How to Gather Data Through Interactive Content

Widely discussed across all business sectors, the use of data to improve business intelligence is a topic every marketer is familiar with.

With a greater depth of information, it becomes easier to understand your consumers’ behavior, preferences, and trends, and make it more efficient to reach them. 

Interactive content plays an important role in achieving this.

If you are familiar with Content Marketing, you can grasp the increased value that interactive content offers.

After all, it all revolves around providing your audience with a qualified experience, only possible through an in-depth understanding of their characteristics. So, accessing this data is a key step.

It’s interesting to note that, just as collecting information optimizes the production of qualified materials, the creation of interactive content allows access to even more data, serving as a two-way street.

Want to discover more? In this article, we will cover:

What’s the role of interactive content in gathering data?

The experience users have online is impacted by their interactions with digital elements, either through clicks on websites or through likes on social networks.

Digital Marketing professionals have long identified these developments as opportunities to understand their buyer personas further.

It turns out that, as individuals consume more and more content, they tend to become more discerning about which materials they spend their time on.

In other words, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to engage with your public and, by so doing, have them share information in return. As a result, it’s necessary to keep up with trends and adapt your strategy.

In light of this, employing interactive content brings numerous benefits to engage consumers.

This has been clearly noted by marketing teams, as highlighted in The Symphony of Connected Interactive Content Marketing.

This survey carried out with more than 20,000 randomly selected marketing professionals, reveals that 87% agree that the use of interactive content over static is beneficial to gain visitors’ attention.

This generates relevant insights for understanding consumer behavior and optimizing strategy.

The importance of this approach to marketing 4.0

Understanding the concepts behind marketing 4.0 is essential for any active professional, especially with the constant development of digital transformation.

Such insights involve observing the demands of the modern consumer, which include personalized experiences and humanized interactions with brands.

Atop the market chain, your potential customers don’t want to be treated as just another business opportunity, in the same way, they look to avoid dealing with companies that act as beyond the community around them.

This leads to developing humanized relationships made possible by creating a dialogue with your audience.

Consequently, when your content provides a reader with the possibility of interaction, they see your brand, even if it is just a moment, relatable. The resulting increase in trust and the likelihood of engagement soon become evident.

In addition to an increase in subsequent lead conversions, this tendency generates essential actions for you to follow along with your public’s behavior — every click matters.

In the next topic, we’ll cover more about the types of information you can gather with this approach. Read on! 

What types of data can be gathered with this strategy?

When discussing user data acquisition, most people associate this with obtaining contact information.

Truly, interactive landing pages are an excellent tool to encourage visitors to share data, such as their name, email address, profession, and more.

But it’s not the only type of data that we mean when talking about the benefits of interactive content.

Basically, any insight can be obtained, so long as appropriate practices are used.

For example, imagine you create an interactive infographic on a highly relevant topic for your business.

At the right moment, you can make use of an interactive quiz within the infographic. If the reader selects an incorrect answer, you can inform and educate your potential customer right away.

With more results, you’ll begin to understand whether it’s a common misconception among visitors to your site. 

Soon you’ll be able to produce efforts to educate the market as a whole on this point, applying this strategy to nourish your persona and discover the solution your company offers.

To be successful, it’s essential that such a concept extends to all of the channels you use to communicate with the buyer persona.

Through an email marketing campaign, you can encourage recipients to respond to the message, providing a predefined type of insight. This works even for unsubscribe requests.

As you’re aware, your nutrition campaigns must make life easier for users looking to stop receiving messages.

If they’ve reached this point, a simple questionnaire asking what led to such a decision will generate a greater understanding of the underlying motivations, improving your strategy.

So, in addition to basic data such as contact information, interactive content generates deeper insights that help your team understand the persona’s pains, motivations, needs, and desires.

In the following topic, we will present some practical examples of how to implement such a strategy. 

How to implement this idea in practice?

So far, you’ve seen how interactive content is directly linked to various benefits for the company.

In addition to increasing the likelihood of capturing leads, this technique improves the image of your brand with your audience, increases the engagement and reach of your posts, and, above all, amplifies your Data Science efforts.

However, beyond merely understanding these concepts, it’s key to know how to apply them in practice, which is what the remainder of this article will focus on.

Interactive landing page

For starters, one format that can see huge benefits from an interactive approach is landing pages, a key tool in gathering visitor contact data and turning them into leads.

To illustrate, imagine that you’ve created a page with the perfect SEO strategy to attract your buyer persona.

On it, the user finds the standard format, generally with an image, an offer to receive some valuable extra content and a questionnaire for them to submit the data you’re looking for.

If they fill it in, great.

However, it’s necessary to consider the possibility that the visitor, although interested in receiving the material, does not trust your brand enough to leave their information. If this happens, their visit will likely end without becoming a lead.

What does this mean? Your attraction campaign is good, but the landing page is lacking something.

Now, consider that, in addition to the elements mentioned above, the page includes links to other website areas, such as testimonials from other customers or descriptions of the company’s unique selling point.

Furthermore, a quiz can test the visitor’s knowledge on the subject, indicating if they’ve failed to answer some part.

Another option is to use the questionnaire to better understand your customer’s motivations or even extract demographic data.

It is easier to gauge a customer’s understanding of their own problem and how the brand is performing comes in addition to generating valuable data.

Consider the responses to a quiz, for example, which indicate whether your audience still needs to be educated on a particular subject, or have already progressed on their journey towards the bottom of the funnel.

The use of other interactive content

Exploring a diverse range of content is essential for the effectiveness of your brand’s digital presence, so it’s important to create interactive material in different formats.

Besides investing in interactive landing pages, it’s necessary to adopt a similar approach to other elements that influence the customer experience.

On this note, we can’t go without mentioning interactive videos, which feature high engagement serve to educate, entertain, and attract consumers.

One successful example is Honda’s campaign to promote the family’s favorite Honda Civic.

The idea behind the advertising piece, in addition to generating engagement, was to convey the car’s high-performance engine, as well as being practical and comfortable for everyday use.

To represent these two distinct aspects, Honda created a video that shows a father performing the simple task of picking up his daughters at school.

The magic of interactivity impacts the video so that every time a user presses “R”, all of the elements of the video change, displaying instead an alternate reality in which the same character has become an undercover police officer.

It provides an authentic and unique experience, leading to incredible results for Honda.

According to the company, page visitors spent an average of three minutes watching the interactive video, far above the auto industry standard.

This reflected directly in the number of hits to the Honda Civic’s page, which doubled during the period of the campaign.

Wrap Up

Using interactive content is a way to invest in gathering valuable marketing data.

In addition to engaging visitors and strengthening their relationship with the brand, interactive content encourages them to share their contact information and makes it easier to track their experience, generating essential insights to optimize your strategy.

Do you want to learn more about interactive content? Download our free guide on interactive content and take your strategy to the next level!