Types of Interactive Content Marketing and Examples To Inspire

Do you want to make sure your next digital marketing campaign drives real engagement between your audience and your brand? Interactive content could be just the method you’re looking for.

Building interactive elements into images, videos and written content actively encourages viewers and readers to engage with your brand. Rather than passively consuming your message, people are making choices that affect their experience. This is a real difference, and one worth capitalizing on.

In terms of presentation, interactive content is similar to other types of marketing collateral and can fit smoothly into an overall content marketing strategy. Adding an interactive infographic, a calculator application or an immersive video to your campaign is a subtle but effective way to ramp up the appeal and stickiness of that campaign.

Before committing to an interactive deliverable, it’s worth learning more about this type of content: What are your options, how can you create these materials and which approach will fit in best with your branding?

What Is Interactive Content Marketing?

Interactive content marketing is a simple concept to explain, but somewhat harder to execute successfully. In short, it means adding reactive elements to marketing materials so that viewers can guide their own experiences.

These elements could be clickable sections that allow users to make decisions, fields where people can enter information or answer questions, visuals that change when a cursor hovers over them or any other feature that changes based on a user’s actions.

Interactive content crosses over the boundaries between written and visual content types. Infographics and images can become interactive with the addition of moving, changing elements. Adding prompts to written content can lead to interactive quizzes or calculators. Videos with branching paths also count as interactive marketing content, as do virtual tours that allow users to move in simulated spaces.

Interactive content marketing is a close relative of gamification, which means using game elements to make offerings more compelling and engaging. If your brand deploys a literal branded game as part of its marketing efforts, then that, too, counts as interactive content marketing.

If you’re looking for ways to engage your audience in ways that differentiate your brand or break through passive media consumption habits, interactivity is a great choice. Of course, due to the added complexity of interactive elements, it’s more feasible to add some of these deliverables to a diverse overall content mix rather than switching solely to interactive materials.

What Are the Benefits of Interactive Content Marketing?

As with any marketing content, it’s important to link your interactive deliverables to specific overall objectives, rather than simply making them for their own sake. With that said, there are plenty of viable uses for this kind of material, ones that can make it a powerful addition to any content strategy.

These advantages include:

• The ability to boost audience engagement: To make full use of an interactive piece of content, users have to take some action. This means engagement is built into the design. Someone who has clicked through an interactive infographic or entered data into a calculator app has invested time and effort, much more so than if they had passively looked at a piece of static content and moved on.
• An opportunity for personalization: How do you deliver content that will appeal directly to each viewer? One way to achieve this goal is to give them the ability to customize their own experience. Interactive content such as quizzes, calculators and branching video provides a unique way to appeal to your audience.
• Improved potential for lead generation: Once potential customers have begun to interact with your content, you have the ability to convert them at the end of the journey. In practice, this can mean a guided experience leading up to a natural call to action, like a mortgage rate calculator that allows the user to reach out to a representative about the kinds of products they’ve just investigated.
• A general feeling of brand loyalty: Interactions don’t just cause people’s eyes to linger on your content for longer; they can also convince those viewers to stick with your brand going forward. The more you engage directly with your audience, the more likely they may be to turn to your brand first in the future.

Interactive content allows you to take your marketing to a new level, gaining the advantages of gamification in marketing, whether you choose to create an actual game or another kind of interactive experience.

Types of Interactive Content To Try

No matter what kind of products or services you offer or your ideal audience profile, there’s likely a type of interactive content that will work for you. The sheer breadth of interactive elements available means you can match your audience, whether you’re aiming for a straightforward business-to-business audience or you’re building an exciting experience to make consumers take notice.

Some of your leading options include:

• Interactive infographics: These images are similar to standard infographics, but with a crucial difference: They change when viewers interact with them, whether that means clicking on an element or simply hovering a cursor over one portion of the image to bring out a new detail. This encourages users to look at the content for longer, focusing on areas that interest them.
• Multiple-choice quizzes: An interactive quiz that allows users to answer questions and presents them with a score is a classic type of gamified content. There is a strong motive to spend considerable time with the quiz to see what the final score will be. There’s also a great opportunity to place a call to action at the end with language shaped based on the quiz results.
• Calculator or assessment apps: User-guided calculators provide your brand with a way to give customers in-depth information in a low-pressure environment. Consumers who aren’t yet ready to apply for a loan, for example, can experiment with a rate calculator and move closer to a decision at their own pace.
• User-guided videos: An interactive video combines the audience engagement of video content with an extra, added level of interest. Viewers are more likely to look directly at a video if it allows them to pick their path, which can help you avoid the issue of distracted consumers viewing content on multiple screens and not fully receiving the message.

Whichever kind of content you use, you gain two immediate advantages:

• Stronger engagement, which comes when users interact with the deliverables.
• The ability to measure engagement and other traits based on customers’ interactions. 

Putting engaging interactive content to work for you is a way to add extra interest and appeal to your next digital marketing campaign. Ambitious brands across industries are already putting this method to work for them.

Examples of Impactful Interactive Marketing Content

There are plenty of effective interactive content examples in the marketing sphere today. Our team at Brafton has worked with many of these approaches, with input from editorial, design, video, social media and web development teams, among others.

The following are a few selected interactive pieces across channels, verticals and industries which can inspire your own efforts:

• The Five-Minutes-of-Fun Research Quiz, Wiley: This interactive quiz is designed to keep clients engaged with the subject matter (scholarly research papers) and the brand (Wiley) without being directly promotional. The “fun” is right in the title, and it allows users to relax for a while while still on the Wiley website.
• How Long Does It Take To Learn a Language?, Preply: This interactive feature, more calculator than quiz, deals directly with Preply’s business, but is still presented in a friendly, approachable style. It uses a variety of variables to give users an in-depth response, requiring more back-end development but creating a compelling interactive experience.
• What’s Your Fashion Footprint?, thredUP: The team at thredUP decided to use an interactive feature to make users think deeply about an important issue: their clothes’ impact on the environment. This is tied into the company’s core business as a green-focused consignment and thrift company, and using the combination quiz and calculator can make users more receptive to the key proposition of reducing fashion waste.
• My Home vs. Mahomes, WSN: This is an infographic with a twist. Users enter only one number: their annual salary. The graphic then adjusts itself to show how long it would take that user to buy a variety of athletes’ expensive homes. Only tangentially related to the company’s main business of listing sports betting odds, it’s undeniably attention-grabbing.

These examples and others across the web show that no matter what type of product you’re selling or who your target audience may be, there’s likely an interactive marketing lane open for you.

Integrate Interactive Content Into Your Marketing Strategy

A well-planned content marketing strategy will have room for effective interactive content as one piece among many. Balancing types of media is a key piece of reaching your audience and achieving your immediate goal, whether it’s brand awareness, conversions, retention or any other objective.

Now that you’ve seen the exciting types of interactive marketing content available to brands, you can work together with an expert content marketing team to increase the reach and appeal of your own content strategy.