7 Ways to Use Interactivity to Personalize Your Content

Take one look at the personalized products industry, and it’s easy to see that we love things tailored to our preferences. Whether it’s mugs with our initials or shampoo and skincare designed to meet our individual needs, consumers in 2024 expect personalized options everywhere they shop.

This expectation for personalization extends to consumers’ online experiences. While personalization has been a growing trend for years, we’ve come a long way from just email subject lines and direct mail campaigns. 

During a webinar on content trends, our then Senior Director of Content Strategy, Stephanie Mansueto, shed light on the continued growth of personalization, particularly in the realm of interactive content. 

During the presentation, Stephanie pointed out that 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content isn’t personalized.

With that in mind, we’ll take you on a journey into the realm of personalized content with a focus on interactivity. You’ll discover:

Why Is Personalization Important in Content?

These days, people don’t just prefer content personalized with their unique needs and preferences in mind. They’ve come to expect it and can quickly lose interest in content that isn’t personalized.

With the wealth of content that’s presented to customers on a daily basis—from a wide range of companies and services—this is no surprise. We all want content that is personally relevant to us and addresses our pain points. 

This is the content that will make an impact on your audience, and it’s the content that you need to continually evaluate and tailor to their needs as they move throughout their journey. 

Consistent content personalization helps your marketing assets stand out from the rest of the noise and grab a consumer’s attention.

It inspires trust and loyalty, especially over the long haul. And it leads to a much better user experience overall, boosting conversions and encouraging repeat business.

Why Should You Use Interactivity to Personalize Your Content?

Interactivity is one of the more effective ways to make your marketing content feel as personal as possible to your target audience. For example, it can:

• Boost engagement and hold a user’s attention for longer
• Make social sharing seem irresistible
• Help you establish a connection with new audience users and audience members
• Help you acquire valuable first-party information about your users
• Make it easier to reconnect with users and nurture leads in the future

Approaching content personalization with interactivity also opens the door to some truly creative content ideas. Examples include exciting, engaging options like interactive landing pages, fun social games, personality quizzes, helpful calculators, and more.

You can create content your users enjoy and remember and feel moved to share with others in their circle. And you can ethically collect data to help you make each subsequent interactive content experience even better and more effective.

7 Examples of Content Personalization With Interactivity

1. Segment Interactive e-books by Job Title or Other Attributes

In this Ion Interactive customer example created by Progress, the interactive e-book begins with a question that customizes the experience for the visitor. 

Here, you’ll notice that once the visitor selects their role from the three options, they also provide their pain points. The e-book then personalizes itself to fit their specific interests and needs, showing them e-book chapters that are relevant to their responses. 

The data collected from these segmentation questions is also sent to a marketing automation platform, creating a lead profile for future content suggestions.

2. Provide Personalized Solutions with a Calculator or Assessment

In an interactive solution finder, assessment, or calculator, you can create targeted questions that unearth your visitor’s pain points or discover what topics, products, or services they are currently interested in. 

In this Ion example, created by Korn Ferry, an interactive assessment asks questions to the user, ultimately offering them personalized insights on salary. By inquiring about the visitor’s company size, industry, and location, Korn Ferry tailors the results page. 

Feedback from this assessment helped Korn Ferry fine-tune future marketing efforts, based on the responses they received. 

3. Use A/B Testing and Adjust Accordingly 

The beauty of interactive content lies in A/B testing. Ion makes it easy to create two versions of an experience, giving you the opportunity to test different questions in an assessment, different placements or requirements of a form, or even something as simple as a different headline. 

For personalization, this data is a gold mine. As with the above examples, the data collected provides a foundation for information: who is our audience? What are they looking for? What will be relevant to them?

By testing and making adjustments to future iterations of your content, you’ll reduce the feeling of frustration mentioned earlier. You’ll be able to provide customers with content that can truly impact their day-to-day struggles, making their work lives easier and their connection with your brand more valuable.

4. Create Interactive Infographics That Stand Out

Digital marketers have been crafting infographics for several years now, and it’s not difficult to understand why. Infographics are user-friendly, shareable pieces of content that simplify complex topics, making them easily understandable at a glance for any audience.

However, the fact that they’ve become essential for any comprehensive marketing campaign means that everyone is producing them, making it challenging for yours to shine. This is where interactivity becomes crucial.

By utilizing a tool like Ion, you can create stunning interactive infographics that breathe life into your content. You can incorporate dynamic features like reveal tiles, videos, music, and more. Additionally, you can generate more leads by personalizing branded content with built-in calls to action.

5. Leverage Interactivity to Generate Better Leads

With Ion on your side, you can also harness content personalization options, such as interactive assessments. I can help you pre-qualify more leads, guide connections toward future sales conversations, and empower your sales team to facilitate efficient interactions.

Assessment-style content helps brand managers and sales associates better understand where a customer is coming from by uncovering unique pain points and introducing personalized growth opportunities. This makes it much easier to offer the best possible solutions upfront.

Top companies and well-known brands like FedEx use interactive experiences to empower their customers, enhance their experience, increase website visits, and boost revenue.

You can even employ Ion to transform older static content into engaging assessment experiences, making it easy to build on what has already proven successful for you in the past.

6. Bring White Papers to Life with Interactivity

When it comes to genuinely educating your audience about a topic, event, or product they need to know about, a white paper is a great choice. A well-crafted whitepaper can help bridge critical knowledge gaps, raise overall awareness, and get potential customers enthusiastic about your brand.

Incorporating white papers into your content marketing strategy grants your brand the ability to delve deeper into a topic than even a long-form blog post would. However, it requires creativity and finesse to ensure that readers genuinely absorb the information, read through to the end, and potentially revisit the content in the future.

Once again, content personalization with interactivity is the key to success here, and Ion can assist you in bringing your white papers to life by making them truly interactive. Users can:

• Navigate the document according to what information is most relevant to their needs, knowledge gaps, or pain points
• Revisit sections that were particularly captivating or relevant
• Provide data or personal information to access exclusive sections or chapters
• Share the experience with acquaintances or across social media

Meanwhile, brand owners gain access to valuable, ethically collected user data. Marketers can track user interactions to gain valuable insights into which features, information snippets, and content types engage users best.

7. Add Energy to Landing Pages and Microsites

Developing dedicated landing pages can help drive conversions and boost interest in a product or key topic by focusing on one particular aspect. Landing pages and microsites are also excellent for qualifying leads and increasing search traffic.

However, today’s consumers have seen countless landing pages by now. They’ve heard all the sales pitches and seen all the gimmicks. Nonetheless, content personalization with interactivity offers marketers a much broader set of tools to work with when it comes to creativity.

For instance, you can use Ion to go beyond the traditional landing page designs that consumers encounter everywhere and create uniquely captivating interactive microsite experiences. For example:

• Sears has designed a user-friendly landing page that allows customers to book appliance services instantly
• DHL has simplified the process of setting up and managing new shipments for customers by integrating various interactive elements
• Robbins Research has created a landing page that simplifies holiday shopping for clients seeking special seasonal deals

Consider the features that could make your customers’ lives easier, and then leverage top-tier tools to bring those features to life in vivid color.

Renewing Focus on Personalization

Remember, in 2024 and beyond, content personalization is no longer simply a good idea. It’s something today’s consumers are used to and have come to expect from the brands they buy.

You could lose business without engaging, properly tailored, interactive experiences that meet rising expectations.

Revamp your brand’s focus on personalization on a level that resonates with your customers when you make Ion by Rock Content an ongoing part of your interactive content campaign today.

Build top-tier experiences in record time with superior support at your fingertips and see firsthand what a difference it makes.