Digital marketing is evolving fast to respond to changing customer behavior in a hyper-competitive marketplace. The quest for effective customer engagement and data gathering has led to a reimagining of digital customer experience strategy and the rise of interactive content.
Customers no longer arrive at a digital sales outlet, add products to a cart, pay, and leave. Instead, they’re invited on a digital customer journey. This journey offers customers enjoyable experiences and initiates customer interaction across sales channels, from digital to brick and mortar, encouraging the customer’s connection to the brand.
This article looks at the significance of interactive content in today’s digital world and explores the Wyng platform’s pioneering strategies and tools that enable brands to captivate audiences and enhance key performance indicators.
What is interactive content in digital marketing?
Digital content refers to any information, media, or creative material stored and transmitted electronically, typically in a format suitable for consumption through digital devices like computers, smartphones, or tablets. This can include text, images, videos, audio, software, and interactive elements that can be made accessible and distributable across online platforms, allowing digital interactivity in brick-and-mortar environments.
Why brands should leverage interactive content
The internet offers users an overwhelming amount of content to choose from, so grabbing and retaining audience attention has become vital for marketers. Interactive content was developed as a more engaging way of digitizing the customer experience, to go beyond static text and images.
Interactive content actively involves the audience, transforming passive consumers into active participants. From quizzes, polls, and surveys to interactive videos and calculators, these engaging experiences foster a deeper connection between brands and their target audience.
Unlike traditional content that merely delivers information, interactive content invites users to engage, share, and even create content themselves. This keeps users on your website longer and encourages them to return for more interactive experiences, ultimately bolstering brand loyalty.
Engaging audiences in a cluttered digital landscape
Attention spans are shrinking, and brands face the challenge of standing out in all that digital clamor. Interactive content provides an effective solution. By offering unique and memorable experiences, brands can break through the noise and create meaningful and memorable interactions with their audience.
Traditional content can be a chore with static text that the user must read and assess. Interactive content, however, is often fun. It encourages users to invest and enjoy their time interacting with your brand, fostering a sense of involvement that traditional content struggles to achieve.
Whether it’s a personalized product recommendation quiz or an interactive storytelling campaign, these experiences resonate with users. It makes them more likely to remember your brand and message.
Evolution of data gathering
Key for brands, however, is data gathering, another feature of interactive content. Every interaction, click, and response provides valuable insights into user preferences, behavior, and intentions.
This type of data is called zero-party data (ZPD), defined as data that’s willingly and proactively shared with a brand. ZPD goes beyond traditional demographic information, offering a deep understanding of individual user’s current and changing needs and desires.
Marketers can leverage this data to personalize messaging and campaigns, allowing them to deliver relevant content to their audience. This enriched content enhances the online customer experience, increasing the likelihood of conversion and customer retention.
From clicks to bricks: bridging the online-offline gap
Brands need to find a way to craft holistic customer experiences and one of the most intriguing aspects of interactive content is its ability to transcend the digital realm and influence real-world interactions.
For instance, interactive content can encourage users to visit physical stores, participate in real-life events, or engage with products and services in a tangible way. These blended experiences may see customers visiting the brick-and-mortar store but paying with a coupon they won in a sweepstakes experience online.
This seamless integration of online and offline experiences blurs the lines between the virtual and physical worlds, allowing brands to create cohesive customer journeys. Businesses can build stronger connections with their audience and drive real-world results by successfully bridging the gap between clicks (online interactions) and bricks (offline interactions).
Increased KPIs through interactive content
Interactive content offers engaging experiences, which become a powerful driver for improving key performance indicators in digital marketing. From driving visitor sessions and measuring interactions to fostering loyalty and optimizing completion rates, interactive content can help brands grow.
Visitor sessions: driving traffic and engagement
The visitor sessions indicator represents the number of times users visit your website or engage with your content. When users are enticed by interactive quizzes, polls, or contests, they visit your site more often and spend more time exploring, increasing traffic and engagement.
Each session presents an opportunity to capture user data, provide valuable information, and drive potential conversions. By creating compelling interactive content, brands can attract users, keep them engaged, and extend their time on the site.
Engaged sessions: how they interact with your site
This metric measures how users interact with your content. By its very nature, interactive content encourages users to actively participate, providing multiple engagement metrics per visit, such as clicks, responses, and more time spent interacting with content.
Engaged sessions provide valuable insights into user behavior and preferences, enabling brands to fine-tune their content strategies and campaigns. Engaged users are also invested and will return more often to interact with your digital content.
Time on page or on site: encouraging user immersion
The time a user spends on your website is a critical KPI. The longer time spent indicates that users find your content relevant and engaging. Interactive content can remarkably prolong user engagement, requiring active participation and interaction.
Whether it’s a captivating, interactive story or a product recommendation quiz, users are more likely to stay on your site to explore and engage with these experiences. This extended time on-site boosts KPIs and offers opportunities for deeper brand engagement and conversion.
Return visitors: fostering loyalty
Fostering customer loyalty is a vital objective for any business. Interactive content plays a significant role in achieving this goal by encouraging return visits. Users who’ve enjoyed an interactive experience are more likely to revisit your site for more.
This loyalty-building effect increases return visitors and contributes to a positive brand image. As users return for more interactive content, they become more familiar with your brand and may develop a stronger connection. These loyal customers can become brand advocates, further enhancing digital marketing efforts.
Completion rate: tailoring experiences for success
The completion rate measures the percentage of users who finish the interactive content, such as quizzes or surveys. By analyzing completion rates, brands can gain insights into the quality and relevance of their interactive content.
