How to Take Your Content to the Next Level With Interactive Content

In college, I had a class that really helped me develop a greater understanding of content. We studied how content affects individuals differently and evaluated how and why people engage more with varying types of content. One area of focus was interactive content.

Interactive content can come in different forms, but ultimately it’s goal is to engage the cognitive and emotional human states. Some examples of interactive content are:

• Charts
• Quizzes/Surveys
• Web Design
• Online gaming
• Calculators
• Whitepapers
• eBooks

The goal of all content is to get people to engage, which is why companies even bother to create it.

However, now that content marketing is no longer a new phenomenon, there are whitepapers and ebooks everywhere you look. When too many companies are offering the same info, you have to give people a reason to choose your business as a resource. To offer your audience something truly valuable, you have to go a step beyond what everyone else in your industry is offering.

There are unique benefits to interactive content, and good reasons why it’s the next big thing.

Inbound Marketing Meets Interactive Content

One of our qualifiers for potential clients at Tribute Media is their capacity to trust us. Now, some people just don’t have that capacity. It happens. However, we understand that we need to earn their trust. And we can do that by providing valuable tools for them to utilize, even before they are a client. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter that we get paid (although that’s a perk)- it matters that we helped someone get closer to achieving their goals.

Some of that we do for free.

Wait… did we really just say that? Yes. Yes, we did.

We do this through our weekly Tuesday Tips, our Email Marketing eBook, offering Corey’s book “Do It Right: A CEO’s Guide to Web Strategy,” and we do it through our Assessment (which happens to be a great piece of interactive content).

Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute had an excellent quote regarding content:

"Our job, as marketers, is not to create more content. It has never been about that. It’s about creating the minimum amount of content with the maximum amount of behavior change in our customers.”

How We’ve Utilized Online Surveys

At Tribute Media, we’ve found that using surveys is one of the best ways to encourage engagement, which is one of the first steps to behavior change. Surveys are also measurable, which is especially convenient.

This is where interactive content comes in. Interactive content tailors itself to the user based on user inputs, which makes it especially beneficial in Inbound Marketing. With interactive content, you can:

1. Create personalized content, in the form of answers to their questions, for each user.
2. Gather information organically (without being creepy about it).
3. Easily gather enough information to create personas.

We use this in our Web Marketing Self-Assessment, which is a 15 question interactive survey. We take a look at five aspects of the web marketing strategy puzzle:

1) Your website

2) Search engine optimization

3) Social media

4) Email marketing

5) Paid search (PPC) and digital advertising

Once the user answers the 15 questions, they receive a score and helpful tips, tailored to them, based on their answer to each question. It’s completely customized and provides helpful answers instantly.

This is the kind of content people want. Everyone is tired of seeing and receiving generic content. They want answers to their questions.

Interactive content does just that and more. Try it out!