How to get your audience to engage with your content | 4 interactive marketing techniques

Is there a disconnect between the marketing content you’re creating and the audience you’re creating it for? Are you struggling to engage your targeted demographics? Interactive marketing could be the solution to your problem.

Engaging your audience is crucial for successful content marketing. If nobody reads it, watches it, or listens to it, what was the point of producing it? Ignored content isn’t serving your business in any way.

By utilising interactive marketing techniques, you can more effectively capture audience attention, influence users, and encourage them to take desired actions.

Here are our interactive marketing strategies you can use to more effectively connect with your target demographic.

1. Create engaging videos speaking directly to your audience, either addressing an issue, or prompting them to take action

Putting something into a professionally edited and polished video just hits differently to an article or a podcast. It engages more of the senses, and allows you to speak to users almost directly. It can put a face and a personality to your brand, and it’s easy to consume, and easy to pay attention to. Viewers watch a video – they can’t get distracted like they can listening to a podcast, or trying to concentrate on an article.

You could go one step further and incorporate elements of interactive video marketing. This is where you’ll have a video on topic A, but as you touch on topic B, you (as the presenter) could point to your right to an icon for a video you’ve already made on topic B. In editing, you put in the thumbnail link to the related video, and if that looks like it will more adequately answer the user’s question, you’ve signposted them in the right direction.

Pro tip: If you’re going to go down the interactive video marketing route, sit down and map out all the variables. It’s almost like one of those choose your own adventure books, except instead of trying to cram 5 exciting adventures into a single book, you need to find the most logical, user-friendly way to guide your target audience to your content that will be of the most interest or help to them.

2. Create games and experiences to capture your audience’s attention, collect data, and potentially gain valuable feedback

Gamification is the MVP when it comes to interactive marketing and enhancing user engagement. It takes all the mechanisms and psychological levers that get people to focus and give 110% when they’re playing games or sport, and applies it to get the same focus out of them in everyday life.

These interactive elements not only capture your audience’s attention but also provide an opportunity to gather valuable feedback, gaining insights into their preferences and interests. Through the addictiveness of video game mechanics, this approach can also encourage users to spend more time on your page, and more time engaging with your content. Because gameplay is working on faster feedback cycles than written or video content, it can deliver instant gratification and keep users coming back for more.

Pro tip: Applying game mechanics to your content marketing efforts might sound like a daunting and technical exercise, but it’s actually never been easier. Using the Drimify gamification platform, you can intuitively customise pre-made game engines to your exact specifications to deliver everything from instant win games to distribute prizes and collect data, to long form, multi-level experiences to influence and educate your audience.

3. Create and run instant win competitions and other online contests

Nothing gets potential users to interact, submit contact details, and engage with your content like the opportunity to win something. Odds are if they’re your target demographic, you’re selling something they already want, or something they might be about to want.

If you can afford to include a grand prize as part of an online contest, build your campaign around that: “Spin the wheel for a chance to prize X!” Prize X draws in the masses, but you’re only giving away a few (or maybe just one) of these – it’s bait. You could distribute promo codes to all participants to drive sales. Creating a contest on Drimify allows you to include the numbers of the prizes on offer, and customise how prizes are distributed over time.

4. Create interactive infographics to guide your customer around your brand

First, what’s an infographic? In short, it’s a mixture of images, visually represented data (think pie charts and simple graphs), possibly some questions with “Yes” and “No” arrows to follow, and an economy of text to help someone quickly and easily navigate a topic. You often find them in banks to help customers make sense of different accounts or financial products, or in medical waiting rooms to help patients understand different conditions.

Interactive infographics go a step further – they’re digital, and allow users to click to go into more detail on specific areas. (Traditional infographics run out of information based on their limited physical space, whether that’s a poster or a pamphlet.) Well-executed interactive infographics can give users the feeling of having unlimited information at their fingertips that can be absorbed rapidly and holistically, and businesses creating interactive infographics can customise them to illustrate product or service ranges, or communicate different aspects of their CSR or HR policies.

Pro tip: If the interactive infographic idea doesn’t appeal, but you still want to communicate the merits of a range of products, customise a Product Recommendation Quiz on Drimify. Rather than leaving it up to the customers to draw their own conclusions (which in specialist retail areas can be risky in terms of customer satisfaction), you can use the right questions to match them to the most appropriate products, and educate them in the process. This is a more targeted approach with more opportunities to collect user data.

Key takeaway

In the modern content marketing landscape, it’s not enough to say a thing and it’s not even enough to say it best. Figuratively speaking, you need to grab your audience by the collar and demand their attention if you want to stand out in the highly saturated reaches of the internet.

Interactive marketing, in various and evolving forms, is the modern solution to this modern problem.

These techniques are actionable starting points for any business looking to connect audience attention with their content.