What Is Interactive Marketing? [Types & Examples]
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Today, marketers have reached a point where unfocused marketing campaigns are no longer effective. Instead, consumers expect hyper-individualized digital marketing messages that have become scalable thanks to the ever-evolving marketing techniques. One such technique or form of marketing is interactive marketing.
Brands can use interactive marketing to engage consumers by delivering customized messages and results to them.
But what does interactive marketing exactly mean and how can you implement it? Read on to find out!
What Is Interactive Marketing?
Interactive marketing is a process that lets you create a two-way relationship with your clients. It involves inviting them to share their opinion and answer some relevant questions in order to receive a personalized outcome or result. As a result, it also helps marketers in collecting valuable data and insights from the customers.
Instead of just presenting information, you create an experience for your audience. You can do it through a quiz, poll, giveaway, etc., where they can be a part of the process.
The more valuable, interesting, and easy to use your interactive content is, the more likely your clients are to believe in your offering.
Hence, marketers can use interactive marketing to develop marketing initiatives based on customer behaviors and preferences.
Some Important Statistics
Let’s take a look at some of the stats around interactive marketing:
- 77% of marketers agree that interactive marketing has a reusable value, which leads to multiple exposures and repeat visitors.
- 88% of marketers say that around 10% of their content will evolve to become interactive in the next 2 years.
- 73% of business leaders believe that blending traditional content with interactive marketing enhances the retention of a company’s message.
- 45% of B2B buyers say interactive content is one of their top three preferred content types.
Benefits of Interactive Marketing
1. Improves Brand Loyalty
The interactive marketing process makes customers feel valued and more engaged in the company’s decisions.
Unlike passive content, interactive content requires active participation from the users which ultimately provides value to them.
As a result, this encourages customers to become even more involved with the company. Moreover, this sense of belongingness creates a particularly strong loyalty among customers.
2. Increases Sales
By leveraging interactive marketing, you can better meet the consumer’s needs, recommend best-suited products, and increase sales. In fact, interactive content is known for boosting conversions by over 30%. Additionally, this makes it an ideal tool for analyzing the success of your marketing campaigns and scaling them further.
3. Helps in Personalization
The interactive marketing approach views the customer as an individual with unique goals, needs, wants, and problems that only your company can resolve. Through content such as quizzes, polls, etc, you can gather responses and understand the needs and preferences of your customers. And provide them with personalized results or offerings.
Thus, a personalized experience like this helps you get in touch with your audience and satisfy their individual needs.
4. Boosts Consumer Engagement
One of the most important benefits of interactive marketing is that it allows sellers and marketers to gain direct feedback from customers.
Using interactive marketing strategies, businesses can provide interesting and immersive browsing and shopping experiences for their customers, allowing them to actively engage with the brand. Thus, with interactive marketing, you can better engage your audience and improve your conversions and sales.
Types of Interactive Marketing
1. Interactive Quizzes
Interactive quizzes are one of the most common and engaging forms of interactive content on the internet. Not only this, but they are also among the easiest to create for businesses today using no-code quiz maker tools.
Quizzes are fun and interesting to take, thus, they can easily generate qualified leads for your business.
An interactive quiz aims to test the target audience’s knowledge of a specific subject matter or to find out their opinion about the subject. It can be used to engage, educate as well as entertain.
The type of quiz a team chooses to create depends on their customers’ pain points to be addressed and the kind of information the team wants to gather through the quiz.
For example, you can simply create a quiz about
- Which game of thrones character you are
- Which Hogwarts house you should be in
- Digital marketing quiz, and many more.
2. Polls
Polls are another excellent interactive marketing strategy – generally used for the top of the sales funnel. They are much easier for users to interact with. They simply have to click a button in order to voice their opinion.
Furthermore, it can make your audience feel a sense of affinity with the rest of your community, particularly if they have similar opinions. This can be done by displaying the overall percentage of people who have the same opinion as yours.
It is very easy for companies to find the answers to important questions with polls.
For example, you can create a poll asking questions like-
- How are you feeling today?
- You could find out if your audience likes your new website or prefers the old one.
- Do you think pineapple belongs on pizza?
- Would you rather read minds or go in the past, and many more.
3. Calculators
A calculator is a great interactive marketing tool for service-based businesses. By using calculators and providing important quantitative information to customers, they can generate sales even before they speak to a sales representative.
While interactive calculators and tools require more time and focus to create than any other form of interactive marketing, they also tend to offer higher engagement levels and ROIs.
Consumers use calculators to generate solutions for complex calculations based on the information they provide. By providing logically calculated results to users, you can provide them with a unique, fully customized experience.
Moreover, those who use your calculator are qualified leads who have already expressed an interest in your services, making it easier for you to market to them.
For example, you can use math formulas to give projections, estimates, ROI, etc for problems like what is the cost to remodel your bedroom, what is your solar ROI, and many more.
4. Surveys
Surveys are a type of interactive tool used to analyze what a person knows or how they view things at a particular point in time. You can conduct a survey to collect feedback, conduct research, and gather valuable insights from your audience.
