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.

Video marketing is one of the top digital marketing trends of 2020. Videos are the best to engage people and offer a huge return on investment for digital marketers.

When you think of videos and digital marketing, the first name that pops up is YouTube! Do you know how many users YouTube has? It has 2 billion users worldwide! Statistics also show that 79% of internet users have their own YouTube account. Without a doubt, YouTube is the largest video sharing platform that digital marketers use in 2020.

If YouTube is so great, why are we even thinking about other platforms for video content marketing? I know you are asking this question right now. I can think of multiple reasons why you should consider alternate video sharing platforms other than YouTube.

Why should you consider other video sharing platforms?

YouTube is the most popular video-sharing platform, but it has many limitations. I will give you five reasons why you should think about alternate platforms other than YouTube.

Content Restriction: We all know about YouTube’s stringent content policy. While to a certain extent, it protects the viewers and creators alike. However, the tight copyright rules sometimes may result in the suspension of the account, disabling of ads that will hugely impact the digital marketers.

DCMA Takedown: YouTube is very strict about copyright claims. That’s not a bad thing. However, YouTube deals the copyright issues with an iron fist. If your account is accused of copyright infringement multiple times, YouTube might delete your account and remove your content altogether.

Advertisements: Even though it helps you make money, YouTube advertisement can get a bit annoying for your users. Sometimes, ads of your competitor or ads of a notorious brand might appear on your video.

The competition: With it’s 2 billion users, YouTube has a huge viewership, but so is the competition. It’s tough to get some attention for your video on YouTube.

 The infamous comment section: Anyone can comment on public videos on YouTube. The comment section in YouTube videos might turn ugly with inappropriate content that might affect your brand. Often viral videos are hijacked by spam or ads. While it’s possible to moderate and remove comments, it may not be practical when you have hundreds of comments.

Video-Sharing Platforms That You Can Use Instead of YouTube

As a digital marketer, you can use several websites as a replacement for YouTube. Here is a list of YouTube-alternatives for video content marketing.

1. Vimeo
2. Dailymotion
3. Metacafe
4. TikTok
5. Veoh
6. Flickr
7. Photobucket
8.  Instagram TV (IGTV)
9. Facebook

Vimeo – A Classy Alternative for YouTube

Vimeo is a video sharing platform widely used by artists, musicians, and filmmakers. Compared to YouTube, Vimeo users are more like a gated community. Vimeo has an excellent interface and known as a “classier” alternative for YouTube.

For a digital marketer, here are the pros and cons of using Vimeo.

Pros of Vimeo

• Vimeo has 170 million monthly views.  
• Vimeo has a clutter-free interface that concentrates most on the video rather than the things around it.
• Vimeo is great to tap into specific customer personas like artists and creative people.
• Vimeo allows creators to upload high-quality videos even 4K Ultra HD
• The paid plan of Vimeo includes 1TB video storage and a wide range of tools for content creators.

Cons of Vimeo

• Vimeo doesn’t support ads if you are looking for monetization.
• Business subscription is costly but comes with a wide range of benefits
• Vimeo is limited for certain sectors of target audience – artists and high-quality content seekers.

Dailymotion – A Flexible YouTube Alternative

Dailymotion is a popular website that is quite like YouTube. The primary difference between YouTube and Dailymotion is in the video length. The maximum length is 60 minutes in Dailymotion. It doesn’t have stringent rules like YouTube, and chances of accounting getting removed or suspended are very less.

Pros of Dailymotion

• High content flexibility. Copyright is respected, but an infringement of copyright doesn’t lead to suspension or content removal.
• Dailymotion has more than 300 million users. You can reach a new target audience.
• Monetization through ads is possible on Dailymotion.

Cons of Dailymotion

• 60-minute video limit, and additional constraints like 10 videos per day or a maximum of 2hrs of video per day.
• Lesser reach compared to YouTube videos
• Analytics of video performance is limited compared to YouTube

Metacafe – A YouTube alternative for short videos

If you have short videos under the 90s, Metacafe is a great place to feature them. It’s a tough competitor of YouTube, with 40 million unique visitors every month. Metacafe concentrates on entertainment and music videos. However, in recent years, Metacafe is used by marketers for product reviews. Here are the pros and cons of Metacafe.

