What Is Interactive Marketing? Check Out These Strategies

Are you looking for ways to increase your engagement and overall sales? Interactive marketing is here to save your day!

Interactive marketing is a two-way approach to marketing and advertising that allows consumers to engage directly with brands. This exchange of ideas usually occurs through digital marketing channels such as email, polls, chatbots, and social media.

How can you embrace this new marketing style and the hottest interactive content ideas?

Let’s find out!

When it comes to meeting consumer expectations, interactive marketing is one of the most customer-centric marketing plans.

For example, if you’re a travel company that offers tour packages, you can create an e-commerce recommendation quiz to make your marketing more interactive.

Source: Outgrow

A product recommendation quiz would ask customers about their preferences regarding the time of year, type of location (e.g., beach or mountains), budget, etc. This interactive tool analyzes the responses and provides customers with the best possible holiday package or destination recommendation.

Customers can plan a great vacation without racking their brains over numerous articles searching for the perfect travel destination. A simple interactive session can increase engagement and conversion rates for your business.

How is interactive content different from static content?

Interactive content is value-added content that attracts customers and allows them to interact and engage with a business. It’s a two-way conversation between marketers and their audiences. Popular interactive content types are calendars, quizzes, polls, e-commerce recommendations, giveaways, and chatbots.

Static content is the content that users passively consume. Examples are scrolling through a blog, e-book, or social media posts.

Relevance of interactive content in modern marketing

With the modernization of digital marketing, customers now look for more than long texts talking “at” them. They want a more conversational approach instead of a one-way marketing stream where marketers throw tons of information.

Interactive marketing focuses on building customer relationships and delivering value through meaningful interactions. It plays a critical role in this era of modern marketing.

Interactive marketing vs. traditional marketing

With interactive content, marketers make a real effort to reach customers and understand their needs and preferences, while traditional marketing follows the direct selling method. Traditional marketing is mostly tactics aimed at informing and enlightening the customers without trying to learn what they’re actually looking for.

10 interactive marketing strategies

Here are some useful interactive marketing strategies you can implement to increase engagement and improve your overall conversion rate.

1. Infographics

If you want to educate your audience in a fun, visual way, infographics are the solution. With an infographic, you can help users better understand concepts with the help of visual aids like graphs, charts, diagrams, and images.

And to enhance customer experience, you can add some interactive elements to your infographic, like scrolling effects and animations that require some action from your audience. Because of the visual element, infographics are both consumable and shareable.

2. Quizzes

A quiz is a fun, interactive form of content that tests customer knowledge on a particular subject via relevant questions. Quizzes are conversational and can get your audience to visit and interact with your site. 

Create a quiz on any topic and see personalized results. For example, you can create a quiz, “Which Friends character are you?” and provide personalized results to your users based on the answers. 

Source: Outgrow

The ease and curiosity of taking quizzes, finding exciting results, and sharing them delight customers. Additionally, quizzes offer a customized user experience and rich business data, making this interactive marketing style worth trying.

3. Calculators

A calculator is an interactive tool that solves complex financial problems. It helps present complex quantitative data in a simplified way and provides real-time, personalized results.

You can use calculators to move the customers down your sales funnel. For example, if you’re using a financing program to sell a loan, create a calculator with a relevant call-to-action like “How much interest would you pay on a home loan?”.

This makes it easier for your potential customers to know ​​the amount they can loan, the interest, and the total amount they need to repay. Calculators are inherently highly interactive as they provide real-time value to users.

4. Polls

Polls are one of the most popular forms of interactive content, prompting audiences to their opinion on a certain topic and making their voices heard. To create a poll, ask your audience an interesting question and let them choose their preferred option from a predefined list.

For example, you can create a poll as simple as “Which food is better: pizza or pasta?” or something like the once-famous “Listen to the audio and tell us what you hear: Laurel or Yanny?”.

Source: Outgrow

Polls, too, provide instant results and gratification, just like quizzes and calculators, making them another appealing form of interactive marketing.

5. Interactive emails

Email marketing is the most commonly used marketing tool. While email can sometimes be one-way communication, make it interactive by adding some personalization and, of course, interactive content to it. This gives your readers a chance to act on the email instead of just reading the usual long, boring text.

Here’s an interactive email from Forever21 for their Black Friday promotions. Who doesn’t love scratch cards and discounts!?

Source: Swipe File

Such an interactive marketing strategy naturally increases your chances of getting more clicks and conversions.

