Why You Need Interactive Content For Your Mobile Marketing Strategy

There is more than a 50% chance that you’re reading this post on a handheld device right now. Wanna bet? That’s the mobile phenomenon for you, spreading like wildfire.

According to Statcounter, 51.3 % of web pages were loaded on mobile devices in October 2016, surpassing desktop and laptop computers for the very first time. And the trend is on the rise. Even Google made it official last year. At the same time, app usage is also on a surge. Now, apps account for 89% of mobile media time, with the other 11% spent on websites.

Source

This shift in consumer behavior is transforming the way businesses approach mobile experiences. Mobile marketing is core to their business for 71% of marketers. However, spending big bucks won’t be enough. It’s the core strategy that need a facelift. From understanding the customers to reaching and retaining them, marketers will need to reevaluate their mobile marketing strategy.

The Year of Reincarnation for Mobile Marketing

Pardon me for sounding dramatic, but that is exactly what will happen – the rebirth of mobile marketing. Shedding the scales, leaving behind brand-first strategies, mobile marketing will enter a customer-first phase. With access to bleeding-edge technology, marketers will focus on understanding how customers interact with mobile experiences. This will help them predict engagement trends and deliver effective communication.

First and foremost marketers need to rework targeting. With consumers hooting in favor of personalized experiences more than ever, knowing their customers beyond device and channel identifiers will become a top priority for digital marketers. It’ll become important to come closer to the holistic customer profile. Austin Miller, Product Marketing Manager for Oracle Marketing Cloud calls it identity resolution.

“…marketers will start to realize the value of all their currently unstructured mobile data in terms of how it can be used in other channels (besides mobile). This realization will transform the way we think about mobile marketing. It will no longer be looked at as another channel”

Austin Miller, Marketing Manager, Oracle Marketing Cloud

And with this solid understanding of consumer behavior, marketers will also have to redesign their outreach strategies. They’ll have to mark down interaction patterns, curate content around it, and find innovative methods to deliver them to the consumers. And the content shouldn’t just be relevant, but something that is tailored to consumers’ tastes so that they want to interact with it on the spot.

Interactive Content – The Booster for Your Mobile Marketing Strategy

Having outlined the basic path of a second life for your mobile marketing plan, it’s clear that interactivity and personalization should be at the core of it. However, your good ‘ol pop-up ads and QR codes (created via QR code generators) aren’t going to serve this purpose. In fact, earlier this year, Google declared on the Webmasters Central Blog that hosting pop-up ads can negatively impact the ranking of your website in mobile search results. So, steer clear of this one.

“Showing a popup that covers the main content, either immediately after the user navigates to a page from the search results, or while they are looking through the page”

Google

And QR codes? Well, they aren’t dead, but they aren’t thriving either.

So, how do you engage mobile users with options fewer than before? Enter interactive content.

Interactive content basically refers to a content form that consumers can interact with in real-time, something that opens a two-way communication channel between a brand and its customers. In short, finally, a content form that’s truly customer-focused, for instance, calculators and quizzes.

Interactive experiences put the reign in the hands of the customers – they’re available on demand and let customers derive value in real-time. They’re fun to use, answer your consumer’s most pressing questions, and show good of them, which helps in engaging customers better. What’s more – since these experiences are more about the customers than for them, they’re shared widely, which in turn increases brand awareness and reach.

In fact, 79 percent marketers agree that interactive content enhances the reputation of a brand’s message, while 79 percent think this content leads to repeat visitors and greater online exposure. And 88% of them find it effective in brand differentiation.

Related Read: 10 Statistics that Prove Interactive Content is the Future of Digital Marketing

How Interactive Content Can Fuel Your Mobile Marketing?

Since the true focus of interactive experiences is to create a dialogue with the customers, they help marketers at both levels – targeting and strategizing.

Targeting

At the targeting stage, marketers can use quizzes and calculators to understand the psyche of their customers better. Personality and graded quizzes come in handy in this case. While the former helps you understand the customers’ likes and dislikes from the responses they give, the latter scores their interest in your particular product/service and helps you map their stage in the funnel journey.

Calculators prove equally effective when it comes to targeting. When VenturePact, a SaaS firm created the mobile app cost calculator, they designed the questions in a way that they can collect the following information about their prospects – their location, their budget, the technologies they use, etc. This helped in not only tweaking their marketing campaigns but also packaging their services better. And as a by-product, they also ended up generating more than 11K leads from it.

Strategy

Now coming on to the strategy part. Interactive content in itself can become a great mobile marketing strategy. Whether you want to get more traffic to your mobile site or you want to promote app downloads, you can use quizzes and calculators. Promote these experiences on social channels, send them to your mailing lists, embed them in your other content pieces, and see them drive traffic to your site. As for app downloads, you can customize the results page of your experience to embed the download link there or redirect users to a landing page that talks about your app and has a download link.

You can also use interactive content for mobile remarketing, a trend that’s going huge. You can couple a quiz or calculator with your mobile ads to bring back customers to your mobile site or app. Knowledge quizzes can come in handy here (example below). You can ask the customers how much they actually know about your business/app or how aware are they of the ongoing mobile offers. Ideas are aplenty.

As the mobile landscape changes rapidly, marketers must upgrade their strategies to meet the changing consumer demands. And personalization is the number one factor defining brand loyalty for consumers today, so using interactive content as a part of your mobile strategy makes complete sense.

Get started with interactive content right away!