Pros of Metacafe

• Metacafe is an older platform that YouTube has a massive volume of videos.
• Metacafe is a great platform if your target audience is keen on entertainment. 
• Metacafe membership is free, and you can monetize your channel via ads.
• Metacafe promotes videos that have high quality, and there is a huge reviewer network for Metacafe.

Cons of Metacafe

• 90 seconds video limit is a massive deal-breaker for digital marketers,
• Metacafe is mostly focused on entertainment, may not be suitable for the technical or scientific content.
• The quality of the videos is not as great as YouTube.

TikTok – The Common-man’s Alternative for YouTube

In 2020, TikTok is taking the internet by storm. TikTok started as a fun app, but soon gained popularity among crowds. Today, TikTok is a strong competitor for YouTube and other video sharing apps. TikTok allows users to create 15 or 60-second videos and is completely free.

Pros of TikTok

• TikTok might be the most popular video-sharing app in 2020, with more than 800 million users worldwide.
• While TikTok doesn’t directly allow the monetization of content, it’s a great place to find sponsors or affiliate marketing.
• TikTok videos are of low production cost, and you don’t have to look for perfection like YouTube.

Cons of TikTok

• Video length is limited to either 15 or 60 seconds.
• Affiliate marketing on TikTok is quite expensive.
• TikTok is primarily used by the younger generation of 16-24 years.
• You need to be very creative to send your message to your target audience in less than 60 seconds.

Veoh – The Long Video Alternative for YouTube

If you have long video content like reviews, tutorials, how-to guides, Veoh is a perfect place to host them. Veoh is not precisely a video sharing website. It’s an internet television website that has some similarities with Netflix and Amazon Prime. Veoh is suitable for digital marketers and content creators who target the television audience.

Pros of Veoh

• Veoh allows long content and full-length films. There is no restriction on the file size.
• Veoh allows content creators to monetize their content through revenue sharing or charging fees for their videos.
• If your target audience is interested in movies/series, then Veoh will be a good fit.

Cons of Veoh

• Veoh receives traffic from a highly specific area of the audience. Hence you need to use the platform specifically for this audience.
• Veoh interface and website aren’t as sophisticated as Vimeo or YouTube.
• Veoh has a long uploading time. You need to be patient while uploading.
• No monetization through ads.

Video-Sharing through Social Media

We have discussed the exclusive video sharing websites that can act as an alternative to YouTube in 2020. When you think of YouTube alternatives, don’t forget the video-sharing capabilities of popular social media. Facebook has an excellent video sharing capability, so does Instagram. Instagram TV (IGTV) is popular among the common folks and celebrities alike. Also, image sharing apps like Flickr and Photobucket have video sharing features.

Digital marketing trends are evolving every single day. In 2020, with COVID-19 pandemic, people are spending more time online. It’s the right time to experiment with some new trends in digital marketing. These new trends will help you reach a huge target audience.

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made its way into the digital marketing realm. The use of AI continues to be a top digital marketing trend, even in 2020. If you haven’t already experimented with this cutting edge technology in marketing, it’s high time to start. Every business around the globe is tapping into the massive potential of Artificial Intelligence for marketing.

Here are four top digital marketing areas in which Artificial Intelligence can be used.

• Chatbots and conversational marketing
• AI-powered personalization of marketing content
• Content creation and curation using artificial intelligence
• Computer Vision

We will briefly touch upon each of them. At the end of the article, you will have a good idea about the top digital marketing trends of 2020 that use Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence in conversational marketing – Chatbots

Digital marketing is no longer an impersonal exercise of creating content and pushing ads online. Customers in 2020 value marketing that they can personally connect. Conversational marketing is a big part of Digital Marketing. Almost every website and social media have chat boxes to interact with prospective customers. However, it may not be economical to assign humans to handle hundreds of conversations online.

Artificial Intelligence provides a perfect solution – chatbots. Chatbots are in trend for some years now, but in 2020, digital marketing uses highly advanced chatbots.

