Find out what is interactive marketing, a few examples of how you can implement it, and what the best software for it is.
Interactive marketing is the practice of engaging customers directly through content such as providing clickable flowcharts, extensive chatbots, or even a one-to-one line of communication. Interactive marketing is different from the traditional approach as it turns a passive visitor into an active consumer.
These marketing initiatives bring a large array of benefits, part of which is getting visitors more engaged with your website or application, however, are quite hard to implement properly. Interactive marketing can quickly overpower any informational content. Additionally, overall marketing costs will also be higher as a lot more attention, care, and time is required to develop good interactive elements.
As such, creating a good interactive marketing strategy and implementing it requires a good foundation. You have to understand the target audience, their needs, and how to fulfill them through interactive content.
As interactive marketing is harder and more costly to implement than the traditional approach, it should have some great benefits to make it worth the effort. Luckily, even with being a relatively new phenomenon, interactive marketing has been shown to produce major advantages for those who can properly utilize it.
In the digital era, capturing the attention of customers is getting increasingly more difficult as there’s simply so much attractive content on the internet. Traditional marketing can only go so far as without interactive content users are simply left to passively consume information.
With interactive marketing, the same piece of content may be reused by the visitor numerous times. Additionally, interactive content is usually significantly more memorable as user input requires paying more attention than passive information consumption.
Interactive content may be used for more than fun or entertainment. There are numerous pieces of content such as flowcharts or chatbots that can influence buying decisions by providing an easy-to-use way to narrow down the options a customer has. Interactive marketing may be used to add such content into various pages or blog posts to lead a customer down a purchasing decision.
Additionally, call-to-actions may be considered a form of interactive marketing. Implementing “buy now” buttons in several areas of a website has now become fairly common as it does definitely improve conversion rates.
Traditional marketing approaches feedback collection by implementing emails or other communication weeks after customers have purchased a product. Interactive marketing may include quizzes, polls, or feedback forms into the customer journey.
Such an approach also reduces the time it takes for a business to gather customer feedback. Interactive marketing can create a new channel that instantly delivers feedback instantly and regularly.
Enumerating all of the possibilities for interactive marketing is nearly impossible. It’s an emerging field that constantly has innovation, software, and options popping up every few months or so. These interactive marketing examples are just some of the most popular choices businesses already use.
These are the favored approach for interactive marketing by those businesses that are mostly run on social media platforms. Fairly few famous influencers have never run a contest or giveaway as these provide a great way to raise visibility and attract attention.
Other businesses may also use giveaways for other interactive marketing reasons. They may create a test run for newer products, essentially getting a way to easily collect feedback while raising brand awareness. Giveaways and contests may not only be a part of interactive marketing, but also a part of the public relations strategy, if implemented correctly, such as through donating something to a charity or other good cause.
Interactive storytelling is part of the outlined marketing approach. Simply put, maintaining attention in long-form content can be difficult, so adding interactive elements makes readers more likely to stay on the page.
It should be noted that simply dropping a few images isn’t interactive storytelling per se. These should provide some sort of interaction with the potential exception for GIFs.
Finally, it’s quite common nowadays to include interactive videos in long-form content. Usually, these interactive videos either supplement the existing content or replace it entirely and provide an easier way to digest the information.
Ecommerce businesses run a lot of personalized content. Abandoned cart emails are a great example of both personalized content and interactive marketing. They are usually sent out if a potential customer has forgotten to complete their purchase.
Other types of personalized content may be user-specific recommendations. Many ecommerce businesses use those, however, that can be applied to nearly any business that runs a newsletter, blog, or any other form of content.
A less often used, but still powerful way to engage customers is to give them the opportunity to contact someone from your team at a moment’s notice. While it may not be a usual approach to interactive marketing, having someone to talk to about a potential purchase is incredibly effective.
These elements of interactive marketing can be integrated through either simple chatbots that allow users to request actual humans to help them out or by adding simple “contact support” buttons into important pages.
To incorporate interactive marketing properly a business has to first weigh their options. All of the methods outlined above are slightly more time-consuming or costly than a traditional approach. As a result, it can run up marketing costs without providing significantly more value.
Largely, the approach taken should be defined by the target audience. B2B businesses or those selling luxury goods, for example, will rarely benefit from giveaways. These audiences simply will not find such interactive marketing enticing.
On the other hand, the same audience will highly value personalized content. So, marketing initiatives should be focused on delivering something that would be tailor made for the intended business or person.
Another important consideration is to weigh the resources of the current marketing team. They may want to create interactive content such as videos, but if there’s no one with editing skills available, the costs may become prohibitive.
As a result, the marketing strategy should largely be lifted from the traditional approach, but should allow for minor tweaks and experimentation. Interactive marketing, after all, isn’t intended to replace traditional marketing. Interactive marketing should supplement it.
Interactive marketing should provide ways for customers to engage with the content. It may be implemented through various methods, ranging from videos to flowcharts or even direct 1-on-1 communication. As such, interactive marketing is best understood as a framework.
Those who want to implement interactive marketing, however, should be cautious about getting too hyped about it. The traditional approach should still form the foundation for all marketing activities. Interactive marketing should be used to supplement the foundation in order to squeeze out more ROI from regular activities.
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