The Real Reason Interactive Content Will Double Your Marketing Success

Incase you haven’t heard, Interactive content is the most effective type of content today. According to a benchmark report by Demand Metric Research, it can literally double your marketing success by increasing traffic, leads and engagement. At the same time, 91% of buyers prefer content with an interactive element. With stats like that, we could obviously all use a bit more interactive content in our organizations to successfully engage, delight and keep our lead gen ticking.

 What do we mean by interactive content?

When we say interactive content, we are talking about all of that stuff you find on the internet that interacts and customizes to individual users. Quizzes, interactive white papers and infographics, polls, surveys, calculators, assessment and selectors all fall into the category of interactive content. The cool thing about this kind of content is that it changes uniquely for each user, so people can get real time results, learn about themselves or become part of your story by using the content. Interactive content is great because it generates a wealth of data while keeping things fun and interesting for your audience. ZEF, Qzzr and SnapApp are just a few examples of companies that can help you to create quality and engaging interactive content for your organization.

 But is this just a fad?

What’s the lifespan, and should we invest in more interactive content in the future? We often have to ask ourselves this question because things move fast in the world of content and marketing trends. Often, something is here today and gone tomorrow.

But interactive content is going nowhere, and there are a lot of biological, historical and cultural reasons that suggest it’s here to stay.

 We’re wired for interactive content

The fact is that we are neurologically wired to reflect, connect and interact. It’s in our nature. That’s why interactive content isn’t just a fad. For the past thousands of years, we have been interacting with each other and the world around us by default. Whether we spoke, fell in love, hunted, traded or shopped we had face to face interactions, and we came into physical contact with the world. We didn’t have any other options.

 This is just the beginning

We’re at a unique historical moment where Interactive media technology is finally possible.

The past 100 years made up the first century of mass consumed passive content that the world had ever seen. Think about it. When cinema, radio and television first came out, they were strictly passive mediums. That passivity was accepted for decades, because for a long time there weren’t other options.

Even 30 years ago, it wasn’t possible for us to provide interactive content to people on any large scale. There are two main reasons for this.

For one thing, there was the distribution issue. Over the last few decades the internet has obviously shaped how we can share and distribute content. Are you old enough to remember your childhood without ‘cell phones’ or the internet? We take it for granted, but It wasn’t that long ago that the internet completely revolutionized how we can share and use media. 1990 wasn’t that long ago in the history of the world, but think of how much our culture has been shaped by the internet since then and you see a radically new planet.

And then you can factor in the fact that only in recent years is it affordable to make interactive content. Making something like a quiz or an interactive video in the past would have been a major financial production. You would have to turn to a professional production house and skilled programmers and invest tens of thousands. But now there are countless softwares out there that can help you to quickly generate this kind of content very affordably.

The point is that up until now we couldn’t really make interactive content available on a mass level. It was just too expensive and the technology wasn’t there to deliver it. These days, we have the technology to easily and cheaply deliver media experiences that are more human and intuitive, and so the demand for it is also here.

Interaction is an important part of our human nature, and today’s technology lets us share our stories and individualize our experiences like never before.

Interactive content that customizes to us as individuals brings us a sense of ownership and human value that inspires us to keep sharing and coming back for more. That is why it is so popular, and that is why it’s here to stay. The desire to interact with the world around us is written into our DNA. As the world becomes more technology dominated we will continue to demand experiences that are more personal, real time and intuitive from the technology that we live with.

The demand for interactive content is now

To sum it up, Interactive content is more than an incredibly effective modern marketing trend. It’s an opportunity - a demand - for us to bring technology closer to our neurological and cultural roots and make it more human once again.

Call it what you want. Is it beautiful, frightening, intriguing or strange? The truth is that interactive content has officially arrived and it’s here to stay. To learn more about how you can effectively use the power of interactive content marketing, download our free guide below.