Low completion rates may signal a need for adjustments, such as simplifying questions or offering better incentives. Optimizing for completion ensures that users receive value from the interactive experience and are more likely to engage with future content.
Our approach to interactive content
Wyng has become a leader in building interesting digital journeys by ensuring every consumer touchpoint is relevant, user-friendly, and offers value to the consumer. We have dozens of different experience types, including sweepstakes, quizzes, and surveys with a huge selection of different gamification options, including scratch off, spin-to-win, and swipe-to-answer. Wyng also has enterprise-class UGC capabilities that help engage audiences and increase brand affinity.
The power of ZPD
Interactive content serves as a dual-purpose powerhouse in digital marketing by engaging users and providing brands with valuable customer insights in the form of zero-party data. This data goes beyond basic demographics, offering insights into individual preferences, purchase intent, and even emotional triggers.
Armed with zero-party data, brands can create hyper-personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with their audience on a profound level. This drives conversions and builds lasting customer relationships.
Building trust through data transparency
In an age where data privacy concerns are at the forefront, interactive content provides an opportunity for brands to build trust through data transparency. By clearly communicating how user data will be used and offering choices, brands can create a sense of control and consent.
This transparency ensures compliance with data regulations and fosters trust and loyalty among users. When users feel their data is respected and used to enhance their experience, they’re more likely to engage with future interactive content and maintain a positive relationship with the brand.
Growing your audience with interactive content
The Wyng platform stands at the forefront of interactive content creation, offering a comprehensive platform designed to help businesses thrive in the digital era. With a wide array of innovative tools and capabilities, Wyng empowers brands to harness the power of interactive content and engage their audiences in meaningful ways.
Exploring interactive experiences with Wyng
Wyng offers a diverse range of interactive experiences, each tailored to specific marketing objectives. From sweepstakes that drive user participation to user-generated content (UGC) contests that amplify brand advocacy, the offerings with Wyng are designed to cater to a variety of campaign goals.
Gamification elements add an extra layer of engagement to your content, making interactions fun and rewarding. Users are more likely to connect with brands when they’re entertained and receive immediate gratification. The gamification features Wyng offers make this possible.
Success stories
These two real-world success stories illustrate the effectiveness of our interactive content approach. Let’s take a look at how.
Viral increase in engagement
The Paper Packaging Board leveraged the Wyng platform interactive experiences to drive engagement and brand awareness. With the “Are You a Papertarian?” quiz, visitors explore their own behaviors to discover whether they’re paper-savvy in their everyday lives. The quiz struck a chord and has counted over 400,000 sessions with the added bonus of higher engagement rates throughout the site.
A high volume of experiences and fast
As the top company connecting brands to the most extensive fan base in sports, LEARFIELD needs a continuous flow of games and events that encourage fan engagement. LEARFIELD was looking for a platform that’s easy to learn, adaptable, and scalable to digital campaigns quickly. The easy-to-learn and adaptable platform Wyng offers allowed them to launch over one thousand experiences in 2022 alone.
Ease of implementation with Wyng
The Wyng platform is designed to cater to businesses of all sizes and levels of marketing expertise. Whether you prefer a hands-on approach or seek comprehensive support, Wyng offers flexible implementation options to suit your needs.
The Wyng services model provides two distinct pathways: self-serve and full-serve, allowing brands to choose the level of assistance that aligns with their capabilities and needs.
Self-serve: The Wyng Platform Experience Studio
For brands looking to take control and create interactive content independently, the Wyng Experience Studio is the ideal tool. This no-code building platform empowers marketers to craft captivating experiences without needing technical expertise.
The Experience Studio’s user-friendly interface and templates make designing and launching interactive campaigns easy, ensuring that you can start engaging your audience swiftly. The Wyng Experience Studio allows you to effortlessly incorporate key strategies including:
- personalization which engages users with content that’s relevant to them;
- flexible deployment across digital channels, allowing engagement in a variety of ways from pop-ups to entire landing pages depending on the brand’s needs;
- value exchange in the form of rewards or coupon codes that keep customers coming back.
Brands that opt for the self-serve model can experiment, iterate, launch, and optimize campaigns on their own schedule. With the resources Wyng has, even newcomers to interactive content can create a compelling digital experience.
Full-serve model with Wyng
For those seeking comprehensive support, Wyng’s full-serve model offers strategic and technical expertise in creating customer experience solutions. Our dedicated team collaborates closely with brands to ideate, design, develop, and execute interactive campaigns tailored to specific objectives.
In the full-serve model, the Wyng team takes care of every aspect of your campaign, from strategic planning and campaign ideation to technical integrations, design, and development. This hands-on approach ensures your interactive content aligns perfectly with your brand’s goals and messaging.
By choosing the full-serve option, brands can tap into the extensive experience Wyng has in creating and optimizing interactive content. Our team’s unique expertise can help you navigate the complexities of the digital landscape, ensuring your campaigns aren’t only engaging but also optimized for maximum impact.
The Wyng Platform: the cutting edge of interactive content
As digital marketing responds to rapidly changing customer behaviors, staying ahead of the curve is essential. Interactive content is a cutting strategy, and Wyng is at the forefront, ready to empower your brand’s customer journey.
We invite you to take the next step to experience the transformative power of interactive content firsthand. You can begin by starting a free trial of the Wyng platform to test its capabilities and see how it can enhance your digital marketing efforts. Alternatively, contact us today for more information if you’re wondering how a tailored, interactive content campaign can impact your business growth.