Do You Know Your Interactive Content Strategy?

Implementing interactive content into your marketing requires not only strategy but also the buy-in of your team in order for it to be successful. Do you know how you’re planning to put interactive content to work for you? Below are some tips on strategizing, as well as some examples of the tools we use to help you make the most of interactivity.

Brainstorm, prioritize, schedule

Brainstorm how you want to implement
Get your team together, and whiteboard out ideas. Do you have a holiday coming up or a special friends-and-family sale? What are your goals? Are you trying to grow brand awareness? Drive conversions? Acquire new customers? Pin down the channels you might use to achieve these, and which tools you might need to create your content.

Prioritize your target areas
Start by picking just one or two places where you believe interactive content might be beneficial (don’t worry, this is flexible, and you’ll be analyzing this later anyway). Maybe start simple, with a newsletter or product release email.

Schedule by building out an editorial calendar
Once you have your goals and your target areas, build out an editorial calendar if you don’t already use one. This not only helps with keeping you on track and accountable for your publishing schedule, but allows you to be more transparent with other areas of the company and within your department. If everyone has access, there’s no confusion over who’s doing what!

The Zembula November editorial calendar.

Test the waters

Which channels are right for you?
Email, social, and mobile are usually the channels of choice for marketers. Pick one, two, or all of these channels and implement your chosen interactive content. Perhaps start with a mobile-optimized quiz, an embedded Facebook video, or a special offer email?

Measure Measure Measure

Implement metric tracking
This is the most crucial step in the entire process. Without tracking specific metrics, you will not have any idea if your goals are being met, and whether you need to change channels, messaging, or both. Try to at the very least track open and click rates on your new campaign. If you would like to get more sophisticated, track dwell time, completions, and read statistics. This allows you to go back and tailor your content and channels to best fit your audience (your editorial calendar is a great place to store all this; just create multiple tabs for blog posts, emails, social media, etc.).

Revisit and revise content
Perhaps your click-thru rates weren’t the best. Try changing up your headline, subject line, or introductory text. Or your completion rates are abysmal. Maybe give your viewers a greater incentive to finish within the first 3 seconds (our typical attention span)

Gradual ramp-up

Consider adding more channels
So you started with email, and you feel like you’re getting great results. Well, what about implementing social or mobile now? Spreading interactive content throughout your content channels ensures customer delight at various touch points and increased conversion rates throughout.

Targeted campaigns
Another thing to consider here is targeting. Is your business siloed? Try to aim your interactive content at particular parts of the business to get the best response. Enable your sales team to utilize interactivity in their interactions and conversations with potential customers. Give your customer success team interesting surveys to use with current customers.

Full steam ahead and new ideas

Continue to monitor metrics, tweak, and revise content as needed!
Content marketing is all about the process (and, also, the end results of course!). Use your feedback loop of metrics to continue to tweak and revise your messaging to get the best results for your goals!

Having a sure strategy in place for content implementation allows you to reap the full benefits of interactivity in your marketing. How far along are you on your interactive content journey? Let us know in the comments!