Stand Out from the Competition Using Interactive Content Marketing

While the fact that content is king remains true, it’s not enough anymore to simply write a text-rich blog post and expect engagement to happen.

According to a study, the average user has an attention span of eight seconds. Within these eight second you need to grab your readers’ attention and encourage them to engage.

In the fast-paced online medium, interactive content marketing is proving to have effectiveness in increasing engagement numbers. While pieces like blog articles and eBooks are considered passive content, interactive content requires the person to actively engage with the content, whether that’s by swiping, tapping or answering a question.

Below are 3 ideas you can use to grab the attention of your readers.

Video

While video has become a favourite among users and content creators alike, it also enables a new type of interactive content. The most popular example would be how TV show Black Mirror created a different experience with the Bandersnatch interactive episode.

While not every business can go as far, it’s easy to leverage video for interactive content, e.g. using Facebook Live or Instagram stories to engage with your followers and ask for their input.

Polls and Questions

Polls and questions have also surfaced as a great tool to interact with the audience. Social platforms like Facebook and Twitter have in-built functionality for polls, making it even easier for you to create and manage polls.

Besides polls, another way to encourage interactivity is by asking a question in your news feed on your social profile.

While it’s a good idea to keep the question relevant to your business, try and experiment with a variety of topics! You want to create interest and incentivize answers. To do this well, think about some topics relevant to your business. Here are a couple of generic ideas that could help:

• Can you recommend some good [your product or service category] books this summer?
• What business advice would you give yourself when you were just starting out?
• If you could run your business in any period in history, when would it be and why?

Infographics

Infographics are visuals that communicate statistics or other information in a concise and clear format.

However, now you can upgrade your infographics game with interactive elements. It might take more time and effort to create a two-way infographic instead of a static one. But a relevant infographic that captivates your audience, generates traffic, engagement and social shares will be well worth it.

You can interact with various elements to move you through the content, which is much more engaging than a long page of text.

Nowadays there are a lot of tools and websites that allow you to generate infographics from a template, and alternatively you can hire a professional graphic design company to create them for you from scratch.