Interactive and Shoppable Content – The cutting edge digital marketing, 2020

Let me ask you a few questions.

What does engage you more? A monotonous speech or an active question-answer session?

What do you enjoy more? A long concert or karaoke with your friends?

I am sure your answer is “the latter” for both of the questions.

We, humans, love interacting with each other – be it our everyday life, or digital marketing. Since its conception a century ago, marketing has long been one-directional. Content marketers design and publish the marketing content to the target audience. For the past five years, and especially in 2020, things have been changing. With the clutter in the digital marketing space and changes in the target audience behaviors, passive, one-way marketing will no longer derive desired results. A more effective alternative in 2020 is digital marketing with interactive content.

According to the 2018 benchmark study by Demand Matric, 96% of the digital marketers who participated in the survey believe this.

“Content interactivity impacts the buyer’s decisions.”

In the 2015 content preference survey by Demand Gen Report, 91% of the customers prefer interactive content over traditional content.

What is interactive content?

Interactive content in marketing is anything that a buyer participates in – answer a quiz, customize a graph, click, or swipe. It enables two-way communication between the marketer and the target audience. Interactive marketing content enables the audience to participate in the advertisement campaign actively and derive benefits. When marketers use interactive content, it benefits them in multiple ways.

Benefits of interactive content in marketing

  • Interactive content helps customers to control and personalize the marketing content. It helps them develop a deeper relationship with the brand.
  • Customers voluntarily offer data when they participate in interactive marketing. Digital marketers can use this data to find market trends.
  • Interactive content in marketing allows the customers to evaluate their options; it’s much efficient than a direct, passive pitch.
  • Interactive content improves conversion rates. Interactive content prompts the buyers to click on something in the advertisement. It results in them spending more time with the ad and improves the chances of them buying the product.
  • Interactive content engages the buyers at a deeper level and helps them connect with the brand more meaningfully.

What are the main types of interactive content?

With the obvious benefits of the interactive content and statistics that prove it,  online marketing space is now flooding with interactive marketing content. If you haven’t started utilizing this fantastic tool, 2020 is the right time to do it. Here are some of the interactive content categories.

Interactive Quizzes: The interactive quizzes have fun and thrilling elements that will engage the customer. Many of the interactive quizzes online revolve around trivia and fun, but businesses do utilize interactive quizzes to gather data about the customers and understand customer preferences. As an interactive marketing content, quizzes are highly effective. An interactive quiz from Buzzfeed attracted more than 22 million people. A more technical quiz conducted by Bolt IoT, attracted more than 100k visitors.

Do you want to create an interactive quiz? Here is a place to start.

Interactive Infographics: Infographics has been a great success in representing data or statistics in a visual form. Interactive infographics take in one notch higher. They allow the viewers to customize their experience. Interactive infographics take input from the users in the form of keystrokes or mouse hover and transform dynamically. There are multiple benefits to interactive infographics. For customers, it gives them a deeper understanding of the subject. For marketers, interactive infographics engage the customers for a longer time, resulting in high conversion rates.

If you would like to start creating interactive infographics, you could try this.

Augmented Reality(AR): Augmented Reality enables marketers to overlay videos, images, or text onto real-life subjects like people. AR has advanced so much that this overlay is seamless. AR helps marketers in engaging with the customers in a three dimensional way by overlaying information on the static advertisements. Customers find AR-powered marketing quite engaging. Brands across the world are using augmented reality for promoting their products. For example, the French fashion brand Dior uses AR on Instagram for trying out sunglasses. L’Oreal Paris uses AR-powered technology for virtual tryouts of lipsticks.

If you would like to start with AR for your interactive marketing campaign, check here.

Interactive 360 Videos: Video marketing is a lasting trend for quite some time. In 2020, you need to experiment with the interactive, 360-degree videos. These videos give your customers a thrilling and fun experience while browsing through your brand or products. 360-degree videos are excellent in covering an event or showing the behind-the-scenes of your brand. This 2016 Google analysis of 360 videos shows that it creates more click-through rates, shares, and subscriptions.

There is quite a few interactive content, including surveys, assessments, interactive ebooks, interactive emails, webinars, and interactive calculators.

Shoppable Content – A top digital marketing trend of 2020

Content from which customers can initiate a purchase action – that’s the shoppable content. It’s a hot digital marketing trend that started in 2018. The biggest boost to shoppable content was when Instagram rolled out its “shoppable post” feature in March 2018. According to a study by Styla, shoppable content has multiple advantages over traditional marketing content.

  • Shoppable content prompts customers to stay longer (about 60%) on a content page. Longer they stay, the chances of conversion goes higher.
  • The click-through rate of shoppable content is 22%, which is much higher than the CTR of the traditional content.
  • Shoppable content ensures higher sales as there are lesser steps between a customer seeing a product and the purchase.

Any content can be tailored to shoppable content. You just need to be a little more creative.

Text Content: The text content like blog posts can turn into shoppable content if you provide the correct purchase links at the appropriate locations. A carefully designed text will make sure that by the time the customer reaches the product link, they are convinced about the purchase action.

Instagram Posts/ Images: Images are a powerful way of getting customers to notice your products. What if the product images accompany little price tags? Images are compelling shoppable content, as images have the power to entice the customers. Instagram Shoppable Posts are a great hit among the customers.

Videos: In 2018 December, Ted Baker London released a shoppable video for men’s apparel. It has trigger points at which customers can initiate and complete a purchase in a few clicks. Shoppable videos are becoming a top digital marketing trend in 2020.

There is a variety of other content like digital magazines, quizzes, webinars that can be turned into shoppable content. Shoppable content exploits multiple benefits of interactive content and ensures that browsing converts into a purchase.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Share This

Copy Link to Clipboard

Copy