6 Essential Types of Interactive Marketing and Tips to Get Started

With attention spans on the decline and brands competing to be noticed, are your digital assets garnering enough eyeballs? In this article, we discuss:

• The benefits of using interactive content
• Six types of interactive marketing that should be part of your martech stack
• The foundational principle behind interactive or event-based marketing
   

With content volumes witnessing a steady and exponential rise, marketers must work harder to capture customer attention. For example, 70% of B2B marketers are creating more content Opens a new window than they did a year ago. This means that marketing content of all types are targeted at your audience from every direction.

To cut through the clutter and ensure that your message resonates with the target audience, it’s imperative to make content more engaging. One strategy to achieve this is implementing interactive marketing.

Learn more: How to Measure Your Interactive Content Marketing EffortsOpens a new window

3 Benefits of Incorporating Interactive Content in your Marketing Strategy

We encounter digital assets on a multitude of platforms, all competing for our attention. Interactive content helps establish engagement and creates a relationship between you and your customer, helping you get your message across. The top benefits of implementing interactive content include:

1. Engagement uptick
 

Customers are more likely to stay focused on interactive content than static digital assets, given its appeal and inherent responsiveness.

2. Insights generation
 

Customer behavior data with interactive content can give you valuable insights into which marketing strategies are working best, products finding the most traction among the audience, and which areas require more effort.

3. Loyalty assurance
 

With so many brands competing in the same marketplace/industry, interactive content offers a way to display empathy and show the audience that a brand genuinely cares about their requirements.

Together, these elements help in increasing a customer’s lifetime value, ensuring they keep returning to your brand and continue to engage with you even in the future.

Learn more: Top Four Tools for Crafting Interactive ContentOpens a new window

6 Types of Interactive Marketing Content that You Need to Adopt

While there are no limits when it comes to making your content more meaningful, engaging, and customer-centric, interactive content has evolved significantly over the last decade. From early-digital-era quizzes and infographics, we have come a long way, with AR/VR now taking over. Here are six types of interactive marketing Opens a new window to look at, as you start reimagining and realigning your content for the new-age customer.

1. Start a two-way communication line with quizzes
 

This is probably the most lasting type of interactive content that has consistently worked for marketers; in 2014, Buzzfeed launched a quiz called “Which City Should You Actually Live in,” making online quizzes a prominent part of any marketing strategy.

There are several options if you’re looking to publish quizzes, including polls on Instagram Stories, Twitter surveys, and of course, quizzes on your website. If you’re a B2B marketer, the quiz format can translate into online assessments that inform the customer while pushing your product.

2. Share data on-demand, without complex tables
 

Another old-school marketing technique is “the calculator”, that allows customers to share their unique information and immediately generate data that can be applied in their daily lives.

If your industry involves calculations in any format — for example cloud migration costs in B2B or home insurance in B2C — calculators are the way to go. Work with your website development team to identify the best place for your calculator, and continuously update the feature for maximum response.

3. Break up long-form via interactive storytelling
 

Interactive storytelling Opens a new window is among the newest trends in long-form, breaking up a 1000+ word piece into digestible chunks. Sections are interspersed with visuals such as GIFs, clickable content, social media embeds, etc. If you are using blogs as a key marketing element, interactive storytelling should definitely be on your radar.

Apply interactive storytelling best practices across all your long-form content, ensuring the customer continues to read until the end.

4. Visually represent information through futuristic infographics
 

Graphs and charts aren’t new to your marketing toolkit, but advancements in data visualization have given this type of interactive marketing a new spin. You can now let your customers “play with” the different UI elements on the infographic, driving a different visual each time.

Take a look at this incredible visualization by Harvard Business Review on mobile widget development Opens a new window across the world. Taking inspiration from instances like this, you can find new ways to represent product information, therefore better engaging customers.

5. Enrich your brand’s identity with interactive documents
 

Corporate documents are a must-have for any brand, but they usually become very long and complicated. To make your documents and reports more compelling, an interactive strategy is essential.

You can choose to segment a long PDF into scrollable slides. Or, a report can be showcased in a tabular format so that the customer can choose only the tabs relevant to them.

6. Make your emailers interactive and graphics-focused
 

Emails are part of every marketer’s strategy, given its impressive ROI levels; it is estimated that for every USD 1 you spend, brings in USD 38 in value addOpens a new window ! To reinforce its impact, email content should be made more appealing, visually rich, and interactive. For instance, you can add surveys, clickable links, and even interactive storytelling-based newsletters to your marketing emails.

Learn more: 5 Storytelling Ideas for the Age of Interactive MarketingOpens a new window

Understanding the Basics of Interactive Marketing and the Way Forward

At its core, interactive marketing is based on a simple idea: customers do not want to be passive consumers of content. They are eager to actively contribute to their CX journey, controlling pivotal elements and guiding the pathway. That is why these types of interactive marketing are also called event-based marketing — where the customer triggers an event and the content responds accordingly.

If you can recreate this to-and-fro communication line in any marketing asset (emails, corporate collaterals, websites, social media, etc.) your engagement levels will witness a measurable spike. In the long term, this will ensure greater brand recall from your customers.

Even though marketers have implemented interactive content principles for many years now, the trend is only growing. Globally, interactive marketing is expected to expand at a 6% CAGR in the next seven yearsOpens a new window . By taking stock of your asset library and adding interactive elements wherever possible, you can be part of this meteoric growth, helping your brands stand out in a competitive landscape.

What are the types of interactive marketing you plan on adopting? Tell us on LinkedInOpens a new window , FacebookOpens a new window , or TwitterOpens a new window .