The natural language processing technique of AI is effectively used to make chatbots sound just like humans. There are multiple benefits in using chatbots to interact with your prospective customers.

• Highly intelligent chatbots closely resemble human conversations
• With chatbots, you will be available for prospective customers 24*7
• Instant response to customer queries
• Connect to potential customers on a personal level
• Relieve customers from filling tedious surveys or forms

Studies indicate that customers like chatbots as they are prompt and accurate to reply, patient, and are highly personalized. While it’s a great idea to use chatbots in digital marketing, you should be careful about the conversation sequence and tone of chatbots. If used smartly, chatbots can be a great gift of Artificial Intelligence to Digital marketing.

Artificial Intelligence for personalized digital marketing in 2020

With the clutter in digital marketing content, customers no longer respond to generic advertisements or marketing campaigns. If you haven’t embraced personalized marketing, 2020 is the right year for it.

People spend a lot of time online, and they create a lot of content – in the form of social media posts, comments, and reactions. Artificial Intelligence provides the ability to analyze these customer data to create personalized ads. The following are some examples of personalized digital marketing using AI.

Personalized Ads – AI algorithms help to analyze data related to location, education, hobbies, career, and personal interests of your prospective customers. Based on this data, digital marketing campaigns can be customized to suit each target audience.

Personalized Emails – Instead of a generic marketing email, customers respond better to emails that speak to them on an individual level. If you have a great email audience, then AI will help you process the data of each of your customers to add personalization elements to their email. This data includes time preferences, interests, hobbies, jobs, and social circles. Superdry, a UK based clothing company, used AI to personalize their email marketing. They made a massive ROI with this technique.

Personalized Website experience – In 2020, the businesses are moving away from cheap, run-of-the-mill websites. Instead, with the use of AI, you can provide a highly personalized home page for your customers. On their returning visit, this customized home page will help your customers to connect better with the business.

Content creation and curation powered by Artificial Intelligence

In 2016, the Washington Post used an AI-powered software named Heliograf to write articles about the Rio Olympic Games since then. This AI-powered software has written hundreds of articles for Washington Post.

The natural language generation capability of Artificial Intelligence is a big boon for digital marketers who wants to create automated content in 2020. The content bots can help you create auto-blogs, ad content, and in-depth articles that are optimized for search engines.  However, the content created using AI solutions might need to be verified and edited by humans.

Content Curation: This is another area where Artificial Intelligence can help digital marketing. AI-powered tools can search the web for content that is relevant to your business, share the same content. Content curation using AI also includes scheduling of content and releasing the content automatically through multiple social media.

Computer Vision – An AI solution for digital marketing

Computer Vision is a term related to Artificial Intelligence, where computers can derive knowledge from the digital images and videos that it process. With CV, computers not only display the images or play the video, but they can also understand what they are displaying and derive information from it.

That sounds really cool, right?

So, now let’s see how the AI-Powered computer vision helps digital marketing.

Brand identification for understanding competition – One of the major challenges for digital marketers to study the competition for a business they represent. With the help of Computer Vision, digital marketers can now scan millions of images to recognize brand logos and other indicators. This will help digital marketers to identify which brands dominate what platforms, helping the competitive analysis. Gumgum is a company that specializes in brand recognition through computer vision.

Gathering customer reactions – With computer vision, digital marketers can now analyze images that customers post as part of their review or social media post. Just like we analyze the written content by the customers to measure their satisfaction, now digital marketers can use computer vision to measure customer’s reactions.

If you haven’t embraced Artificial Intelligence for your digital marketing, 2020 is the year for it. As there is a huge online audience, your digital marketing strategy using AI will give you a high return on investment.

Have you tried Artificial Intelligence-powered marketing techniques? We are excited to know how it worked for you!

Keyword research and optimising your website for those keywords are essential for boosting organic traffic.

However, when you have done the above two, your job is not quite finished!

You need to keep monitoring the performance of your target keywords.

• What are the top search phrases that your website is ranking for?
• Who are your main competitors for those keywords?
• What’s the trend of your keyword rank over a period?

