How to Test if Interactive Fits Your Content Strategy

Interactive content is a mandate for today’s content marketing plan. It is engaging, helps improve brand awareness and amplifies user experience. But marketers need to test its effectiveness too.

Interactive content, as we have been discussing so far, helps improve user experience by going beyond passive reading or watching. There are multiple engagement points in the form of images, infographics, videos, text, GIFs, quizzes, assessments, etc. but you have to balance things while incorporating interactive in your content strategy. You have to make it interesting without overdoing it, maintain your budget, do justice to your existing content and add value to your customer’s journey.

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What is Interactive Content?

In layman’s terms, interactive content is any digital content that is designed for user participation to earn their attention and engage them. Interactive content improves user experience by going beyond passive reading or watching. The user has with multiple engagement points in the form of images, infographics, videos, text, GIFs, quizzes, assessments, etc., thus creating unique, exciting, and valuable experiences for them.

Why Use Interactive Content?

• Brand awareness – Interactive content is the differentiator, is exciting and grabs eyeballs — all of which is necessary to reach out to your audience.
• Helps you understand your customer better – an intelligently implemented interactive content gives you actionable data and behavioral patterns of your prospects and customers, for you to build a customer profile.
• Amplifies user experience – audience engages, participates, and enjoys while interacting with content.
   

Also Read: 5 Expert Opinions on Interactive Content Marketing

How to Test if Interactive Fits Your Content Strategy?

Ion Interactive has published an interesting white paper about the what, why, and how of interactive content marketing.
If you want to create brand awareness – whether you are a popular brand or an upcoming business, if you're going to build your buyer persona to deliver targeted and relevant results, and if you're going to add value to your customer’s lives and encourage brand loyalty – you have to integrate interactive content into your strategy. For this you need to:

1.  Assess your existing content: You need to critically evaluate your existing content to

• Understand if it is entirely static.
• How well informed your customers are after going through your content?
• Does your brand stand out amongst your competitors?
• Is your existing content gaining traction?
• What are your conversion rates?
• Can you reuse or repurpose existing content?
   

2. Identify opportunities: Once you know how your existing content is performing, you need to focus on combining interactive elements to it to get more out of it. Remember, you don’t have to start from scratch and neither you have to go overboard with the interactivity. Here are some ideas to repurpose your existing content:

• For your blog posts, you could embed files, GIFs, images or videos for an interactive experience. You could use form or comment fields to gather feedback, ideas, and promote discussions.
• For your white paper or pdf, you could create quizzes to test the reader’s knowledge or offer an assessment of what products your user could use from you.
• Implement calculators, instead of pricing sheet for the user to understand various purchase scenarios.
• Provide multiple clickable options to make additional content easily discoverable on your landing page.
• Create a trivia quiz, personality quiz, or contests to increase brand awareness and help customer bond with your brand.
• Create interactive educational videos where learners can ask questions and direct the course of the video.
   

Also Read: Top 4 Recent B2C Interactive Content Marketing Campaigns

3. Identify the right type of content: You have to understand the buyer persona to design interactive content. Though static content doesn’t give a holistic customer view, it can still give you an idea of their preferences, demographics, your brand’s standing, etc.

If you want to increase brand awareness, creating shareable videos and quizzes can generate a buzz. An interactive infographic can educate your customers. If you wish to improve on conversions, you may want to create contests, which can offer discount coupons. In aiding decision making, calculators are a good option.

4. Placement in the sales funnel: Content needs to be different at every stage of the funnel and every point of the buyer journey.

• Early Stage (Awareness): Create lightweight content which creates awareness and educates your customers. Interactive content that can gather leads and information about your prospects gather user queries and feedback can help you build customer profiles.
• Middle Stage (Acceleration): At this stage, content could be in-depth, more targeted and personalized. The content should be informative and nudge them towards the buying process.
• Late Stage (Decision Making): Here the content is customized, offers pricing details and attractive offers, and makes it easy to buy from you.
   

Also Read: 5 Challenges of Interactive Content Marketing and How to Overcome Them

Evaluate Effort vs. Value

There are significant resources like money, time and team involved in creating interactive content. You thus need to evaluate the value derived regarding awareness and conversions against the investment. You would, therefore, need to assess:

• How does interactive content benefit your audience?
• Is it educating, engaging, and entertaining enough?
• Will it create a buzz?
• Can it drive better conversions?
• Can it be reused or repurposed?
• Does it fit your budgets?

An effective content marketing strategy will involve measurement and analytics that drives content optimization and conversion of leads. Test your efforts before you incorporate interactive content into a more substantial chunk of your content marketing strategy.

Also Read: 5 Types of Interactive Content and How to Create Them