Have you ever attempted one of those "Which GOT Character Are You?" quizzes?
Who hasn't?
They’re fun, aren’t they? In this article, we’ll try to understand what makes them fun. By the end of this article, you’ll have enough reasons to love interactive content as much as we do.
If you were curious, this is what we got:
What a timely character quiz to take!
Interactive content engages the customer. The customer is an active participant in the content and affects the outcome.
You might be wondering why you need interactive content. You might even think your content does well enough without including the reader or viewer as an active participant. And it might be! However, using interactive content can boost your online presence and help with audience engagement at an astounding level.
Did you know that over 2 million blogs are published every day? That’s not even counting ads and other forms of content. This causes content fatigue among readers and content consumers. Interactive content solves the problem of fatigue because it requires engagement.
Interactive content is visually appealing, which increases the chance of engagement by readers over 40 times. Furthermore, interactive content is highly shareable. People like to share results they get after testing themselves, whether it’s a quiz for fun or friendly competition. Interactive quizzes, calculators, and polls fit the bill quite easily.
Lead generation is a hurdle faced by most marketers. In fact, 61 percent of B2B marketers think generating high-quality leads is one of their biggest challenges. Interactive content makes it exponentially easier to generate leads and quality ones at that.
People are generally reluctant to engage with content that offers nothing to them in return. However, interactive content adds real value by answering the customer’s pressing queries. To understand our point better, have a look at this interactive calculator by Outgrow.
This experience calculates the approximate ROI of the prospect’s email marketing strategy. It asks all the right questions like the number of emails sent per campaign, the open rate, the click rate, etc. On the basis of these answers, it estimates the email marketing ROI in real time. The customer obtains value after engaging with the calculator, which ensures future engagement as well.
Furthermore, interactive content is inherently personalized. For starters, you can take the example of the calculator we mentioned above. Each prospect gets a unique and personalized answer for his/her query. In quizzes, each question is mapped to a specific outcome that ensures personalized answer. This increases the chances of prospects shelling out their contact information as they accord greater importance to personalized results.
Upselling plays an extremely important role in business growth. In fact, it’s 68 percent more expensive to acquire $1 from a new customer than it is to upsell current customers. Statistics aside, experience shows that repeat customers make up for a lot of a company’s profit. Hubspot’s latest marketing model, the Flywheel, puts the impetus of business growth mostly on customers and referrals. In other words, upselling your products is not an option anymore.
Interactive content can help you upsell by providing a taste of your product to the customer beforehand. Consequently, the customer can’t help but come back for more. Have a look at this interactive calculator:
This experience collects leads but adds real value to the customer by helping them estimate their revenue and projection. After they have provided a free evaluation, they leverage expert advice by offering more details. This way the content scratches the imminent itch of the customer but leaves them wanting more!
By now, you must have noticed one similarity in all the interactive experiences we have mentioned. They all collect a lot of clients’ personal and relevant information. To obtain an outcome out of an interactive experience, the prospect has to answer relevant questions. This also eliminates the possibility of fake information because the prospect hopes to obtain accurate outcomes.
This information can be used by companies to build detailed buyer personas. Consequently, this can be used to personalize sales pitches and close deals more efficiently.
First, let's take a look at this image:
This is an interactive poll created by Arlington Condo on Outgrow. The results page of the experience portrays (visually, nonetheless) the number of people that agree with your opinion. The number of people that taking the quiz is a testament to the fact that people trust the brand enough to engage with the content and services/product it has to offer.
Moreover, interactive content increases your chances of gaining social proof. Why do we say that? Well, interactive content offers real value to its customers. The customer in return, share it with other people that they think they might benefit from that information. For ease of understanding, let us go back to the email ROI calculator. A calculator like that can gain an abundance of social proof for a company that offers marketing solutions.
Remarketing, also known as retargeting, is targeting the customers that have already viewed something on your site. The entire concept of remarketing revolves around relevance. However, interactive content has the power to make your remarketing ads all the more effective.
Interactive content can increase the ROI of your ads through increased engagement. As we have established before, interactive content is visually appealing and provides real value. Hence, embedding interactive content in your remarketing ads can increase the prospect's engagement with it.
For example, assume that a client checked out your website page that shows high-intent to buy. Maybe they checked out your pricing page or template examples page. You can embed an interactive calculator like this in your remarketing ads:
Through this calculator, prospects can find out exactly how much they would have to spend on the tool and how much they’ll get out of it. This can be a good way to show your capture those high intent prospects by highlighting the benefits of buying your product.
