Copyblogger – Authority Rainmaker conference review series #2
Scott Brinker gave a fantastic presentation about interactive content marketing. The gist of it is that people are so overloaded with blog posts, white papers, webinars, videos, tweets and infographics that it is hard to stand out. One of the ways that thought leaders can stand out is by not only creating the standard stuff like e-books and top of the funnel calls to action but to create experiences that are engaging.
“In a recent study by the Content Marketing Institute, marketers rated their biggest challenge as ‘producing the kind of content that engages’.” Content Marketing Institute
And Scott’s company ION Interactive says that “Adding engaging interactivity to your content marketing helps you go from being part of the clutter to cutting straight through it”.
Examples of interactive content
- Quizzes
- Assessments
- Games
- Wizards
- Configurators
- Segmentation Paths
- Calculators
Static content can be turned into compelling two-way content more easily than you might think and is the premise behind Scott’s talk and his company that makes interactive marketing software. Gone are the days when it was enough to have an e-book and a landing page.
The four stages of content that Scott discussed
- The early web
- Multimedia content
- Personalization
- Interactive content
Scott joked about Andrew Chen’s law of shitty click through’s which essentially states that interactive marketing tactics often decay in effectiveness over time. An example of this is banner ad click through rate. According to double-click, across all ad formats and placements, overall display ad CTR is 0.06%, which is less than 1 in 1,000 impressions…Rich media Ad CTR is 0.27%
I remember back around 2000 or 2001, when one of my clients was considering paying $25,000 a month for a Yahoo banner ad. I talked him out of it and got him ranked number one in Google for “saxophones”, “band instruments” and hundreds of terms, even though one of his peers was getting pretty good results from that program. Imagine a small business considering an expensive banner ad like that now with a 0.06% to 0.27% CTR?
Scott recommends thinking about turning your product pages, best practices, pricing spreadsheets, segmented messaging and content marketing into assessments, configurators, calculators, conversion paths and more engaging and higher converting interactive content.
An example of an interactive landing page
Using a quiz to ask a series of questions and then providing results based on their input is one example of moving from passive to interactive content.
Additional interactive landing page examples can be seen here.
BuzzFeed quizzes are an example that Scott used to warn the audience not to go so far and be ridiculous just because some of the funky news sites are having good results with it. In other words, you might not want to try an underwear quiz in your financial services or legal marketing… You have to be more creative and ultimately more useful than that to have this kind of content add to your thought leadership.
Ion interactive is one of at least 75 interactive technology vendors that you can experiment with. Stay tuned for a relevant quiz, as I test interactive content software.
Consumers are looking for useful content and interactive content is the evolution from content to actual experiences.
Are you ready for the fourth wave of content marketing?