6. Interactive video

Interactive video is another interactive content that engages customers and helps companies achieve their marketing goals. Video content marketing is a great way to let customers interact with your visual content. They can click, drag, scroll, move, gesture, and perform actions on the video content.

Here’s an interactive video from Coldplay. They released “Ink” as part of their “Ghost Stories” music video. This video asks the viewers to choose which plot to follow (e.g., which path to take in the forest). Interesting, isn’t it?

Source: Coldplay.com

7. Interactive blog

A blog is a page on your website where you share your thoughts on a particular subject with your readers. An interactive blog is even better. It helps grab readers’ attention and boosts interaction on your page.

8. User-generated content

User-generated content (UGC) can be a simple yet efficient type of interactive marketing. With UGC, you invite your users to share their own content. You can further curate content in many ways, such as via a hashtag on social media platforms. This helps draw the limelight to your audience. Your potential customers can see how they can be represented and encourage them to sign up with your brand.

9. Surveys

Surveys are one of the oldest ways to collect direct user information. Use surveys to collect customer feedback, test a newly launched product, analyze product usability, and more.

10. Chatbots

A chatbot is an interactive tool that simulates human-like conversations through text or voice messages. Brands operating in the B2C and B2B space typically use these intelligent virtual assistants for customer support and marketing.

For example, if you’re an online beauty products retailer, add a beauty assistant chatbot to your website. This will help your customers choose their products easily and improve their buying experience.

Interactive marketing examples

Marketing trends are seeing an uptick. So, it’s time to prepare for a more interactive future. Here are some well-known interactive marketing examples you can draw inspiration from.

1. Alexa

Amazon’s Alexa has become so “real” and popular that it’s almost hard to think of it as a chatbot. Amazon uses this smart tool (audio bot) to increase its sales and gain popularity.

Alexa replies and offers its advice through voice commands when a user asks a question. It’s one of those interactive marketing tools that have made artificial intelligence indispensable in people’s daily lives.

2. Bailey’s

Bailey’s pet product quiz brings in about 22% of the total sales they earn each month. The quiz asks a series of questions fully consistent with the pet industry. After analyzing a user’s answers, the quiz shows relevant product recommendations.

Source: Bailey’s

3. Airbnb

Airbnb publishes user-generated content, including images, travel guides, and how-tos. This UGC has skyrocketed its position in the travel accommodation space. With the help of interactive content, they inspire people to travel more.

Source: Pixlee

Advantages of interactive marketing

Interactive marketing offers tons of benefits when done right. Let’s look at some of its main advantages.

Helps stand out from competitors

Interactive marketing entices customers to participate, engage, and interact with you. You can record their responses and offer relevant, customized solutions based. This ultimately increases your authority and authenticity with your audience and gives you an edge over your competitors.

Increases reach on social media platforms

Your customers come across diverse content on different platforms each day. But do they click all? No.

Static content like blogs and videos are everywhere. Customers look for content that speaks to them. This is where interactive content comes into play. With interactive content, you engage your audience and increase your brand reach, ultimately multiplying your earnings.

Fosters personalized interaction

Interactive marketing drives personalized and meaningful interaction between marketers and their audiences. Interactive content allows you to understand your audience’s preferences vital to improving your product.

Helps with lead generation and segmentation 

By offering your audience personalized content in the right place at the right time, you see an increase in your lead generation rate. For example, adding a lead generation form to your interactive content helps collect relevant user information.

Additionally, you can analyze the collected data and create segment users based on various parameters such as preferences, browsing habits, and budgets and use them to run retargeting campaigns.

Interactive marketing challenges

“Nothing good comes easy.” While there are various benefits of implementing interactive content into your marketing plan, interactive marketing accompanies some challenges.

• Budgeting: There are many costs associated with creating interactive content, including tools, staff training, technology, persona mapping, and more. Therefore, choosing the right content experience platform is crucial. 
• Identifying the right distribution channels: Evaluating and deciding on the right distribution channels is a challenge with interactive marketing. You need to understand your audience and how and when they use a particular channel to get the most out of your interactive content.
• Creating high-quality content: It’s difficult to understand whether a certain level of content resonates with your audience. You need to evaluate your customers’ preferences and expectations and create content accordingly. A huge roadblock can be not having any insights into how your audiences interact with your other static content. Therefore, the first phase of your interactive content journey involves taking risks and learning from your mistakes.

An uphill climb

While you may face some challenges with your interactive marketing strategy, the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Focus on overcoming the challenges with the right strategy, approach, and research and capitalize on this incredible marketing style.

Enrich customer experience in 15 simple ways and win more customers.