As Mark Schaefer note:“We live in an age of content overload. There is so much content being produced every day (every hour and every minute) that consumer attention is a scarce commodity. Your brand is competing against everyone who sells similar products and services, but you are also competing against everyone who produces content of any kind.“
So, how do you, your brand, and your content stand out from all the others?
I've put together the following for you 5 reasons why you should invest in interactive content. Essential for your brand to start gaining the recognition it deserves from the rest.
The fourth wave of content marketing.
Scott Brinker recently wrote on his blog, explaining why they are betting the entire company on marketing apps. He views interactive web experiences (powered by these marketing apps) as the fourth wave of content marketing.
The first three waves, according to Scott, are:
1. Web text-based content
2. Rich media content
“Rich media "It's a digital advertising term that refers to an advertisement with advanced features such as video, audio, or other elements that encourage viewers to interact and engage with the content." - Google.
3. Customization
As Scott notes in his post, interactive content can include assistants, configurators, calculators, assessment tools, contests, interactive white papers, games, quizzes, surveys, guided tours, portals, social hubs, diagnostics, workbooks, galleries, services, sweepstakes, learning exercises – in short, anything consumers can interact with.
As the fourth wave of content marketing, This interactive content is the future.
The app “Guess Who Won!”
To give you an idea of how powerful this type of marketing can be, check out the app “Guess Who Won!”" from the ion interactive. The app gives you five tests. A / B To judge, for each test, you are shown two variations of a landing page and asked to guess which one performs better.
As marketers, we analyze data to make decisions. That said, we design so many landing pages to receive so many emails (mostly from other marketers) that we think we know what works best – even when we don't rely on data. Despite my professional experience, I got 3 out of 5 right, for a huge 60% score. Sad truth.
After reading Scott's blog post and trying out the app, I came away with five reasons to invest in interactive content, which I'm sharing with you here. Enjoy!
Reason # 1: Involvement
Overall, the experience of interacting with this app was fun and valuable for me. Even more importantly, it got me involved. Let's be honest – regardless of how valuable it is, have you ever felt truly engaged with a whitepaper or ebook?
Consuming text-based content (e.g., white papers, ebooks, blogs) is passive. Slides require you to at least press the “Next” button to advance through a story, and videos can be viewed as a group, promoting discussion and interaction. While mass content consumption puts you in the stands at a football game, interactive content puts you inside the game.
Reason # 2: Gamification
Interactive content often involves a reward for its users upon completion, which keeps them engaged without feeling like a game. The "Guess Who Won?" app promises to give you a score for your answers, which further motivated me to finish playing.
One of the most difficult challenges for content marketers is maintaining reader attention. Downloads are great, but what if your audience stops reading halfway through? Through a gamification experience (for example, a reward at the end of a game), interactive content creates a cycle of engagement that lasts from beginning to end.
Reason # 3: Superior Retention
Content marketing aims to reach buyers in the awareness phase, differentiate our brands in the consideration phase, and make our brands the sole winner in the selection stage. Interactive content clearly works in the awareness stage – as we just mentioned, these assets grab and hold the reader's attention.
But beyond that, interactive content also works in the consideration phase. Why? Because it leaves an impression. For example, when I'm looking for or need an A/B testing tool, the A/B testing app will come to mind.
We measure prospects who fail to complete a registration form in a white paper as an “attrition rate.” They came, they left, and we may never see them again. But if a prospect took the time to interact with you, the term “attrition” doesn’t apply.
Reason # 4: Multi-Dimensional Experiences
There are so many ways to present a technical document or ebook, but designing interactive content is similar to creating a mobile app or a piece of web software. While this obviously requires a greater investment of time/money to create, each screen, click, and interaction is an opportunity to impress and delight the end user.
Furthermore, interactive content has the ability to incorporate an unlimited mix of multimedia content: videos, slideshows, animations, audio, and much more. If you consider the “interaction experience,” combined with multimedia, it’s clear: content marketers need to think beyond the written word and consider that “content” is the end-to-end experience we create for our users.
Reason # 5: Accelerated sales cycle
It's great that 200 people downloaded my latest ebook, but do they actually read it? I have no idea. When you can't measure and quantify the consumption of your content, it's quite a challenge for... marketing and sales deciphering clues about the availability or possibility of sales prospects.
With interactive content, however, each interaction can be measured and recorded. If you create an app like “Guess Who Won!”, you can record how each participant answers each question. You could design the content to discover how to prepare a sales lead for a purchase, their preferred method of communication, or other relevant data. Amazing, isn't it?
The conventional qualification mechanism involves asking many questions on the registration form (e.g., budget, authority, industry, etc.), but with interactive content, you ask fewer questions upfront and receive more valuable information as they interact. By measuring and quantifying interactions, you can infer more accurate and valuable information about people. And with that, you're already further along in the sales cycle.
Does that make sense, enlightened person?
Conclusion
Interactive content comes with limitations and considerations. On the one hand, there's the novelty effect – interactive content is fresh right now, but so were infographics in 2010 and blogs in the early 2000s. Soon, a large number of marketers will be using interactive content, and only the highest quality examples will remain.
But from now on, content marketing will be less about words and images, and much more about... holistic experiences that you create for the consumer. As interactive content becomes more common, consumers expect more active and powerful experiences from your brand.
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