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5 Interactive Content Hacks to grow your audience by 100%

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Interactive content is an attention seeker & has evolved as a crucial form of content marketing. Explore to know how it can help in driving phenomenal growth

‘Interactive Content’ is a widely applied and consumed form of content that is less popular among the audience consuming it. 81% of marketers believe that interactive content grabs the attention of readers.

You can’t avoid advertising; most of us are subject to many ads on social media and websites every day. But these days, it’s not enough to simply offer great content. You also need to grow your audience base for that content.

A huge portion of individuals believes that businesses that consistently create content are interested in building good relationships with old as well as new audiences.

Regardless of Whether you’re building a blog audience or a Social Media fan base, the technique is basically the same. What’s more, it takes similar techniques to build an audience of 10,000 people that it takes to build an audience often.

One of the effective techniques is interactive content. Maureen Kent and Michael Kent were the first researchers to come up with a concept of the dialogue theory, which says that in order to grow and build a loyal community, you should establish two-way communication.

Interactive content is a highly effective approach to break through the noise and offer real value, advice, and education while at the same time allowing the user to directly engage with that content.

In the world of internet marketing, if you want to expand your audience base and build customer loyalty and achieve customer retention, you must think content.

Once you recognize that your audience is an irreplaceable asset, you’ll be aware of the content that you produce for them.

Let’s dive in to see the Interactive content hacks that will help you in expanding your audience base.

Use interactive content to educate your audience

Statistics states that 93% of marketers agreed that interactive content is very effective at educating buyers. One of the empowering parts of interactive content development is breaking away from a linear narrative. In order to do this effectively, you have to design a clear information architecture, that is, navigation and structural framework that assists users in finding their way around. For example, on a typical website, your navigation menus serve as the foundation for how your web content is composed and consumed.

Some of the key pieces of architecture to consider include:

  •  A global navigation menu that lets individuals jump between topics
  • On-screen prompts that show which components are clickable or hoverable
  • Links between sections or pages within a piece of content 
  • Calls-to-action that tell visitors where to go or what to do next once they finish your story

Fill gaps in your content marketing campaign

We discussed about some of the methods in which you can obtain leads and educate buyers with interactive content, however, each piece doesn’t have to be a stand-alone experience. Interactive content can fit into every aspect of your marketing landscape. According to the Content Marketing Institute, a leading marketing institute in the United States, “Interactive content enables you to deliver engaging, educational, differentiated content experiences.” Here are some examples:

  • Paid Media: Interactive Call-to-Actions (CTAs) often drive higher click through rates and conversions than static CTAs because they inspire the viewers to engage
  • Blog: Embed quizzes with lead forms directly into your blog to collect leads from what otherwise would have been ungated, awareness content
  • Events: There are numerous ways you can integrate interactive content into events. You can launch interactive quizzes to collect contact info for leads during the event or send along pre-event surveys to give visitors a taste of what you’ll be offering once they arrive. With the information you collect from their interactive inputs, you can even personalize the content particularly for them
  • Social Media: Social media is probably one of the best mediums for interactive content because the audience is primed to engage by sharing, liking, and interacting with others’ content. Promoting your interactive content on social media is a must-do method.
  • Email: Visual and interactive email content is still rather new, so businesses that use it can easily stand out from the competition and achieve better click rates

Create your interactive content as serial contents

An effective way to expand and create a loyal audience base out of a virtual stranger is to create serial content, the typical Part 1, Part 2, etc., posts that bloggers often publish. The capability to break the content down into bite-sized morsels and parse them out over a longer period of time, when utilized correctly, is a magnificent method to keep the reader engaged and hanging on.

The initial step to unpacking the concept of serial content is to separate it from a content series. Think of a series as a topic about which multiple posts are made, while serial content portrays a narrative that ties each installment together. Serial content aims to capture the attention of the reader and keep them portrayed with each update.

Seeing content as a story makes it inherently more engaging. The narrative quality of this type of content, when utilized correctly, will bring and hold the audience much more effectively than basic, bland content offering an optimistic CTA at the conclusion.

Discover new ways to display your interactive content

Take a look at your content for how it can be displayed in different manners. Perhaps you have 5 main points that you need to highlight in an intriguing layout or a set of steps that you can visually stack to appear like a staircase or a ladder. Surf around the internet to get some inspiration for how you can break down your content, it all comes down to creativity!

For inspiration, take a look at The Geek’s Guide to London or Hover image for Nike. Instead of showing the contents of the guide in a simple grid or list layout, the actual locations are utilized visually to serve a dual purpose: a table of contents and a visual map to display all the tourist attractions in London that are in the guide. It’s a great method to hit two birds with one arrow, in a more interesting way. As CEO & Co-Founder, HubSpot, Brian Halligan says “It’s not what you sell that matters as much as how you sell it!”

Polls and Surveys

The most read story in the year 2013 on The New York Times website was actually a quiz. Polls and surveys are aimed at gathering feedback and finding new user data. The great advantage of these forms is their restrainedness. On top of that, polls and surveys are among the oldest forms of interactive content and have been fruitful across time.

The success of polls and surveys lives in their shortness. Marketers need more information about users, however, by asking for too much, they end up getting nothing. Depending on the complexity of the poll or survey, rewarding the users is suggested.

Polls and surveys have numerous common components, but there is a clear difference between them. A survey contains multiple questions while a poll consists of only one multiple choice question.

Take Away

Also,

Interactive contents drive huge audience engagement, which is the key behind the success of any piece of content and a brand.

Interactive Content marketing has made gaining an audience a lot easier than it used to be. However, the real test is actuating more individuals to your piece of content and turning them into long-term customers that will stay loyal to your brand.

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    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    Chandrima Samanta
    Content-Editor at MartechCube
    Chandrima is a Content management executive with a flair for creating high quality content irrespective of genre. She believes in crafting stories irrespective of genre and bringing them to a creative form. Prior to working for MartechCube she was a Business Analyst with Capgemini.

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