainment for them.
For content you can choose from:
- Blog posts
- Short news
- Social media comments and stories
- Feature articles
- Research/case studies
And multimedia formats like:
- Images
- Videos
- Infographics
- Gifs
- Audio
- Animation
- Gamification content
- Calculators, sliders etc.
5. Get some feedback
Before you get the chance to make these options live on your website, consult some other people on your choices. For one, ask within your company, staff and so on. They are most likely a part of your target audience – at least some of them could be – and they might give you some good feedback on what is great and what could be improved. You can also select a few brand advocates or loyal customers and let them test it.
6. Adjust content to the customer’s location in the funnel
One of the best ways to use interactive content is to match content to users, depending on where they are in the funnel. Customers at different stages are going to need different things from you, and so you can ensure you’re giving them the best content at every stage.
For example, for those at the top of the funnel, you can create content that’s designed to teach the customer about what you can do for them. That’s going to be content like webinars, interactive ebooks, quizzes, and so on. These can all teach the customer about what you can offer to them.
For those in the middle of the funnel, you’ll want to offer content that helps them evaluate you as a business, and decide if they want to buy from you. For these customers, that’s going to be content like product recommendations and cost calculators, so they can work out if you’re the best people to buy from. As this is done in a much more engaging way than regular recommendations and posts, it can move that customer down the funnel.
Then, there’s the customers at the bottom of the funnel. You’re looking to help them make the final decision to buy from you, so you want content that helps nudge them over the finishing line. When it comes to interactive content, that can be things like ROI and savings calculators.
7. Add quizzes and surveys to your site
Quizzes and surveys are some of the most well-known ways to introduce interactive content to your audience. Not only are they fun and engaging for your customers, but they are also amazing for gathering data and providing more targeted messaging.
You could have a personality quiz on your site but for the best effect, instead of regular results, post other content, products or services from your site that would match that person’s answers. This way, they get a great offer based on their preferences and you get a possible purchase. It’s even better if you add a discount to that mix as well or something free like a short ebook or white paper.
Surveys, on the other hand, are there mostly for you, but you could make them fun and engaging by adding a gift or a discount at the beginning or the end of it. This way, you get the data, and the audience feels like they’ve helped out – and they’ve earned a reward as well.
8. Add search, report or test functions
This is another way to add interactive content but this one is more useful than fun or engaging. For instance, the search option within the text is supposed to give your readers an opportunity to expand on the subject matter without being forced to. Report or test functions could be there to test something you’ve discussed in your content – for example, a quick test of internet speeds or a piece of software, depending on what your website is about.
9. Involve the readers with clickable options
Clicking is a form of interacting. However, most regular content doesn’t require much clicking at all. Interactive content that involves clickable options, does. Here is how it could work: an image with a slider which users can move to see the before and after, an animation that requires clicking for it to work etc. Anything that users can click on is useful because it involves them and keeps them on the page for longer.
10. Encourage feedback from readers
After having interactive content on your site for a while, start asking for feedback from your readers. This way, you’ll get a hands-on info on whether it works well or not. You can also use some common metrics to measure the success of your content.
11. Include social sharing
Social sharing is great because it shows your content to more people, and all you need to do is offer the ability to share for this to happen. Some interactive content is very shareable and might give you a wider reach. For example, you can add quizzes to your page, and ask the user to share it with others. That way they can compare the answers they get with others, and you’ll get more data too.
Place social sharing buttons on the top or the bottom of your pages. Most website building tools will have widgets that allow you to do this, and make it very simple to do so. You can also use user-generated content on your site or social pages to encourage engagement. This is a form of social proof, much like customer reviews, and you can get a lot more from your audience by using it.
12. Add internal links
Internal links are a great way to introduce more of your content to your readers. When you link several related pages together, it helps the audience find more info on the topic that they’re interested in. As well as this, it’s actually something that’s very important for SEO right now. Search engines will consider the usability of your site when ranking you, and when you’re putting several related pages together, it’s a good sign to them.
However, figure out a better way than just linking pieces of your text to the content – possibly an image, a video or a design option could lead your readers to other places on your site.Using more visually appealing ways to link those pages will encourage readers to click around, and stay on the page for longer, too.
13. Take advantage of social media
As a business, you should already be on social media as that helps push your branding as a whole. If you are using social media tools, you’ll see there’s so many options to create interactivity in your posts. Because of this, you can create interactive content directly through your social media.
At the most basic level, interactivity can be as simple as asking readers to ‘like’ a post if they resonate with it. You can take this further, for example running competitions that give them a chance of winning a prize if they interact. The more they interact with the post, the more chances they have of winning. That can include liking the post, commenting on it, or sharing it with others.
Interactive content is the future of engaging the visitors. Audiences don’t want to just be the silent observers, but active users of your content. This also gives them an opportunity to get more usefulness out of it. Hopefully, these tips will help.
