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Get a Quote Today!How to Engage your Audience with Interactive Marketing
In the business of today’s digital world and the highly competitive nature that surrounds it, engaging an audience is crucial. Encouraging audience participation with interactive content is an effective and beneficial way to reach your target market with interactive and enticing marketing.
Giving an audience a chance to interact physically with a business and getting an insight into the current trends and strategies to keep up with will increase brand loyalty and attract new, potential customers.
What is interactive marketing?
Interactive marketing is a technique that uses creative and appealing content to engage an audience and promote customer interaction with a brand. Interactive marketing examples include visuals, video content, quizzes, surveys and polls to create a communication channel between the company and a customer.
Alongside effective static content such as blogs and articles, interactive marketing uses the benefits that accompany different social media platforms, such as live videos, polls, surveys and the ability to share content.
What are the benefits of interactive marketing?
Interactive marketing comes with many benefits that will lead to increased brand loyalty, consumer engagement and an increased online presence.
Here are some advantages of interactive marketing:
1. Increased brand loyalty
Engaging in interactive marketing will leave customers feeling interested in a company as they experience a positive interaction with a business. As a result, brand loyalty will increase as consumers return for more immersive and engaging interactive content.
2. Increased engagement
If interactive marketing is engaging and enticing and leaves customers feeling positive, they will likely return for more. Increased engagement will benefit a business by making customers aware of your business or products, resulting in more returning and potential customers.
3. The ability to receive feedback
One of the main points of successful interactive marketing is that a business can fully understand what is working and what needs improvement.
Suppose customers are completing surveys, taking part in quizzes or using polls. In that case, a business can make an informed and efficient decision into different strategies they may need to revise to remain engaging.
4. The increased presence of a company
If interactive marketing and content are engaging, new and returning customers will likely return for more. Customers may share effective content with others, resulting in increased interactions, so your company’s presence will grow with a wider audience.
How to create engaging, interactive content
Whilst static content, such as blogs and articles, are equally important and will aid in the effectiveness of your business’s marketing strategies, it’s important to create interactive content to engage your audience.
There are different platforms, tools and techniques you can use to boost engagement and consumer participation. Thinking of diverse, exciting and interesting ways to engage your audience will result in the benefits of interactive marketing as you use it to your business’s advantage.
Here are some tips that will benefit the engagement of interactive content:
1. Polls, surveys and quizzes
Interactive marketing may lead your mind to polls and quizzes, popular forms of engaging content. Polls and quizzes reach an audience directly and encourage them to participate by answering questions. As a result, engagement is high, and a company can gain insight into the effectiveness of this type of content.
If you create a quiz or survey and entice an audience that way, you must think of a creative title that will grab someone’s attention and lead them to the quiz. Questions included in the quiz will get the user thinking as they answer, resulting in high engagement.
A quiz is a chance for your company to ask customers directly what they think of your business or a specific product or element. From there, you can then consider the feedback and understand the effectiveness of a particular aspect. If you pick up a frequent opinion, it will give you insight into the next steps.
A poll works in the same way as a quiz but may be quicker to engage an audience.as the questions are generally shorter, with fewer options.
2. Interactive videos
Interactive videos are a quick and easy way to grab someone’s attention and keep them engaged for a short period. Interactive videos have functions such as popups, links to follow and questions to answer.
Nowadays, we live in a fast-paced world where people aren’t looking for lengthy videos that take their time to get to the point. An audience will engage with video content when it is informative, concise, and fun to use.
Real-time broadcasting is an excellent example of an engaging way to keep an audience gripped. Social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and TikTok can create live videos that reach an audience directly. Real-time videos create a direct line of communication between an audience and a business, and engage a returning or potential customer.
Reaching audiences with live, real-time content makes your business more reliable and trustworthy, and allows an audience to interact and voice their opinion. Live videos generally have a comment section, encouraging viewers to interact in real time with their thoughts and comments.
3. User-generated content
You can use social media to encourage user-generated content, which is content created by someone outside of your business. On social media, audiences can be encouraged to leave a review, post their opinion and raise business awareness through word of mouth.
Potential customers engage with opinions that users post outside of a business because they view it as trustworthy and reliable. A user that posts about a positive experience will engage other users to achieve the same outcome.
This method of interactive content is effective as it creates organic traffic to your business and can help to create a strong company image. This method gives the audience a more immersive experience by adding a personalised touch. Users want their opinion heard and to let others know about their experiences.
Examples of user-generated content could be:
- a post on a social media platform
- a positive review left by website visitors
- a blog post that someone outside of the company has created
4. Engagement marketing
Engagement marketing allows your business to interact physically with your audience, offering a personalised touch and a trustworthy image. This type of interactive marketing may include conference booths, a one on one conversation, personalised messages or customer follow-up through an email.
This strategy increases brand loyalty and helps your business stand out from the crowd as it helps build good relationships by acknowledging individual customers.
5. Gamification
Using games is a great, light-hearted way to engage an audience. Audiences are not looking for intense marketing but, instead, for fun and different ways to engage online. By creating a game that is easy to use and distracts a user away from reality, they’ll find themselves coming back for more.
Regarding your business, you may create a promotional code to engage your audience further as they can exceed up in the game. You can incentivise a user to proceed in the game by offering a promotional code as a prize that a user can work towards winning.
This interactive marketing strategy is effective, promotes word of mouth and is an exciting way to boost audience engagement.
How to keep interactive marketing engaging
Maintaining your audience and keeping them engaged is just as important as creating the content in the first place. Keeping the content as exciting and enticing as possible is essential and must be done to receive the benefits of digital marketing.
Here are some tips to keep your returning and new customers engaged:
1. Know your audience
By outlining the target audience you’re looking to entice and engage, you can alter the type of interactive marketing to suit their preferences. This creates a high potential to increase new customers who gravitate towards the interactive content provided.
2. Remain consistent
Not only does this make you look like a professional, authentic company, but it also aids in increasing long-term brand loyalty. Ensure you provide audiences with as much new, yet consistent, content as possible. This lets the audience know what to expect from your brand each time they encounter it. For example, thinking of a new marketing campaign every month to keep them as interested as possible.
3. Take feedback into consideration.
An audience’s opinion will determine the engagement of the interactive marketing, so it’s a good idea to be open to feedback. Both positive and negative feedback will ensure a productive outcome as you consider what will obtain audience satisfaction.
4. Make use of the different social media platforms.
The different social platforms and various marketing channels have advantages and disadvantages, so you should use them to benefit you. A social media strategy could be using Instagram stories for polls that offer a personal touch by letting audiences answer questions.
Coming up with content should be an exciting process and if you follow these steps, your returning and potential customers should remain interested and engaged.
FAQs
1. How effective is engaging, interactive marketing?
A successful company who aims to incorporate interactive marketing into its business model will experience the benefits as they entice audiences and invite interaction with potential customers.
2. What interactive platforms can you use to promote audience engagement?
Many businesses use online platforms to promote audience engagement, stay relevant and create content. For example, social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Youtube live all allow for direct communication through the use of live video.
3. Do all companies use interactive marketing?
No matter the company’s size, any business can create content that will engage an audience. Whilst not all companies use this digital marketing strategy, it is on the rise in the digital world we live in today.