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November 29, 2021 Content Chat Recap: Why You Need To Include Interactive Content In Your 2022 Marketing Plan

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Tight on time and budget, marketers often stick to tried-and-true ways to engage their brand communities, which is an understandable approach. However, there is a case to be made for creating interactive content that directly involves your reader or viewer in the experience.

In this #ContentChat we explain how to include interactive content in your marketing plan with Maureen Jann (@NeoLuxeMo), co-founder and chief marketing strategist at NeoLuxe Marketing. Maureen and her team created the What Kind of Marketer Am I? quiz, which was made for marketers by marketers to predict what type of marketer you are. Read the chat recap below to learn what went into creating the quiz and how interactive content can drive results for brands, including an exploration of the common types and examples of interactive content, how to measure the success of interactive content, and more.

Q1: What is interactive content?

Interactive content gets your reader/viewer to engage and participate with your content, instead of passively consuming it.

Q2: What are the common types of interactive content that brands can create for content marketing?

Many marketers do not create interactive content, so there may not be a “common type” of interactive content.

However, interactive content can include quizzes, games, animated or multimedia ebooks, surveys, and even Twitter Chats.

Many social media channels have an audience poll or quiz feature, making social media channels a great place to experiment with interactive content.

Livestreams can be great interactive content if the hosts engage with the viewers, respond to questions, and involve them in the experience.

Social media sites with live stream capabilities are perfect for these opportunities.

Brands can also create tools that enable their community to create user-generated content using brand assets.

Q3: How can interactive content help marketing teams meet their goals?

Interactive content can help brands break through the noise and effectively engage their communities.

Interactive content can also humanize a brand.

Beyond audience engagement, interactive content can help you learn about your community and tailor your future content and campaigns to their needs.

However, a necessary disclaimer: Do not mistake your interactive content insights for legitimate research. It can certainly tell you more about your community, but your sample may not accurately reflect your entire target market.

Q4: What examples of interactive content can you share?

Maureen, Erika, and Alyx share a few interactive content examples below. What examples can you share? Let us know in the comments, or Tweet us using #ContentChat.

Q5: What are some common challenges or hurdles content marketers encounter when planning or creating interactive content?

Fear is a common challenge when planning interactive content. Marketers can become concerned the project will be too difficult to complete, expensive, hard to measure the return on investment, or that no one will engage with the content.

But don't let this fear stop you—you never know what could happen until you try.

Maureen and John allocate 20-25% of their client budget for projects that explore new ideas, like interactive content.

Another challenge marketers may face is that interactive content can become irrelevant quickly (like most content).

For the NeoLuxe Marketing team's quiz, they had to learn a lot about statistics and correlation, which could be a challenge for some marketers. Additionally, it was a significant time investment to create all the post-quiz content. Maureen shares a blog post that explains her team's challenges and results.

Q6: How can teams measure the success of their interactive content?

Set both long- and short-term goals for any interactive content campaigns.

Develop your interactive content so you can measure its impact through views, shares, form submissions, click-throughs, and more.

In Maureen's case, the team has top-of-funnel goals like lead capture and is tracking the number of people who take the quiz, the number of conversions, and engagement on the post-quiz emails.

Q7: What tools or resources do you recommend for marketers looking to create and host interactive content?

Maureen, Erika, and John share their favorite tools for interactive content below. What did they miss? Tell us in the comments.

About Alek Irvin

Alek Irvin is a content marketing professional with a rich history in social media management, executive thought leadership development, and media relations. As a consultant at Erika Heald Marketing Consulting, he creates human-focused content and thought leadership platforms that help brand leaders connect and engage with their communities. Alek has worked with a range of startups and Fortune 500 companies across the B2B technology and consumer spaces, including IBM, Dell Technologies, Hitch Works, Emtrain, Integrate, and Frameable. Connect with him on Twitter @AlekIrvin.

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