All Work and No Play: How Interactive Content Can Benefit Your Business

If you’ve been active on the Internet in the past five years, you’ve probably done a Buzzfeed quiz or two. In fact, it’s become so ubiquitous that “I did a Buzzfeed quiz on it…” has become a bit of a cliché. But it’s become that way for a reason. Interactive content is dang effective.

In the digital marketing world, staying unique and ahead of the game is a main objective. But when everyone else is making and putting out content, how can you make something that stands out in that sea of words and images?

More and more the answer is what places like Buzzfeed have known for years: interactive content.

It has an innate ability to engage the end-user and keep them on your page. The average person has an attention span of about eight seconds when it comes to browsing the web, so you have to grab the user in essentially the blink of an eye.

We know this because if your page doesn’t look good or if it loads too slowly, you’re going to see major page bounceback. But now interactive content has brought a new dimension to how to engage and keep your visitors.

“I’m Here. Now What?”

Think about this: you’ve managed to get someone to click on your site off of Google, or however they found you, and they’re immediately presented with a delightful little game or story for to go through and enjoy, all the while it gets them more invested in you and your company.

Imagine you’re a cheesecake shop and you want to get people interested in your product. Maybe you could make some fanciful story to click through using colourful art about how your shop came to be or how the cakes are made. If the art is good enough, you might even be able to get a mascot out of it. Something cute and fun that looks good and endears you and your product to the end-user. And because it was interactive, it will keep people on your page longer.

And this is just one of many ways to interact with your end-user.

Where’s Your Customer in Their Journey?

The three basic stages of your sales funnel are Awareness, Evaluation, and Decision Making, and different content works for different stages:

• Awareness: Polls, quizzes, and knowledge tests are some of the best ways to grab people in this stage
• Evaluation: Benchmark assessments are effective at helping people in this stage.
• Decision Making: Go for a calculator, gallery, survey, or product picker. Make it easy for them to make a purchase with you.

Most of these are relatively easy to produce too, though you’ll want to consider your budget before going too crazy with your interactive content and paying a monthly subscription fee.

If you’ve got a micro-budget, or just don’t need anything fancy, HubSpot has a form generation software that can easily be used to make quizzes absolutely for free. Playbuzz is also free along with Google Forms. All of these could be a great way to engage the end-user and get them to stay on your page. Though it all depends on what the user needs and wants

These same tools are also great for getting information from your end-user without making them feel uncomfortable.

An Unfortunate Paradox

The more you need a user’s info, the less they’ll want to give it to you. A quiz or poll can avoid this issue by bringing the inherent value of content and entertainment together to work for you.

Your user gets to enjoy themselves and you get to learn about them more so you can personalize their experience further.

Your interactive content doesn’t have to be all quizzes and polls. You can further engage the end-user with something like interactive emails with a minigame. Email is such a personal way to reach out to people due to its one-to-one nature. It can have a serious impact.

Stand Out with Something Different

Interactive content is a versatile, effective option that can be applicable in every part of the sales funnel. It’s a form of content that is inherently more unique than classic, written content simply because everyone makes content, but not everyone makes interactive content.

So, for right now at least, choosing to make a relevant piece of interactive content will already put you above some of your competitors.

It gives you a way to really engage your users while collecting valuable data on them without being invasive.

So how can you use this exciting new form of content to help your company succeed?

Let us know what’s worked for you, we love to hear from you!