Three examples of interactive content marketing that create new, diverse offerings for brands.
Interactive content was one of the top trends or predictions for content marketing this year made by many experts. According to Demand Gen 2015 Content Preferences Survey, 91 percent of buyers said they prefer on-demand interactive and visual content. Many brands have listened – 73 percent are focusing on more engaging content and 52 percent also are prioritizing visual content, as noted in the Content Marketing Institute 2016 B2C Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends.
With most content, the readers or viewers simply consume the exact same information as everyone else. But if the content changes based on input from the reader, it falls into the category of interactive. Common examples include quizzes, interactive infographics, calculators and interactive white papers, configurators, contests and e-books.
Creating interactive content that is just a bunch of bells and whistles to be trendy won’t build trust in your brand. Successful interactive content provides information relevant to the brands that help users solve their specific problems and challenges. You don’t want the readers to just think “that was cool” and move on to another site.
So what can you do? Here are three examples of effective interactive content:
DDI Interactive Road Map
Type of Interactive Content: Interactive Infographic with embedded quizzes
Why it’s Effective: Since you choose which stats and info to reveal, this potentially very busy infographic is streamlined and personalized. Two interactive quizzes embedded in the infographic help dispel common myths and make readers think. Step 7 of the (figurative) road to success is especially powerful because readers can toggle between what a successful business looks like compared to an unsuccessful organization.
Prudential: I’ll Do It Later
Type of Content: Website with quizzes and calculators
Why it Works: Most retirement content marketing focuses on how much money you need, but this Prudential site tackles one of the chief reasons why people don’t save – procrastination.
The site includes an interactive survey so you can see where you stack up against others in terms of procrastinating writing a wedding speech, a procrastination personality test and a procrastination calculator that estimates how many years you have spent procrastinating based on the average of yep hours a day. The tool takes it up a notch by then showing all of things you could have accomplished if you hadn’t procrastinated, such as painted the Sistine Chapel 0.83 times.
At the very end the website ties it back into retirement with the cost of waiting calculator. Simply put, the site is personal, powerful and thought provoking in a way that wouldn’t be possible without the interactivity.
Diet Coke #ITSMINE Contest
Type of Content: Contest
Why it Works: Most everyone has a camera and likes to post pictures on social media. Posting pictures of yourself with one of the fancy and colorful Diet Coke bottles requires just a few minutes of time, which meets the first criteria of a good contest – easy for people to do. The prize is tailored to the target audience of Diet Coke (typically women) with a $10,000 new wardrobe handpicked by a stylist.
Most important, the contest result – thousands and thousands of images of people with new cool-looking Diet Coke bottles – buys more exposure than $10,000 worth of advertising would stretch.
Customer engagement + positive brand exposure = successful contest.
Finally, here is engagement by the numbers, according to the Demand Gen 2015 Content Preferences Survey.
The numbers:
- 91: percentage of buyers who prefer on-demand interactive and visual content
- 67: percentage of buyers who rely on content to research more than they did a year ago
- 74: percentage of buyers who said they have less time to view content than a year ago
- 60: percentage of buyers who occasionally or frequently access content from a tablet (up from 37 percent the previous year)
- 47: percentage of millennials who use tools/calculators/assessments compared with 32 percent of buyers over 40 years old
