Add Interactivity to Your Content Marketing Strategy

Win in the Customer Engagement Game With Interactive Content

Customer attention is a hot commodity and one that is most prominent when devising a content marketing strategy. Every one of us has been a “skimmer”—eyes darting from content to content, resting on only the most engaging headline or visual.

How does a B2B organization compete for and win a consumer’s attention in a space crowded with white papers, briefs, and E-books—a veritable sea of content that makes it difficult to stand out?

The answer? Go interactive with your content marketing.

Why Interactive Content Works

If content is king, interactive content is emperor. Interactive content opens up a whole realm of possibilities for not only capturing the attention of potential buyers but getting them to consume and act on your content.

And if you think about it, interactivity is more in line with human nature and how we behave, especially in today’s technology-driven world. Consider mobile use, our interactive nature as people, and simply the sheer quantity of content bombarding us each day. It’s no small wonder why interactive content is winning the day.

Buyers are looking for interactive content to help them make purchase decisions, and B2B organizations can gain key customer insights from different interactive content.

It’s a win-win—now here are 5 easy ways to get started today.

5 Ways to Add Interactive Content to Your Content Marketing Strategy

Polls and Quizzes: While polls and quizzes may call to mind a Buzzfeed-type strategy, these forms of content can be very effective for B2B marketers. They present a great opportunity to learn more about your customers through questions that draw out their opinions, needs and preferences. A clever topic with the right questions can:

• Attract and engage
• Position you as a brand that listens
• Gather key data
• Provide information about your audience’s habits and challenges
• Give audience members insight into what others are saying

Infographics: We already know infographics are effective in communicating sometimes complicated information in a very visual and easily-digestible way, so take your infographic a step further with animation and interactivity.

Check out this great example that helps power infrastructure teams understand how to utilize the new products from the team at GE’s Critical Power. This example also serves as a great way to highlight customer case studies – choose a customer to learn how GE helped them solve their data center power needs.

Video: There’s a reason Facebook focused its latest algorithm update around video with Facebook Live. Video has become a hugely successful content format and a way for B2B marketers to add significant value to their content. Incorporating pop-up questions or calls-to-action not only gives the viewer something to do beyond just watching, but it provides you with measurable data.

Guides: You can’t go wrong with a highly-visual presentation of information. Take users on an interactive journey to answer a question or get information that otherwise would have been bullet-point text and bulky paragraphs. Here’s how Elo employed an interactive guide to help buyers navigate the process of purchasing a custom POS system.

Calculators: Have complicated, mathematical information you’re trying to convey? The answer is simpler than you’d think: use a calculator. Marketers are often turning to interactive calculators to help users get answers to number-driven questions, like this one from B2W Software.

If you’re hungry for even more options for interactive content, Content Marketing Institute has a few to add to the mix.

There will always remain a place in any B2B organization’s content strategy for E-books, static infographics, white papers and other tried-and-true content for generating traffic and leads. But it’s critical to ask yourself if you could be pushing your content marketing a step further to cut through the content noise and truly stand out.