How To Make Content Interactive To Engage Visitors
When your brand has to compete with an endless stream of blog posts, expert-level white papers, and lengthy webinars to connect with your audience, passive content won’t cut it. By adding interactive content to your strategy, you can make your brand stand out and keep your audience’s attention on your content for longer. From engaging infographics to quizzes and ratings, discover how to make content interactive with topics like:
- What Is Interactive Content?
- What Are the Benefits of Interactive Content?
- Types of Interactive Content
- How To Make Content Interactive
What Is Interactive Content?
Image via Unsplash by @benchaccounting
Interactive content is any feature on your website or apps that encourages engagement from the audience. The type of engagement differs based on the kinds of content. You may already use interactive content on your website and not know it—any calls to action (CTAs) that require people to complete an action count as interactive content. Filling out a form, answering questions, and even starting a discussion in the comment section are all examples of interactive content.
Interactive content takes the experience of your website from a passive one to an engaging one. The more engaging your content, the more time people spend on the page. It also increases their chances of returning or sharing your content with someone else. All of these things help improve your SEO. The more time people spend on your site and the more shares your content gets send signals to Google. These signals tell the search engine that your content has value and that it’s worth recommending to other searchers. That helps you increase your search engine positioning and get more organic traffic.
What Are The Benefits of Interactive Content?
Interactive content does more than just increase visitors’ time on the page. Here are some of the other major benefits interactive content can have on your business or brand:
Increase Conversions
More interactivity on your website can lead to more conversions. Clients and customers who feel engaged are more present in the moment when browsing your content. They’re not just scrolling, thinking about what they should add to their grocery list while they passively look for an answer to their questions. It’s the same reason that teachers often advocate projects and demonstrations over lectures. Being engaged means your clients and leads aren’t bored. And when they’re not bored, they’re more likely to take action.
Read more: How To Calculate and Improve Your Conversion Rate
Learn More About Your Audience
Most interactive content isn’t just a shiny toy for your audience to play with. These pieces can also help you collect valuable information about your audience that you can use for future content creation. Quizzes, polls, and comments sections are the perfect types of interactive content to collect this data. Pose questions about the content itself to discover what your audience understands and what things they want to learn more about. In the comment section, browse their questions and concerns to influence what topics you should cover in your next pieces.
Improve Satisfaction and Loyalty
When your audience has content they can interact with, it helps them to feel like part of a community. They’re taking part in an activity created by your brand just for them. That makes them feel more like an active group member than an isolated, passive consumer. Whether you include quizzes to help them figure out what type of product or service they might benefit from or you ask for their feedback on a new company initiative, interaction with your brand makes them feel like you care about their opinions and satisfaction, not just their money.
Types of Interactive Content
If you’re looking for the right content to increase engagement on your website, here are some popular forms of interactive content to try:
Quizzes
Interactive quizzes give your audience a chance to share opinions and connect with your brand on a personal level. Brief quizzes they can complete in a few minutes increase engagement and can provide informational or entertainment value, depending on the topic. Offering incentives for completing the quiz may encourage more engagement. It might be something as simple as asking people to test their knowledge and share results with friends. Or, you could link your quiz to a contest and tell your audience that anyone who completes it has a chance to win a free consultation with your team for a premium service.
With user-friendly quiz platforms like Qzzr, you can design interactive content in as little as a few minutes and start sharing that content on your website and social media channels immediately. Platforms like this one let you track quiz results and put those results to use. Integrate quiz results with your customer relationship management (CRM) tool and start targeting your customers with more personalized offers.
Interactive Infographics
Static infographics are already a great tool for sharing a lot of dense data in an easy-to-understand format. Imagine what you could do with them if they were interactive. But interactive infographics encourage your audience to stop and focus their attention on the moving parts. Remember, engagement helps people stay present in the moment. When they’re present and paying attention to your content, they’re also more likely to remember it. This helps brand recognition and recall. It can also help increase conversions and sales when these leads return to your brand when they’re ready to buy something.
Interactive infographics can take many forms. Some might simply ask viewers to click on different sections of the graphic to reveal more information. Others might combine other forms of interactive content, like quizzes or maps, to collect information and share knowledge at the same time.
Maps
If your company does business in the real world instead of online-only, a map could be a great interactive tool. Help your audience find your in-person service locations or events where your business plans to have a presence. Interactive maps make this data more interesting and relevant because it puts locations in context rather than just listing an address. Use tools such as Mapme to create traditional maps or Tableau Public to create a geographic data map. Make your maps engaging by encouraging users to click on map points for more information. Take the interactivity to the next level by inviting users to offer their own data points, such as places they found your products in stores.
Lead Capture Forms
Lead capture forms may be the type of interactive content that helps your brand the most. These examples of CTAs create an easy and effective way for you to collect contact information from leads interested in staying connected with or learning more about your brand. Lead capture forms can be as simple as a two-box form that asks for someone’s name and email address, like our CopyPress newsletter form.
Or you can combine lead capture forms with other types of interactive content. For example, you may ask your audience to take a short quiz and include a lead capture form at the end. The user then has to share their email address to get the results in their inbox.
Related: 13 Lead Generation Strategies You Can Start Using Today
How To Make Content Interactive
Use these steps to learn how to take your current static content and make it interactive to increase engagement and audience satisfaction:
1. Understand Your Target Audience
Understanding what content your audience likes to consume can help you develop the right interactive pieces for any campaign. For example, let’s say your target audience is millennials. If you know that this group likes to spend free time taking BuzzFeed quizzes, you may plan to include quizzes that relate to your industry or products in your marketing. This helps replicate the experience of things your audience likes to do for fun, so they’ll be more likely to engage with those features and your brand.
2. Do a Content Audit
You don’t have to start from scratch to create interactive content for your brand. If you already have a large database of articles, blogs, and eBooks, start by adding interactive elements to them first. Can you find a way to make your eBooks more enjoyable to navigate? Can you give your readers a quiz to take and then recommend an article or blog for them to read?
It’s possible you can even use the information from older pieces of content to create brand-new ones. For example, let’s say you have an older blog post that gives a lot of value to your readers but its popularity is waning. Try converting that blog into an interactive infographic. When you republish it, the information will feel fresh and it might even attract a larger audience than before.
3. Analyze Your Data and Refine
Just as you track the performance of your traditional content, do the same with your interactive pieces. Reviewing data and metrics can help you see how the audience responds to the pieces. If you find that you’re not getting the viewership or engagement you expected, this shows opportunities where you can collect more information from your audience and revise your approach. If you find that your content is performing well, you might explore how you can incorporate the same interactive elements into some of your underperforming content to give it a boost.
4. Add Well-Placed Calls to Action
No matter what kind of interactive content you use in your strategy, make sure you include CTAs in each one. CTAs help direct your audience to whatever step you want them to take next in the customer journey. For example, at the end of a quiz, you might provide a link and a call to read more content on the quiz topic. Or on the completion message of a lead capture form, you may present a poll and ask the audience about their experience with your brand so far.
Without CTAs, you miss out on pushing your audience to that crucial next step of your marketing strategy. Some of them may be able to move from one step to the next on their own, but others need a gentle reminder and a push. CopyPress can help with adding powerful calls to action to your content. Our team of expert writers, editors, and quality assurance specialists knows how to develop compelling content for your target audience and help you reach your business goals. Schedule a call with us today to tell us more about your project needs and find out how we boost your conversion rate with high-quality content writing.
CopyPress writer
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