The best thing a digital marketer could ever do for himself is create engaging, interactive content.
And this doesn’t just mean asking your audience questions.
It’s important that every advertisement you create, every post you upload, every piece of content you present to your audience actually speaks to them. Because if it doesn’t, they’ll just ignore your content. And if everyone ignores your content, you’re not getting any sales.
That’s why we’re going to talk about Interactive Content in this article, as well as the best ways to keep your audience engaged with every piece of content you give them.
First off, what exactly qualifies as Interactive Content, and why is it even important?
Let’s take this example.
You’re a Social Media Marketer for an E-commerce store that’s really into handbags.
So you know your audience is typically women on Instagram, especially young women.
Most “Social Media Marketers” would dump one post a week advertising a new handbag, tag it with a price and call it a day.
You decide to post up the new handbag, the best one you’ve seen, and as a twist, you tell your audience to guess the price.
Let’s be honest. If that piece of content doesn’t get any comment, you probably never had an audience to begin with.
As another example, let’s say you’re an advertising agency with a specialty in Google Ads, and you’re trying to advertise for a Chocolate company.
You’d probably want your ads to lead to the company’s website.
So why not buy some chocolates and give them to the first five, ten, fifty clicks for free?
Or at least give them a coupon for a free chocolate when they buy one.
That’s not a bad deal, now, is it?
So if you’re smart, you’ll notice that both scenarios provoked the audience to do something to the content you posted. At the very least, something different.
That’s all Interactive Content is.
It makes the audience do something small, preferably but not always, in return for a treat. It makes your audience interact with your post; whether that interaction is as simple as a Facebook like or a Twitter Retweet, (No, we’re not going to call Twitter X. It takes the fun out of the word “retweet”) or a comment or even, more preferably, a visit to your site.
If the content you put out can’t make or persuade or even convince your audience to do anything, then it definitely can’t make your audience hand over their money.
Which essentially means that if your content isn’t interactive in any way, you shouldn’t even be a digital marketer.
That’s how important interactive content is.
Whether you use emails, social media, paid advertising, or even cold outreach (and if you don’t know what any of those are, you shouldn’t be a digital marketer, either), so long as you intend to sell or “market,” or advertise something, every piece of content you post needs to be interactive. It needs to make your audience do something, even if it’s something as small as looking out for your next post.
Now that we’ve covered Why Interactive Content is important to you as a Digital Marketer, let’s cover a few ways you can use it to your advantage.
1. Reward.
The best content in Digital Marketing have one thing in common; it gave the audience a perceived reward.
Think about it. Opay let you create a bank account in seconds without a BVN. Kuda gave you 30 free transfers a month. In a marketplace where just one free month was a steal, Spotify let you listen to the best songs for three.
The reason you’ve clicked on an ad was because you figured you’d get something out of it, and that’s why they work so well.
Without going too deep into detail, your marketing content should always have a reward. Usually, the reward is the product itself, or a guarantee attached to the product. A free sample, a free month, or the fastest service in the market.
Whichever guarantees you give, make sure it’s something you can do. If Spotify advertised three free months and only gave you two, they probably won’t be as famous as they are today.
2. Appeal.
So many ads these days are simply not attractive or appealing enough.
Don’t make that mistake.
You need to create content that would definitely catch your audience’s eye.
If you’re using social media posts, be sure to use a colour palette that appeals to your audience’s eye. Maybe a bright primary colour and an unusual tint. Lime green and orange definitely have a different appeal to them.
If you’re using emails, be sure to use words that would appeal to your audience’s eye. If you sell baby products in your emails, your subject line should at least have something that relates to babies.
And if you’re using paid ads, use words, colours and pictures you know your audience won’t ignore. (I got tired of using “...that would appeal to your audience’s eye” too much)
Regardless, appeal is crucial. If you can’t get your audience’s attention, you won’t even be able to sell them anything in the first place.
3. Consistency.
I know what you’re thinking. What does consistency have to do with making your content interactive?
The answer: Everything.
Long story short, every single algorithm on the planet heavily rewards consistency. There are Tiktok accounts that blew up to thousands of followers in days because of a single post. But if you look closely, you’ll notice that the account has a huge number of older posts that had been posted maybe even every week.
The same goes with every single piece of content you can think of, including paid ads.
There are a lot of “digital marketers” out there, but only a few of them are well known. And if you ask them why, it all boils down to one word: Consistency.
In a world where other marketing agencies post one piece of content a month, the best of them post one piece of content a day. They’re literally posting 30 times more content than the other agencies. Of course they’d get rewarded for that. It would be unreasonable if they didn’t.
And that’s where the real benefit of interactive content comes in.
If you post interactive content consistently, more of your posts will get interacted with, which means the computer algorithms of whichever platform you use to market will keep pushing your stuff to every single person in your audience, and even reach out to a wider audience for you.
Next thing you know, you’ve doubled your audience and even customers in a matter of a few months.
So long as you keep to the above three criteria, you’ll definitely have no problem driving in sales as a digital marketer. If you aren’t driving any sales yet, you’re probably not following one of the above criteria properly.
That said, remember to be patient while you’re posting content as a digital marketer. Realistically, it’ll be months of hard work before you even see results.
But the results will definitely be worth it.
