Today, the rise of online customers’ expectations toward brands to produce thumb-stopping content and capture their attention has been challenging brands to improve their content marketing. People are demanding more meaningful experiences and more engaging content. Besides helping brands stand out and create brand recall, interactive content can help draw in some potential business partnerships as well! How?

First, what is interactive content?

Interactive content is a 2-way experience. It’s a conversation between brands and customers. Brands need to understand the root of their customers’ problems or needs and then point them to solutions. Rather than passive reading, interactive content encourages customers to take action. It can take the format of sharable content, entertainment and even shoppable posts. With interactive content, customers take an active role in consuming content by interacting through likes, swipes, shares, or even through games. The longer they stay and interact with content, the more brands are able to collect valuable insights and understand their customers’ persona.

5 types of interactive content your brand can explore

1. Interactive infographics

With info-heavy content, there is a chance your customers will not be able to absorb everything. While it’s true that static infographics can act as a visual representation of information or data, they can sometimes be a bit overwhelming. But what if we give control back to the reader, and let them choose how they want to consume this content? You can hide certain non-critical information, for instance, and point the reader to explore and tap or scroll to reveal it. To take it to another level, adding purposeful animation can further aid understanding and absorption of information, not to mention directing attention and incentivising such interactions and engagement.

2. Shoppable posts 

Welcome to the era of online shopping! As shop-streaming becomes more and more popular, shoppable content lets customers buy products immediately during a livestream. This simplifies the whole shopping experience to just a few taps. By making content shoppable, information such as price and product details can be called up with just 1 tap. It even enables customers to make a purchase right away as they scroll through social media. This reduces friction in e-commerce, and makes moving between shopping and social sharing seamless. In the age of social distancing and lesser footfalls to brick-and-mortar stores, shoppable content is the solution for brands to make their products easily available, especially if done through social media.

Shoppable content is not just limited to static content! Check out what Ikea did by combining video with shoppable content.

3. Virtual Reality

What if you can interact with a video, rather than passively watching it?  Let’s take a look at how Boursin Sensorium is killing it with how they sell their soft cheese. Fancy a roller coaster ride through the fridge? Say no more. Just watch!

Not only has this experiential video increased brand awareness among a younger target audience, it has also sparked conversations and increased sales for products featured in the video. 

4. Interactive quizzes

Research says that our attention span is getting shorter and narrower each year, dropping from 12 to 8 secs since the dawn of the smartphone era. Even more alarming is the fact that our attention span is now even shorter than a goldfish, which is 9 secs! This makes it clear that customers can lose interest quickly in content you want them to see. So how can you keep them from wandering away? Another way is to get them to participate and play! Check out this interactive quiz from Adobe’s creative types quiz. 

I got the red fella who’s creating beauty and seeing beauty….What’s yours?

5. Interactive email

Over the past year, many of us have probably received random friendly check-ins that may have started something like, “Hope you have a good day! By the way, we have this new…” Make no mistake, it’s not wrong. But have you ever bothered to read them at all? We get it, there are so many email you have to go through each day. But how can we make email more enjoyable? Through rich media content like GIFs, videos, or interactive formats! Here are some examples:

Believe it or not, interactive email content can increase the click-to-open rate by 73%. This is because people want to see something engaging in order to be curious enough to see more. This is also a great opportunity for brands to show off a bit of their brand personality.

So why should brands consider interactive content?

Interactive content can be a great tool that brands can use to communicate and engage with customers. But the strategy and the planning behind it are even more critical. At the end of the day, brands need to ensure that they know who their target audience is, and be careful not to let fancy interaction overshadow the messages they are trying to communicate.

So what will your next content be? We can’t wait to interact with it.