May 16, 2017 | 1 minute read

Let's get quizzical: make your content interactive

Passle

A new report from the Content Marketing Institute shows that large companies are hopping on board the interactive content train. With so many companies struggling to get their audience to engage, interactive content seems like a no-brainer:

You are (hopefully) providing something that is entertaining, useful, or interesting to your audience
In exchange you get some great data and goodwill

But what does interactive content mean in practice? As with any kind of content strategy, it pays off to work backwards, starting with audience's painpoints. It's tempting to create quizzes like Which TV Villain Are You? which might get you clicks from hundreds of irrelevant people (then again, maybe not, Buzzfeed has that territory pretty well covered already). On the other hand, a less dazzling offering, such as a self-assessment form that gives your audience a practical answer to their issue, might align much better with your business strategy.

Interactive content isn't just all about quizzes and games either, I've previously written about the rise of conversational interfaces which might be the future of interaction for B2B companies.

This content—which often takes the form of eBooks, infographics, calculators, quizzes, or self-assessments—is often used in a variety of ways by organizations, mostly near the top of the sales funnel. Among the most popular uses included engagement, audience education, brand awareness, and lead generation, with each of these four reasons topping 50 percent among survey respondents who said they relied on interactive content marketing.