For example, by using a survey, you can find out how a client feels about your new software, and whether it’s easy enough for them to grasp.
Thus, it can be a great tool to collect feedback and other valuable information that will help you improve your business. Moreover, you can also conduct a customer satisfaction survey and find out how your audience likes the changes you’ve made.
5. Giveaways & Contests
An online giveaway or contest is a promotion where users perform tasks in return for a chance to win a prize.
It is a common tool used by digital marketers to increase traffic to their websites. As a result, it helps engage new as well as existing users by offering them something valuable free of cost.
When you have one big giveaway or contest, you will be able to engage a lot more people. Moreover, giveaways encourage social sharing on a whole new level. Thus, giveaways and contests are great ways to generate leads.
For example,
- Giveaway Idea: Use This Hashtag!
- Giveaway Idea: Retweet To Enter This Giveaway.
- Contest Idea: Share your video.
6. Interactive Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the oldest marketing techniques. To make your emails interesting and engaging, you can simply embed an interactive piece of content into your email and send it out to your subscribers.
Interactive emails let subscribers take a quiz, vote for a poll, take a survey, or participate in a giveaway directly from their inbox. They contain functional elements that allow readers to interact with the content by swiping, tapping, clicking, or simply watching. These can be created easily using email newsletter templates. Moreover, these interactive elements can have different forms such as a GIF and illustration to a quiz or countdown timer.
For example,
- Nike uses dynamically changing backgrounds and images in the interactive emails they send to their customers.
- Netflix uses cinemagraphs in their marketing emails which tends to attract the viewers to see what it is.
7. Interactive Videos
By using interactive videos, you can let viewers interact with the video’s elements, alter the story, and create a more personalized experience for them. This interactive element combined with video content has proved to be a great way to capture their attention. Moreover, 77% of marketers believe that interactive video engages customers pretty well, leading to an increased attention span.
Given that other interactive marketing content, such as calculators, polls, and quizzes, can also be combined with a video to make it more interesting.
In order to widen your reach, you should offer viewers the option to share the video, subscribe to your email list or visit your website at the end of the video.
Examples of interactive videos are:
- Interactive brand quizzes
- Branded stories
- 360 degree
A few Examples of Interactive Marketing
1. Coca-cola
Coca-Cola Zero, as an affiliated partner of the new James Bond film, launched a campaign encouraging consumers to find their inner Bond.
Under this campaign, a coca-cola zero vending machine was placed at a station. It aimed to prompt unsuspected passengers to perform a mission in 70 seconds for a chance to win a ticket to the films. Once they entered their name, they were given 70 seconds to collect the tickets at the other side of the station. The interesting part was that there were a lot of obstacles to completing this task and going to the other platform.
This campaign encouraged consumers to interact with the brand through an offline platform, while an accompanying viral video generated awareness and momentum online.
Interactive advertisements tend to encourage engagement and communication, and if used effectively can generate substantial awareness and ignite lasting interest in the minds of consumers.
2. Alexa (Amazon)
Amazon uses its own platform to promote its brand and increase online sales. Their voice assistant has a great understanding of the context of various ads and their relationship to the Amazon store. The users can simply ask the voice assistant to add the product being advertised to their cart, ask for more information about it, or just say “remind me” to get a follow-up notice about the product later.
For instance, whenever a customer asks Alexa about a product, she offers some product recommendations and suggestions regarding how to purchase the item using voice commands.
The audio element of Amazon’s Alexa makes the experience more interactive and engaging. Hence, interactive marketing is becoming a more immersive aspect of our everyday lives with products and companies like this.
3. Heineken
An innovative strategy was used by this Dutch brewery to attract potential employees. In 2016, Heineken released a recruitment video to engage future talent, as part of its Go Places initiative.
The video checks a candidate’s personality and introduces them to the company by asking twelve questions. Moreover, these questions are designed to help a candidate determine whether they are a good fit for the company or not. This encouraged users to click and watch the entire video.
As a result, Heineken has seen an astounding 300% increase in the number of applicants.
It’s also interesting to note that 67% of participants took all of the tests and watched the entire video. Hence, there is no doubt that this was a successful hiring campaign for Heineken.
4. Knorr
Unilever’s food and beverage brand Knorr wanted to increase brand awareness. They did the same by generating buzz about their passion for food by engaging users with some enticing, interactive ads.
Their goal was to increase brand awareness by inspiring people to talk about their product with their friends. So, for an interactive marketing strategy, Knorr used quizzes in which they invited users to answer 10 questions and find out their favorite flavour.
This attracted the attention of millennials who are always exploring new cuisines and helped them improve customer engagement by raising brand awareness.
Conclusion
There you go! We’ve already established that engaging your audience and bringing their focus on your brand and products becomes easier with interactive marketing. Some of the techniques are live streaming, polls, quizzes, user-generated content, etc. Moreover, it also helps boost your engagement and conversions and helps strengthen customer relationships in a simple yet excellent way.
So, what are you thinking? Try out Outgrow’s 7 days free trial to see how interactive content can benefit your business (and thank us later)! 😀
