Let’s face it: traditional marketing is dead or dying. Okay, that might be something of an exaggeration. But at the very least, any business worth their salt- small businesses and lean startups especially- should be expanding beyond traditional media for their strategic marketing needs.
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How to Improve Marketing with Interactive Content?
Read on to find out a little more about what interactive content is, and why it should be part of your own marketing strategy.
What is interactive content marketing?
What we’re calling traditional marketing could fairly be described as adverts for newspaper and radio, leaflets, billboards- that sort of thing. It’s nothing more than getting your message out, and in front of as many sets of eyes as possible.
If we’re talking digital, traditional marketing covers concepts like PPC advertising, blogs and articles. It’s the same principle of getting as many page views as you can. (contd.: How to Improve Marketing with Interactive Content?)
Traditional marketing can be very successful, but it fails on one key point. The advertiser is active, and the potential customer is passive. Because we see so many adverts per day, just watching TV or walking around town, we tune them out.
Interactive marketing turns this idea on its head. The customer plays an active part in the advertising process by interacting with what’s put in front of them. As an advertiser, you can go beyond a tagline: you can tell a story, and you know that the person on the other end will actually be listening.
But what actually IS interactive marketing?
The best way of illustrating how interactivity could benefit your marketing strategy is through example.
1. Real time infographics
We use interactive marketing as part of our core marketing strategy. Probably our most successful example was last summer, when we rode the tsunami-behemoth that was Pokémon Go.
As it happened, Pokemon Go was only part of the craze: the craze itself became a craze, as people were fascinated with how the game seemed to take over the world. People loved hearing about how many people were downloading the game per second, and how much money it made per day.
We harnessed that to earn 100,000 users and 400+ quality backlinks in eleven days.
2. Real time graphs
A year or so before, we applied the same concept to Black Friday shopping. This time, a little plugin graph showed where money was being spent all the way through Black Friday. The data was based on over 60,000 consumer apps and three years’ worth of customer purchase behavior. (contd.: How to Improve Marketing with Interactive Content?)
A number of tools at the bottom could change the rate of time passing: so the graph could either go slowly, so you could actually try and understand it, or at a thousand miles an hour- so you could get an idea of the real scale of money spent.
Again, this really taps into the craze of the craze itself: Black Friday is a great day to pick up deals, but it’s also sort of fun to revel in the sheer scale of it, and the lengths people will go to at Walmart to pick up those last few discount TV’s.
3. Interactive quizzes
Okay- on to one that was nothing to do with us, for a change.
Orbitz is an online business that helps people to research and organise their business trips. It’s the sort of concept that’s a little difficult to advertise: how do you put that on the side of a bus, or in a PPC ad, and expect many conversions?
Instead, Orbitz made a quiz. It’s an interactive quiz called ‘Is your travel partner a perfect match?’ And it’s quite funny, and fun to take, even if you aren’t going on a business trip. The great thing about it is that quizzes are fun in their own right, and they play really well on social media.
4. Interactive storytelling
Last but not least, interactive marketing is a great way of telling a story. A story that you know for sure is going to find an interested audience.
Tully Luxury Travel are- yep, you guessed it- in the travel business. Advertising holiday destinations is probably the easiest job in marketing. But if anything, that makes it even more difficult to stand out. (contd.: How to Improve Marketing with Interactive Content?)
That’s why they put together an interactive microsite that allows you to explore your destination before you close your browser. Click on the page for, say, Bali and you can learn more about the island, the experience of tourists who go there, and check out wonderful photos taken by real people.
It’s a great example of how interactive marketing can hook you in, and leave you wanting more.
So- should we ditch traditional marketing?
No, we shouldn’t, and here’s why. While interactive marketing can be a great success- 100,000 new users from our Pokémon Go campaign being an example- it’s also limited.
It’s easy to jump onto a trend, but less easy to grab onto that all-important long tail. Black Friday might be a great news story on Black Friday, but not on June 12th.
That’s why you have to come up with a marketing strategy.
How to Improve Marketing with Interactive Content?
- How to Improve Marketing with Interactive Content? - August 1, 2017