Previously, we asked marketers to share the best pieces of interactive content they’ve seen from other brands to inspire you as you create your own interactive content.
Now, we’ve handpicked four of those experts, and we’re diving deeper into their own interactive content secrets. Below, they tell us the best piece of interactive content they’ve created, tips for creating your own interactive content, and their opinions on whether interactive content is just a passing trend or here to stay.
In this follow-up article, we make sure you have all you need to get started building your own interactive content.
Here are the insights, straight from the experts:
Ray Blakney of Live Lingua
Best interactive content piece he’s created: Live Lingua’s Language Learning Styles Quiz
Why do you think this quiz is such an effective piece of interactive content? Â
The kinds of quizzes we’ve created and have used successfully are quizzes that tell people something about themselves. Essentially, “tell me more about me.” Wanting to know this is human nature and something we all desire. Quizzes can help fulfill this need.
What research did you perform before deciding to create this piece of interactive content?
The first thing I do when creating a quiz is to research whether somebody else already has a related quiz. If they don’t, then I find experts on the subject of the quiz and bring them on for the project to help create it. This saves a lot of the research on my end since the expert comes with the knowledge.
What challenges did you face when creating this quiz?
Finding the perfect length. People don’t trust the quiz if it’s too short, but lose patience if the quiz is too long. Â
How can someone designing a quiz tell if they’ve reached the right length? The only way to know is to test. When you build your quiz, make sure you have a way to track how far along each user is getting. Then you can test adding or subtracting questions to see if that changes the completion rate. Keep in mind you will never reach a 100% completion rate on any quiz. The number I would shoot for is about 70-80% completion rate. If any change you make takes it too far out of that range, then you may have gone too far in one direction or the other.
What tips do you have for creating effective interactive content?
Know your customer and create interactive content that meets their needs. Â
If you have an existing customer base, then the easiest way to do this research is simply to ask them. This can easily be done with an email survey. Just make sure you include an incentive for the customer to complete it.
In our case at LiveLingua.com, we gave a free class to anybody who completed our survey.  This led to an over 30% completion rate on a mailing list of a thousand. If you use a survey software – we used SurveyMonkey – you will even get some insightful reports at the end that can help you parse the data easier to get useful information out.
Why did your brand start using interactive content?
Our brand is in the education and information space. So interactive content goes hand in hand with what we do.
What other types of interactive content have you created?
We’ve created interactive audio quizzes, as well as other educational games for our users.
Do you think interactive content is just a passing trend or here to stay? Why?
It’s not just a passing trend at all. The type of interaction may change, but the best way to engage people is to create something they can interact with, not just something that’s passive. Â
Bryan Ho of Gumbr
Best interactive content piece he’s created: Startup Illustrated and Gumbr’s Co-founder Question Cards
Why do you think the question cards are such an effective piece of interactive content?
I consider this the best piece because it has:
- Strong and clear branding within the interactive content itself
- Strong alignment of themes between the interactive content and product (i.e., the purpose, intention, and content was very relevant to the product offered)
- Clear call-to-actions within the interactive content that direct to an email list
- A launch onto a relevant distribution platform (ProductHunt)
What research did you perform before deciding to create this piece of interactive content?
Research consisted of three parts: First, I researched common topics covered by others within the industry and understood what pieces of traditional content did well.
As I mention on the Co-founder Question Cards page, this content piece was adapted from an original article from First Round Review. This de-risked building the piece of interactive content.
Second, I was also posting and tweeting similar concepts on the brand’s social media. Based on the reaction and engagement on those posts, I could understand which ideas and topics were relevant to my existing audience.
Lastly was understanding the distribution channels where I was going to launch the interactive content. I aimed to answer questions like, “Were there similar products launched successfully?” and “Is this format and topic relevant to that distribution channel?”
What challenges did you face when creating the cards?
There were no major issues with creating the content, as I was able to get it coded in-house.
However, I came to realize that without that ability, most marketing teams would have to go through a lengthier process to develop and create something similar.
That is actually the impetus of why I am building Gumbr, a SaaS that aims to help teams create and deploy pieces of interactive content without coding or asking another department.
What tips do you have for creating effective interactive content?
After analyzing over 50 pieces of interactive content, I’ve found the two most important aspects large companies do that indie brands do not are:
- Having a clear call-to-action within their pieces for a user to take next steps (this usually appears in the form of signing up for an email list or filling out a lead form)
- Having a strong alignment between the piece of interactive content and your product
The interactivity of the content allows you to give visitors an experience the written word alone cannot. I believe more thought should go into the psychology behind the experience and the best way to leverage that to drive business outcomes.
Why did your brand start using interactive content?
In my previous company, an interactive calculator I built to help customers compare potential earnings across product offerings was the most visited page. That piece of interactive content also drove the most number of organic leads.
Even for paid acquisition channels, we saw customers going from the campaign landing page to that piece of content before becoming a qualified lead. I saw the power of interactive content used well, and from that point, I knew interactive content would remain a staple in my marketing strategy.
What other types of interactive content have you created?
Calculators, tappable essays, timelines, choose-your-own-ending text-based games.
The list will continue to expand as I build out Gumbr and use interactive content for its marketing.
