The Value of Interactive Content
Content marketing is the core of most digital marketing strategies these days, and the distribution of spend is only going to go further towards content in 2015. With that said, one area that is seeing most growth (particularly in our agency) is in interactive content. In this piece we’ll explore the value of interactive content to explain why it’s worth trying for your business in the new year.
Interactive content is a piece of content that goes beyond that which is simply written or visual - it engages the user either through engagement/gamification, or through data visualisations that can be interacted with. Interactive content is at it’s best when it is interesting, different, and has a strong visual.
Take this example from The Guardian on the history of flight for instance:
As you can see this piece shows flights in the air at the time in a highly visual way. Users are encouraged to click through different steps to find out more about the history of commercial aviation.
This piece is just one example of many. The Guardian are particularly good at their data visualisations - they constantly innovate and create new tools. For any business, creating an interactive piece can be time consuming, involve a great deal of ideation and strategy, and require an investment in terms of building the piece.
But, the results can be great. For example, see the number of links and equity being created for The Guardian by this piece alone:
As you can see, lots of strong looking links coming through. This is far beyond what you can achieve from a written piece of content, an eBook, or a standard infographic. There’s extra investment upfront, but the returns can be more than worth it.
The key to distributing interactive content is the same as with other pieces, but on a bigger scale. Start by making your interactive content responsive so that it can be embedded on authority sites. Next, create the piece with exlusives in mind. You’re ideally looking for bigger placements with this kind of content, and larger media corporations will often want an exlusive period with the content. Being able to split the content into sections makes this much more manageable and scalable for you.
As with other pieces of content that you are outreaching, the first round of outreach is to sow the seeds. Aim for high authority placements, that give strong referral traffic. This will naturally draw more placements from other sites and start the sharing chain that will give you the scale of placements that you’re looking for to get the full value from your content creation efforts.
With all of this in mind, it’s essential that you have a strategy behind your content creation efforts. At Datify, we look at your target audience and identify the content topics, types, and platforms with which they engage. This helps to inform our initial brainstorm and come up with unique ideas that will engage the target audience. Whilst no piece of content can be guaranteed to be a success, this gives your content the best chance as it has data behind it based on your target audience’s previous engagement history.
Interactive content holds huge value when done correctly. To get it right you need to start with a strategy and understand your audience, before creating the content in a way that makes scalable outreach achievable. Once you have your piece ready, outreach your content to relevant publications to set it on it’s way.
Following these steps will help you to harness the true value of your interactive content in 2015!