How long has content been king? It’s hard to keep track.
In fact, I’d wager that content in its current form, static and unmoving, has been reigning over marketing long enough that we marketers are getting a bit bored.
Fortunately, our boredom doesn’t affect marketing, or our readers’ attention spans, as a whole. The stats behind the sales driven by marketing prove that certain types of static content, like listicles, will endure forever. They tap directly into the human psyche in a way that Vines and infographics still don’t.
But there are ripples on the horizon. We’re just beginning to enter a new era of content creation. One which harkens back to the cleverest of spread ads in magazines, like cutout coupons.
Interactive Content Coup
The content I speak of, fellow marketers, is interactive content. Copy that, by its very nature, forces the reader to engage.
Listen, the truth is that human attention spans are getting shorter. As a species, we already have a shorter attention span than goldfish (8 seconds versus 9 seconds). We’re going to need better aces up our sleeves if we want to drive engagement the way the Mad Men did in the Sixties. Giant campaigns can go bust without any perceivable reason these days, and small, laughable Vines can go viral and contribute 20% more conversion.
The world of marketing is slightly mad, and in order to reinstate order, we need a new king that can quell a school of goldfish-like readers. Here are 10 types of interactive content that you should try running ASAP:
1. Self Assessments
There’s nothing quite like a self-assessment when it comes to forcing your prospects to reassess their need for your product. It’s certainly safer than “fear marketing” (which turns off some), but hits the same nerves.
The most famous self-assessment is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), with hundreds of questions and results that can be dozens of pages long. But branded self-assessments shouldn’t be that long and or hard to produce. In fact, if you’ve been doing your buyer persona homework, you should already know exactly what questions to ask your prospects. Now you just need to put them into a .doc and pop them into a WordPress form or mailmerge.
2. Calculators
Unless they somehow tie directly into your product or service (like a compound interest calculator for a mutual fund), calculators aren’t going to drive people to your site. But they are extremely useful, can be “appified” and will certainly give you easy brand visibility.
The key is to make a calculator that is related to your product in some way or another, and to make one that your competitors haven’t already put out there. There’s no value in reproducing interactive inbound marketing that your prospects may have already seen elsewhere. That just makes it a gimmick.
3. Quizzes
Like self-assessments, quizzes (like Zimbio’s Which Game of Thrones Character Are You?) force your prospects to reassess their need for your services. In many ways, a quiz is much better than an actual salesman because it’s disarming yet similarly effective.
Quizzes and self-assessments also provide value by giving you direct insights into the minds of your target buyers. The data a well-run quiz produces is enough to change your entire content strategy. But even if it doesn’t, you can still make a cool infographic out of it.
4. Automated Diagnostic Tools
The best example of an automated diagnostic tool is the Internet speed test site (especially the one by Ookla). But an even better one would tell you what mistakes you’re making and what you could be doing better in the results (like Neil Patel’s Quicksprout homepage). While they’re not as interactive as the other types of content mentioned here, they do force your prospects to pass a litmus test.
Do I trust and value this brand’s opinion enough to let this tool diagnose me? Chances are that if they click it, they’d buy it, too. It’s up to you to frame the sell in the right way at the right time.
5. Idea Generators
These are honestly the least useful of all the interactive content types you could create, but they have the highest chance of going viral. (Remember John Travolta’s Adele Dazeem name generator?)
If you can make your prospects laugh, who cares whether the generator is related to your product or not? It should be, but you’re already in win-win territory.
6. Surveys/Polls
The bread and butter of interactive content for online magazines and news sites (the MayPac fight was the last event to generate a lot of these), surveys and polls are incredibly versatile and can give you deep insights into your prospects and buyers. No brand should do any serious marketing without them.
And you don’t need to have a newsletter to run a survey or poll, either. All you need is a landing page, a tweet, a Facebook post and a LinkedIn post, and you’re halfway to golden.
7. Gifographics
A relatively new entrant in the interactive content arena, gifographics haven’t hit their stride yet, but they have a lot of potential. The image above is actually the last frame of a simple gifographic-like chart.
Pinterest is currently the best place to find branded examples of gifographics, and there are only a handful out there that are any good. Quicksprout’s How Google Works is still one of the best examples.
8. Interactive Videos
YouTubers have been creating interactive videos for years. Savvy YouTube celebrities seamlessly weave comments, clickable text boxes and links to other videos to promote their channels all the time. Why can’t brands do the same in their videos?
Because it’s “salesy”? So what? Why are you creating these videos in the first place if not to drive sales?
Creating marketing videos to be “helpful” is one thing if you’re a Fortune 500 company looking to greatly increase your thought leadership visibility. But when you’re a bootstrapped startup, you better be able to track conversions from your video marketing.
9. Interactive Print Ads
The one item on this list that you may not have actually seen yet, interactive ads are making a big splash in the print world. Hubspot created a top 15 list on the subject that includes some impressive feats of advertising engineering in a traditional medium that are sure to leave deep impressions on readers.
10. Games
Last but not least, gamification is still doing its best to infiltrate the corporate world. It hasn’t truly succeeded yet. Gamification ranks dead last in polls that ask marketers to rank the importance of content, and sometimes it doesn’t even show up as an option. When it does appear on sites, it’s usually limited to simple elements, like the acquisition of progression badges in Codeacademy courses (shown above).
But the importance of gamification, based on the success of the gaming industry and human psychology, cannot be understated. It’s only a matter of time before gamification comes into its own. In the meantime, Clickipedia has rounded up 25 of the best examples of gamification in business.
New World Order?
Will interactive content drastically change the way marketers do content marketing? Not a chance. Even with the advent of different channels and mediums for marketing, human psychology only changes so much.
But will interactive content make content marketing much more exciting and fun for both content creators and customers? Absolutely.
So, what are you waiting for? Go get your hands wet with these 10 types of interactive content. And let me know how it goes.