Does it sound too much work? Don’t worry. In this article, I will walk you through five awesome websites that will help you track the search performance of your target keywords. These websites are easy to use and quite user-friendly.

This is my promise. After you have finished reading this article, it will only take you 10-15 minutes to set up the keyword performance tracking for your website.

So, let’s dive right in.

SEMRush

SEMRush is the most popular website that provides a wide range of SEO related services. SEMRush has many products to evaluate and boost the online visibility of your website.

So, let’s just login to SEMRush and see their products and services.

As you login to SEMRush, the landing page would be a dashboard with a myriad of options. Let me walk you through this dashboard. The dashboard of SEMRush can be divided into two main sections.

Section 1: General analysis of any domain or keyword

If you are looking for digging deeper into your domain’s online presence (or your competitor’s) or looking for the keywords that will work for you, there are several analytics tools available within the SEMRush website.

• Domain Analytics: It’s a quick way to check your domain’s online visibility. This includes organic and paid search traffic and number of backlinks to your website.
• Keyword Analytics: You can look up any keyword in this tool. The tool will instantly pull up the search volume for that keyword, competition level, the value of the keyword. It’s also a starting point of in-depth keyword research in SEMRush.
• Traffic Analytics: It’s a tool for diving deep into the traffic data of any website. It shows traffic from different devices, unique visitors, traffic sources, and traffic from different geographical regions.
• Gap Analysis: This is an extensive toolkit to understand the keyword gaps and backlink gaps. It allows you to add up to 5 competitors and compare the performance of your with for criteria like keyword ranking, organic, and paid traffic.

Section 2:  Continuous tracking of your website

On the dashboard of SEMRush, you will find a project section. Check the screenshot below. This is the place where you can add your website as a project to get a comprehensive analysis that includes – your high performing keywords, your ranks for each keyword, and how your website perform when compared to your competitors.

Here are the steps to create a project for the continuous monitoring of  your website. Once you set up a project, SEMRush will periodically send you the search performance of your target keywords.

Step1: Add your website as a project

Expand the project section in the main dashboard and scroll down. You will get an option to “create my first project.”

Step 2: Enter your domain and a project name and create project

Step 3: Set up position tracking 

Once you create a new project for your website, you will be redirected to the project dashboard. On this page, you can see various SEO analysis options. For keyword tracking, you need to set up the position tracking as in the below image.

Step 4: Add your keywords for performance monitoring

Once you click on the setup in the above step, you will get a page to enter the geographical details where you want to do the tracking. The next step is to add keywords that you want to track. You can either enter them manually or export them from a text or CSW file. Add the keywords to the project and start tracking.

Voila! You will start getting your weekly performance updates.

SEMRush has a lot of different tools to improve the performance of your website. It might be a little overwhelming in the beginning to use all of these tools. However, once you have done the above steps, you can explore the other tools and boost your websites online presence and organic traffic.

SEMRush is a paid website where you get a seven-day free trial.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another excellent website you can use for keyword performance tracking. You can perform the keyword rank tracking using a great tool from Ahrefs.

The Rank Tracker tool of Ahrefs

The “Rank Tracker” is an excellent tool that bundles a lot of features in one place. In my opinion, it’s a go-to place for all your keyword performance queries.

It’s very easy to start using the Rank Tracker. Here’s are the steps.  

Step1: Create a project for your website

This is a simple step, where you have to input your website URL. The Aherfs expert’s tip is to choose the http + https option while you input your domain’s URL.

Step2: Input/Import a list of keywords that you want to monitor

The next step is to provide a list of keywords to the Rank Tracker tool for monitoring. If you have only a few keywords, then you can add them manually in a comma-separated list. There are also options for importing a txt of CSW files.

If you just scroll down, you can see that the Rank Tracker tool has already picked up some top-ranking keywords for your website. How cool is that? So, you can pick some of those keywords as well.

Step 3: Add the locations for which you need the tracking data.

