Of all the goals you have for your content, the most important is engagement. Sure, traffic is great, but if your content doesn’t engage that traffic, you won’t see the results you were after.
While many options exist, interactive content is designed with the sole purpose of grabbing your visitors’ attention and keeping it until they are satisfied. Fortunately, with the help of an interactive content marketing platform, it’s never been easier to produce this kind of valuable content.
4 Examples Interactive Content Marketing Platform
Furthermore, there are only four main types of interactive content you need to consider for your website. Better still,
with the right interactive content marketing platform, just about anyone can
create an engaging example quickly and, often times, for free.
1. Quizzes
Maybe the most popular form of interactive content is the basic quiz. They’re simple to create and take. Yet, quizzes can produce absolutely incredible results. In fact, Women.com owns well over half the engagement for quizzes, dominating even Buzzfeed, which is probably better known for this kind of interactive content.
Their quizzes aren’t overly complicated, either. Check out their most successful one, “Quiz: Only 1 In 50 People Can Identify These 16 Grammar Mistakes. Can You?”
SurveyMonkey
is an extremely popular interactive content marketing platform and is also completely free to use. Otherwise, Quiz Maker offers three different options.
2. Calculator and Tools
Online calculators do more than just help readers add and subtract. They help readers by making convoluted calculations much easier. For example, if you wanted to know what the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017” would mean for you, the NY Times’ tax calculator requires you to only answer four questions.
Another extremely popular tool is a mortgage calculator. Just about every major mortgage originator and real-estate advice site offers one. That’s because those in the market for a new home absolutely need this information, but would rather not conduct complex calculations in order to receive it (or find out for the first time when they’re in a lender’s office).
Take a look at this mortgage calculator from NerdWallet for an excellent example of how you can use an interactive content marketing platform to create a winning webpage that will bring you traffic for years to come. If you’re looking for a free interactive content marketing platform to build your site a calculator, try uCalc or Calculoid. For those who may need more from their calculators, ContentTools is an excellent choice.
3. Interactive Visuals
Interactive visuals make it easier for people to understand complicated concepts by illustrating them with visuals. As opposed to an infographic, though, these visuals allow the viewer to adjust the input for specific outcomes. One really fun example that showed up in recent years was “Winds and Words”:
“Using data collected
from script dialogue and other sources, this experiment analyzes and visualizes
characters’ words and interactions from the first six seasons of HBO’s Game of
Thrones.”
If you watched the show, you know how daunting it could be at times to remember the dozens of characters’ interactions with one another, year-after-year. The fun tool shows users whom every character spoke to – and how often – broken down by season. This type of marketing asset is possible with an interactive content marketing platform like R Shiny. It’s too involved for any sort of free software, but the results are clearly
worth it.
4. Timelines, Sliders, and More
Finally, another fantastic way to use an interactive content marketing platform is to create a timeline or slider that shows the progression of a product, service, or event. For example, check out this cool timeline that documents the evolution of the iPhone. With just one click-at-a-time, you can watch as the model in front of you changes. That’s a lot more interesting than simply seeing them all laid out in one static visual because it gives you a much better sense of how the device’s dimensions changed over time.
Another interesting example shows how diversity in tech grew between 2014 and 2017. Once again, a simple side-by-side comparison of each year would have sufficed, but it’s far more engaging when you can look at each metric and see exactly how it changed with just a simple click. If your site needs a timeline, Preceden offers a free trial, yet it’s trusted by brands like Netflix and Slack. Otherwise, R Shiny is also great for this kind of content.
The Most Important Rule When Creating Interactive Content
Now that you understand what interactive content is and what your four main options are, the next step is deciding which would make the most sense for your business. As you research the different types of interactive content that is successful in your market, you’ll see that even in a single category – say quizzes – there’s no limit to what you can do. In terms of the questions you ask, the interface of the quiz, how results are provided, etc., the sky’s the limit.
However, remember this quote from the founder of “Convince and Convert,” Jay Baer, about content creation: “One of the best ways to succeed with modern marketing is not to try to be amazing, but just be useful.” Bells and whistles are great, but if your interactive content doesn’t actually provide the answers your market wants, don’t expect it to attract much attention for very long.
Keep in mind, too, that those answers don’t necessarily have to be life-changing. Finding out how much of a mortgage you can afford is great, but clearly, many of Women.com’s readers were interested in discovering if they could name “All 15 of These 80s Hits by One Line.” Different markets. Different interactive content.
It’s Never Been Easier to Create Interactive Content
Depending on the kind you want to create, an interactive content marketing platform could produce your next post by the end-of-the-day and for absolutely free.
By: Susan Moeller
Source: BuzzSumo: Find the content that works and the influencers who matter
1.58K subscribers
