Interactive content – 10 effective areas of application 

After we’ve already learned about what interactive content is, why we need it and what formats are available, the last question is: Where exactly can we use it?

Regardless of industry and target group, there are countless options. Since we are all followers of the goldfish generation and rarely read long texts to the end, we limit ourselves to 10 points in this article. After all, we also want the information to reach you. So here we go, 10 effective fields of application for interactive content.

Exhibition/Events

A trade fair can often be loud, chaotic and especially very crowded. And particularly among all the competition, it is not so easy to attract the attention of the visitors. Interactive content can be used in many different ways at a trade fair, helping you to convince visitors of your brand.

For example, we have created informative interactive user interfaces and info graphics for the German Cancer League (Krebsliga), which can be used to educate visitors about colorectal cancer in a playful and understandable way.

Interactive elements also enable the interest of the target group to be maintained even when all stand staff are already in a conversation. Make sure that the appropriate format and design match the target group and corporate image and guarantee maximum user-friendliness. The last thing you want is confusing handling, which raises many questions among visitors and therefore requires a constant presence of staff.

Annual reports

Since the beginning of the 20th century, annual reports have been an integral part and prerequisite of every company. And since then hundreds of pages have been printed on white paper without much variation. That’s right, because why bothering about spicing up the usual boring business routine at the end of the year? The only highlight of the Annual Reports was the switch to a PDF format. Well, at least it saves us some trees.

But why do Annual Reports always have to be dry and full of boring facts? We at Cleverclip like to think a little differently. And so we are also firmly convinced that there are a lot of possibilities to make the past year of your company a little more lively through interactive content! Moving animations, quizzes or clickable buttons to give the reader more information, with simple interactive elements you can be sure that the reader will turn a little further than just the second page.

Email marketing

Although e-mail remains one of the most effective forms of communication, you should bear in mind that 270 billion e-mails are sent every day. Now hand on heart: How often do you open a newsletter and read it really carefully? Personally, I have rarely bothered to go beyond the subject line. To make me open an e-mail, the company has to scratch its fingers to provide me with a “catchy” and personalized subject line. But how often have I actually finished reading it, or even clicked on a link… ? Honestly, never.

So, in order not to end up rigorously in the trash, we have to offer the recipients added value. This can take the form of an interactive video, for example. Even ordinary video marketing reduces the unsubscribe rate by 26% and increases the opening rate by 19%. The interactivity adds the final touch to any video and enables maximum user engagement.

But also interactive infographics or a quiz can be perfectly integrated into an e-mail. The best thing to do is to draw attention to this in the subject line so that even picky customers (like myself) will open the e-mail.

Landing Pages and Webpages

This is the classic area of application that most of us probably think of. Of course, any kind of interactive content is especially effective on the webpage. In the age of the goldfish era, we only have a few seconds to convince our webpage visitors. And we certainly won’t succeed if we slam the webpage with a long company history, sit back and wait for the conversions to skyrocket. We have to become active and above all make the customer actively active – sounds confusing, but it can be explained quite simply: Just integrate interactive content on the webpage!

There are countless formats for this as well: Quizzes, interactive videos, mini games, infographics etc. – This way you can accommodate much more hidden information without being overwhelming on the webpage. At the same time, the longer retention time and activity of the user suggests preferred content to Google and thus misses you a higher SEO ranking.

A landing page can be effectively spiced up, especially in the context of pre-launch marketing: In this way, you can create an active community even before the product launch as well as initial buying impulses for the actual launch day.

Digital learning

Interactive elements can not only effectively enrich content marketing. Playful elements activate completely different synapses in the brain than static facts and figures and can therefore promote creative thinking, especially in digital learning, and thus stick better in the memory. Thanks to interactive elements, participants are directly asked to act and can thus be actively confronted with decision situations in order to apply the content they have learned. Users can, for example, test their own knowledge with integrated quizzes or collect information on a specific topic by clicking on interactive infographics and thus acquire knowledge step by step without having to read page-long texts.

Social Media

Social media can deliver significant added value to any brand. But with the increasing importance of social media, the challenge of asserting oneself in the masses and maintaining high organic reach is growing. Facebook, Instagram & co are more and more governed by algorithms and make it very difficult for us to gain or even keep followers. A good way to fight this algorithmic delusion of everyday life is to create better and especially interactive content. This way we automatically achieve more user engagement. Higher engagement has a positive effect on the algorithm, the content is getting more likes, comments and shares. The most popular formats on social networks are quizzes, surveys and mini games.

Tutorials/ Instructions

Oh, the good old product manuals and descriptions… I am actually a person of self-initiative and try to teach myself how to handle a product in the best possible way. But there are situations in which I am actually dependent on a manual. And what do I do? I take a quick look, usually read the first line and close this extremely boring and dry written manual. Tutorials, in which a YouTuber recites a 10 minute monologue into the camera, I have been avoiding for a long time. And so I sit desperately with my two product halves and don’t know how to screw them together (ok, it’s not that bad yet, but you get my point…?) . Of course, a touch of interactivity would make things very different. In fact, even a moving splash of color would motivate me at least until the 2nd line.

With interactive tutorials, product descriptions and instructions, e.g. in the form of interactive infographics, every company will ultimately succeed in actually placing the service or product in the daily use of the target group. And not just in the form of two halves of the product that are unscrewed and soon end up in the broom closet.

Assessments and surveys

Surveys are real gold mines for marketing managers to gain valuable insights into customer behavior. But why should the user be motivated to answer your question? Most of us have already passed the age when lollipops were offered after a blood draw. It would also be kind of funny if a renowned fashion label advertised with jelly babies to fill out a customer feedback form. We need to awaken the initiative and motivation of the target group and make the survey tasty – and not with the Ferrero candy department, but with interactivity! By keeping the target group on trap, you also avoid the danger that users click through all the questions out of listlessness, thus falsifying the results.

E-books

E-books are already powerful tools to prove expertise in the form of high-quality exclusive knowledge. But mostly e-books are exactly identical to the original books. Digital formats, of course, offer completely different options that are simply never used. But why not offering an embedded music list? Animated graphics or fields that spit out information worth knowing when clicked? An e-book version by J.K Rowling may well do without amusing GIFs, but especially in a business context it is very difficult to attract the interest of the target group with static ordinary content. Interactive elements give your e-book more variety and guarantee maximum attention of the readers.

Uses of interactive content – conclusion

Convinced of the many ways in which interactive content can be used? Regardless of the platform, interactive content usually allows you to kill two birds with one stone: While you enjoy a higher level of user engagement on the one hand, you also gain valuable insights into customer behaviour and can thus continue to specialize your products and services in the future.

Looking for some support in creating interactive content? Then feel free to contact us! Or check out our blog for more exciting topics around “better communication”.