Many marketers include audience education and engagement as main reasons to look at interactive content for their marketing campaigns. Yet arguably a more valuable benefit from interactive content is the valuable insights and data about consumers that can be gleamed from this format. In this post we’ll walk you through how it works.
Digital interactions facilitate learning
What happens when you have a conversation with someone? You learn about them! And with every additional conversation you have with someone, you learn more about them and build on your relationship. Interactive content marketing gives you the opportunity to do the same thing, only through a digital interaction. By making your content interactive, every action serves to create a two way interaction with your users – giving you the opportunity to learn more about your audience. As these interactions occur over time, your consumers will learn more about your services and build loyalty with your brand while you capture data on their likes & dislikes.
By interacting with your content, users are voluntarily giving you valuble information in regards to their opinions and preferences on the topic you’re presenting. Based on what you decide to convey in your content, you can learn any number of things from or about your consumers.
For example, a poll asking what consumers’ go-to drinks are on a hot summer day can enable you to learn about their consumption preferences. A list asking users to sort features they’d like to see in your product from 1st to last can give you direct real time feedback from current and potential customers. This interaction is a two way street – so while you are learning about your consumers through the insights they provide, they are learning about you as well. Your content works to inform your buyers and build brand awareness, leading to future interactions and, ultimately, more purchases.
How can marketers leverage this Data?
There are many ways you can work with the data you receive and put it to good use. One way is to use it to better target your consumers with your marketing campaigns. By aggregating the data you receive, you can get a good look at the charecteristics of your consumers and see what markets you are doing well in and where you can improve. This allows you to allocate your resources more efficiently, and can help you reach your marketing goals faster. Running multiple interactive campaigns over time will allow you to granularly close in on who you are further targeting, and can provide you with the ability to reach a one-to-one level of personalization.
Interactive content can also help you qualify leads. By placing an email capture or registration form before or after your campaign can help you accurately gain insight into the needs and goals of your audience. And based on the answers given by the consumer in various interactions, you can judge how likely they are to transition from a lead to a customer, for example. The more knowledge you learn about your consumers the better you’ll be able to personalize future campaigns, from remarketing to sending personalized outreach and more.
In addition to using the data to better market to your consumers, you can turn the data captured into content to publish. Using the results from your interactive campaigns, you’ll be able to create beautiful charts and graphs that can be a foundation for a great infographic or blog post in the future.
Let’s look at how Pearl Jam and Spotify used Interactive Brackets to woo their audience and collect valuable insights and data to increase their ROI:
Pearl Jam teamed up with Spotify who sponsored their interactive bracket to engage their fans online and generate buzz for their upcoming tour. While they went into the campaign looking for engagement, they came away with much more. The bracket was filled with 64 of Pearl Jam’s most popular songs. These songs were then matched up against another song.
First, users input their predictions as to which songs will come out on top. Then, they opened up voting round by round, with the songs that won the matchups moving on to the next round. Users who most accurately predicted the outcome earned points in each round and a handful of users with high points won a prize. This gamification and reward structure incentivized users to input their email, and allowed Pearl Jam to collect thousands of new email newsletter sign ups.
Through the campaign, Pearl Jam was able to gather valuable insight into which songs were the fan favorites. Based on the votes received in the campaign, Pearl Jam and Spotify were able to market around the songs that saw large numbers of votes. This was hugely effective in increasing the number of streams Pearl Jam saw on Spotify, seeing a 29% month over month increase on the songs included in the campaign.
Conclusion
When running interactive content campaigns you benefit not just from great engagement, but also by gaining valuable 1st party actionable data. With this data you can make better decisions for your company when it comes to marketing. And it doesn’t hurt that consumers tend to prefer interactive content over static content – the results speak for themselves. That Pearl Jam campaign above saw users spending over 10 minutes per session participating in the campaign!
Learn more about the Votion Platform, and see how interactive content can benefit you!