According to a study by Aol. and Nielsen on content sharing, a staggering “27,000,000 pieces of content are shared everyday”. Not only are consumers bombarded with content, marketers are facing big challenges on knowing who is consuming their content and how they are interacting with it. With content sharing growing at a rapid pace, marketers need to create content that reaches the right audience at the right time at a faster pace.
Content marketing tactics such as blogs, podcasts, & infographics are important for educating your audience on your brand and for generating sales. Yet these passive forms of content do not create enough opportunity for engagement. According to the Demand Metric Lead Generation Benchmark Report for 2014 “58% of the marketers say their content doesn’t create an opportunity for engagement.”
For these reasons, marketers have started creating more interactive forms of content like bracket voting campaigns, polls, quizzes, and assessments. Here are some important stats about interactive content by Content Marketing Institute that will tell you why interactive content marketing beats content marketing:
- Interactive content generates conversions moderately or very well 70% of the time, compared to just 36% for passive content.
- 93% of marketers said interactive content is somewhat or very effective at educating the buyer, versus just 70% for static content.
- 38% said interactive content is somewhat or very effective at being shared, versus just 17% for static content.
These important stats suggest that more and more marketers will make interactive form of content marketing a key element of their marketing strategies as we move forward. However, with so many interactive content tools available, marketers face a huge challenge figuring out what tool leads to higher engagement and conversion opportunities and deliver the best ROI.
As the leading provider of Bracket campaigns for our clients, we’ve seen how effective they are when used as an interactive content tool for driving engagement. Brackets are great for a few reasons:
- Brackets lets your users come back to your campaign again and again through multiple rounds of voting that leads to higher engagement over long periods of time.
- Brackets are more fun and entertaining than traditional products and create more opportunities for virality and social sharing.
- Brackets create more opportunities for building a strong community around your campaign. People are more likely to invite their friends join their experiences as they are passionate about competitors in the campaign.
With that in mind, here are some great examples of some bracket voting campaigns that led to high social engagement within a short period of time that we wanted to highlight.
- NCAA March Madness Bracket campaign: March is an exciting time for sports enthusiasts. Each year during March, tens of millions of brackets are filled out to predict the outcome of the NCAA’s tournament bracket. This bracket campaign connects with the fans on emotional level that compels them to share their experiences on social media and tell their friends to join them in their experiences. It serves as a powerful tool in building a community around the campaign that in 2014 resulted in a total of 5,583,821 mentions on social media. Here is an example live March Madness campaign.
- Pearl Jam Madness: Pearl Jam has a huge fan base. To promote their upcoming tour and keep their fans engaged, the band created a “Best Song” bracket voting campaign where users could first predict which songs would win, and then vote for their favorites round by round. Within few weeks of running this campaign, it resulted in close to 500,000 votes, tens of thousands of registrations, 1.2 million page views and thousands of social engagements .
- RadioTimes 2015 TV Champion Campaign: RadioTimes, the leading TV and Radio magazine in United Kingdom, wanted to engage fans across all TV genres to determine the 2015 TV Champion. For this, the company created a bracket voting campaign that resulted in over 120 million votes and 250k+ tweets, Facebook posts/comments . The fans loved the campaign and even celebrities like Ricky Gervais commented on it multiple times.
Conclusion:
These interactive bracket campaigns reveal that providing the right content to your users in topics they are interested in enable a far more engaging and fun type of medium: Brackets! There are many tools you can use to create buzz and engagement for your campaign, but Brackets can truly stand out. Just as other interactive content marketing tools such as polls, quizzes, & assessments are easy to create and deploy, so are Brackets. To learn more about how to create a bracket. If you want to learn how Votion can help you create a bracket similar to Ncaa tournament bracket, then contact us to learn more!