 Do you think interactive content is just a passing trend or here to stay? Why?
It is here to stay.
However, the form of interactive content will continue to evolve. In the past, we saw it as interactive quizzes going viral on Facebook and then, the boom of custom calculators for pricing or ROI.
As people begin to see the platform risk of social media, where you might only reach a fraction of your following, more brands will see the need for an owned audience – usually in the form of an email list. Wanting to stand out from the ocean of content, they would then seek the use of interactive content to provide both form and function to the written word.
The main issue now is the accessibility of creating interactive content. Once better tools that make creating unique interactive online experiences easier become available to everyone, I believe we will see the medium of digital content begin to evolve into its next form.
Luciana Nitu of Planable
Best interactive content piece she’s created: Planable’s interactive feature request board
Why do you think this feature request board is such an effective piece of interactive content?
This piece of interactive content still proves to be a great research tool about both our prospects and customers. We can assess in real-time what feature to build next based on the number of votes and the time relevance of the feature request. A big part of the way we build our product and grow our business is solely based on this single piece of content.
What research did you perform before deciding to create this piece of interactive content?
We mainly researched how other SaaS businesses do it, the right tools to integrate in order to make things interactive, and the ways to promote it. We didn’t want to make a big deal about having a feature request dashboard, but we still wanted to reach the right audience to give us the insights we need to move forward.
What challenges did you face when creating it?
With every piece of interactive content, the biggest challenge is the integration. We have to be careful not to mess up the entire website when installing a new plugin, for example. My advice is to back up your website right before installing anything new.
What tips do you have for creating effective interactive content?
For interactive content, the first step is to decide where and how you want to promote it. After that, you can go into the research phase. For example, if the content is something you’re going to use for research, it will most likely be promoted through newsletters. If it’s something seasonal, you won’t have time to pick up some speed organically, so ads will be your go-to method. If it’s a course that’s going to be relevant for several years, make sure you SEO optimize the crap out of it.
Also, when it comes to deciding which interactive content piece to create, decide fast. I often get stuck hunting for the perfect solution, when in fact it rarely exists. If you’ve done research for seven plugins, but none of them checks all the boxes, it’s better to choose one that checks most of the boxes and move on.
Decisions are reversible most of the time (if you do the backup first, of course).
Why did your brand start using interactive content?
The first time, we started using interactive content as an experiment. We wanted to test out the types of content that work with our audience. It looks like marketers like some (inter)action in their lives, so we’ve continued to produce interactive content as much as the resources allow us to.
What other types of interactive content have you created?
Top of mind, there’s Planable’s Advent Calendar we create every Christmas. Briefly, every December we hand over 24 gifts (usually discounts and other awesome resources). All you have to do is come back every day and check the boxes. You’ll get your gift guaranteed.
Do you think interactive content is just a passing trend or here to stay? Why?
I’m pretty sure it’s here to stay. Gamification in general is not a passing trend anymore. It’s a great tactic used by the most brilliant minds in marketing. The reason is simple: we like to play.
From childhood and all the way through adulthood, we are more likely to pay attention to something that resembles a game rather than to something that makes us stay put – like a static article, for example. If used properly, interactive content can easily become a crown source of traffic, leads, and customers.
Boyd Norwood of Nozzle
Best interactive content piece he’s created: Nozzle’s People Also Ask Deliverable Expansion tool
Why do you think the People Also Ask tool is such an effective piece of interactive content?
Nozzle is not your typical rank tracker that only monitors the ranking position of your website and a few competitors. We store all the data of the top 100 results for every SERP that is being monitored; therefore, we have a ton of data.
The PAA Expansion Deliverable Demo is a great way for us to show off just a small portion of the data we collect for customers. Since it’s built as a Data Studio template, people can interact with it, filter by keyword group, device, date, and also drill down to see which search terms served up each of the People Also Ask questions.
What research did you perform before deciding to create this piece of interactive content?
A handful of studies have been conducted in recent years showing that People Also Ask boxes appear in almost 50% of Google’s search results pages. As a result, SEOs have been talking more and more about the importance of websites answering these specific questions as another way to gain organic traffic. Since we have the ability to extract this data, it became clear that we should share this ability with the SEO community.
What challenges did you face when creating it?
The biggest challenge was tweaking the SQL query to pull the data from BigQuery in the most useful way possible and make it easy to manipulate once in Data Studio. Luckily, we have a solid development team at Nozzle who karate-kicked their way through this challenge.
What tips do you have for creating effective interactive content?
The best tip we have is to give your audience exactly what they’re looking for, or create content around a topic that you know will excite their spidey-senses.
Why did your brand start using interactive content?
We wanted our audience to see for themselves how valuable our data could be, rather than just taking our word for it.
What other types of interactive content have you created?
Using our data and Data Studio, we also created a Local Pack Dashboard where people can see which companies appear in the local map pack listings across a huge set of keywords. You can drill down to see which keywords served up a specific company or to see a general list of which keywords did or did not serve up a local pack result.
Do you think interactive content is just a passing trend or here to stay? Why?
Interactive content is here to stay. The websites that stand out and engage their audience in innovative ways will outpace those that don’t.
Thanks again to our experts for sharing their insights!