Interactive content can enrich your social media strategy through its visual appeal and potential for customer education. As humans, we like to perceive information in images more than text. Other than keeping the users engaged, these visuals make your social media efforts more attractive.
Moreover, interactive content can be easily created around trendy topics that are relevant to you. This allows you to leverage the considerable attention that the topic is getting. Let’s assume you own a sports and wellness center. Now, let’s assume the Winter Olympics are around the corner. Maybe people are tweeting and posting a lot about it. To attract quality leads, you can create an effortless quiz like this:
Well, these were the reasons for including interactive content in your content strategy. But which kind of interactive content is best for you? How many types of interactive content are there anyway?
The following six types of interactive content are most commonly used across various platforms and have proven to be universally successful among consumers.
Interactive calculators can help you estimate the numeric value of your prospect's queries. They can input and select values for their answers. Each option is assigned a numerical value and the final result takes the relevant answers into consideration.
51 percent of marketers feel that interactive calculators are most effective in the consideration stage. The buyer identifies a need and these leads can be nurtured well through interactive calculators.
This calculator was created by Get Paid for Your Pad (GPYP) that helps property owners become expert AirBnB hosts. They wanted to build an assessment that would help people understand how well their AirBnB listing is doing in terms of quality.
They created a quick calculator that solves a major query their customer base had. Result? They got more than 800+ conversions at a 41 percent conversion rate.
These are the quizzes that provide a personalized outcome according to the answers inputted by the reader. Each option is mapped to a specific outcome and provides the user with a result based on their habits and preferences.
Take the example of this quiz created by Macroscape, a marketing consulting firm. They had a client who manufactured bikes and needed to engage their customers and help them make sound purchase decisions.
They built an interactive quiz on the Outgrow platform which helped people find out which bicycle is a right fit for them based on their responses to a few easy questions. Since Macroscape’s client was assisting their prospects with decision making instead of just selling, the quiz became a hit!
Did the quiz perform well? Well, it garnered 3225 visits and 1151 leads within 6 months of going live. That's a 36 percent conversion rate!
E-commerce recommendation quizzes are essentially Outcome quizzes tailored specifically for e-commerce. You can include products that you recommend directly from your inventory. People get a product recommendation tailored specifically for them and you get a better conversion rate.
This is a quiz created by Z Gallerie that recommends a set of products tailored specifically to the reader’s preferences. The quiz asks a limited number of questions and collects their contact information.
The quiz brings in an enormous amount of leads per day. Moreover, the display ads stemming from the quiz generate one and a half times more engagement than their digital ad, resulting in a 1.4x lift in average order value.
Graded assessments are interactive experiences that assess a person and provide them with a test score on the basis of their answers. They’re essentially like pop quizzes in school, only fun. People like any content that challenges or entertains them. A graded quiz does both.
Have a look at this grammar competency quiz by Women.com. It has a set of 16 questions and claims that only one in 50 people can answer all of the questions correctly. However, the quiz is relatively easy, which increases the chances of people scoring high. Consequently, this increases its shareability as people like to show off their high scores.
An interactive poll can help your readers know where they stand as compared to their peers. Moreover, it can help you in market research and getting a general opinion on a relevant subject. However, we have to admit that it is hard to get a valid survey result. In fact, 72 percent of customers said surveys interfere with their experience of a website, according to OpinionLab. The same study found that 80 percent of customers have abandoned a survey halfway through.
So, how do we get around this paradox? We go interactive! This interactive poll by Unicorn Wealth proves our point.
Unicorn Wealth is a website that provides daily resources with helpful tips on wealth building and continued prosperity. The poll asks two questions from its prospects, but manages to keep them engaged with instant social proof and relevant visual cues. In fact, the poll showcases the percent of people that agree with the prospect’s opinion along with detailed reports for the same.
TIP: Check out the best free survey makers in 2019.
At the end of the day, a lot of content and social media efforts are made in hopes that it goes viral. Have a look at this contest created by DPAC. They merge the idea of a poll and contest, and prospects can choose the movie they want as their Valentine’s Day gift. Additionally, each prize winner is awarded a $40 gift certificate to Pompieri Pizza in Durham.
As the customer needs changes, so does the content that’s being catered to them. Thus, interactive content is bound to evolve in years to come. It’s time to get on board!
Want to learn more about the benefits of interactive content? Read up on how to increase page engagement!
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