The Rank Tracker tool from Ahrefs will bring you ranking data from 170 countries around the world. It’s good to target a specific geographical region for a better understanding of your keyword performance

Step 4: Add competitors

The tool suggests a few possible competitors in your domain. This list is based on the top ranking websites for the keywords you had added in step 2. You can choose from the already populated list, or add specific competitor URLs

Once you add these data into the project and start monitoring, you will get a dashboard that provides you all the details you want to know about your keywords, organic traffic, competitors, and search engine rankings. The dashboard is divided into four different sections

• Overview: The graphs that show your online presence, filters for data, and raw ranking data.
• Competitors: Same as the above overview, but the data is from your five competitor URLs.
• Metrics: Gives several useful data related to your keywords. For example, the search rank, keyword difficulty, Click Per Cost(CPC), search volume, and clicks
• Grossing: It’s a section that gives you the increase and decrease in your keyword positions over a long period.

Here’s a great video from an Aherfs expert, that will help you set up the Rank Tracker tool

Ahrefs is also a paid website. Unlike the SMERush, you dont get a free trial. The seven-day trial will cost you $7. But I believe it’s worth it.

AccuRanker

If you want a super simple, yet comprehensive keyword performance tracker, then you should check out AccuRanker. 

Compared to many other keyword ranking trackers, AccuRanker is super-fast. It only takes a few seconds for the tool to pull out the keyword performance metrics.

The first page you will encounter after signing up is the AccuRanker dashboard. Share of Voice is one of the exciting matrics available in the dashboard of AccuRanker.

Share of Voice (SOV) is a metric that is underutilized by many people. Have you heard of it before? It’s a measure of your brand visibility and a gauge of your keyword performance.

AccuRanker also has a keyword dashboard. This is the place you will be spending a lot of time if you want to monitor the performance of your target keywords.

AccuRanker is a paid software, but you can sign up for a 14-day free trial.

Google Analytics

You might already know about the powers of Google Analytics for SEO analysis. But, until recently, I hadn’t explored the possibility of keyword performance tracking with Google Analytics.

While it’s great to have the keyword performance data from Google itself, setting up Google Analytics is a bit involved. It’s not a straight forward click and go like the above websites. Don’t worry. I will show you the step by step process for using Google Analytics for your keyword performance tracking. 

Step 1: Sign up for Google Search Console and Google Analytics with your Google account.

Step 2: Link your search console account with Google Analytics

• Login to Google Analytics and click on the admin

• From the landing page go to “Property Settings”

• In Property Settings, scroll down to find “Adjust Search Console”

• In the landing page, you will get a link to “add” your website to Google Analytics, click on it.

• On the landing page, you will get a list of websites you own. Choose whichever you want to connect to your Analytics. Google Analytics will redirect to Google Search Console to verify if you own the website.

• Go back to the Analytics page and refresh.

With these simple steps, Google Analytics will be able to draw data from your Google Search Console and provide you useful information.

How to view the keyword tracking data in Google Analytics?

1. Open Google Analytics dashboard
2. Go to Acquisitions
3. Click on Search Console
4. Go into Queries

When you reach the queries page, you will see the set of queries for which your website is ranking. It will give you the following details.

1. Number of clicks for each keyword.
2. Your Search Engine Ranking for that keyword.
3. Click-Through Rate.
4. The total number of impressions.

If you haven’t tried these free tools from Google, it’s worth giving them a try. We have a cool article on how you can improve your search engine ranking using the data from Google Analytics. DO Check it out!

SERPWatcher

If you are just starting out with keyword tracking, you might want to check out SERPWatcher. As their website claims, the website has quite an intuitive and simple user interface.

If you don’t want to spend too much time to walk deep into the SEO jungles, SERPWatcher promises it will only take 30 seconds from the initial setup to the daily keyword performance tracking.

The functionality of SERPWatcher is almost the same as the websites we saw above. It includes,

• Keyword performance tracking including ranking, search volume.
• Narrow the tracking based on geographical location and devices.
• Keyword tracking for multiple domains.
• Gain and loss of position for each keyword.

Once you set up the keyword tracking, SERPWatcher will send you daily updates on the performance of your keywords. SERPWatcher is from Mangools, which also provides other powerful tools like KWFinder, SERPChecker, LinkMiner, and SiteProfiler.

SERPWatcher provides ten days free trial, to get to know the tool before you make a decision.