From Static to Interactive: How to Increase the Performance of the Content You Already Have

Much has been said about the insane amount of articles, videos, and overall content being produced right now. Not only do we have a lot of good and informative content written by humans (and, most likely, competitors), but now we also have a lot of zombie content made by AI.

In a world where people’s attention is a precious currency, everyone has the same question: How do I make my content stand out?

And, more than that, how can we find the time to create meaningful experiences when so much has already been done?

I’ll try to answer that question for you with some magic pill, also known as interactive content. Moreover, I’ll explain how to go from static to interactive with a piece of content that you already have.

First of All, Consider Your Behavior as Someone Who Consumes Content

Think about a subject that really interests you. It can be marketing or something more personal, such as fashion, cars, or music.

How much time are you willing to spend reading an article about it?

Do you prefer having a lot of detailed information and taking around 30 minutes to read it, or are you more likely to scan the page for the most relevant information and take around 5 minutes?

You’re most likely in the second team. According to Adobe’s research on content consumption, around 61 percent of people feel their attention span is shorter than it used to be. Around 53 percent of the people interviewed said they prefer to spend up to 5 minutes engaging with a post or video.

We must make that 5 minutes count.

The idea is to make the customer associate your brand with a positive feeling. A great way to do it is by creating experiences that can be both live (such as events and pop-up stores) or digital.

In that vein, there’s much that can be done. From digital tours and demos to our favorite here at Rock Content: Interactive experiences.

If you’re into games, you might have heard about Devolver Digital’s “marketing simulator” game. To promote their products, they’ve created a first-person immersive experience where the gamer can go through a game expo and have access to trailers, demos, and other assets from multiple different games.

While most companies cannot create a game from scratch, nor do they need it, interactiveness can add value to most marketing campaigns.

Imagine that, instead of a full-blown PDF report with all the initiatives from last year, you could offer an interactive site to your stakeholders where they could check each chapter, interact with your graphs, and maybe even answer a quiz or two about your company’s performance last year.

On top of that, you could log how much time the readers spent in each section and which data engaged them the most.

Now, I imagine some of you have a new question for me:

How to find the time and budget to create an interactive experience from scratch?

The quick answer is: you don’t.

Calm down; this is not bad news! You don’t need to create something from zero: You can take something you already have. And better yet, no coding experience is needed.

Read also: How to create interactive content even if you don’t know what HTML is

How to Choose Which Content to Repurpose?

This is not an easy decision, but a few criteria might guide you. First of all, I recommend looking for content with a couple or more of these characteristics:

• You feel that it directly tackles a pain point of your persona;
• Didn’t perform as well as you hoped it would;
• Is long (around 8 or more minutes of reading time);
• Have information that can be better displayed interactively;

Also, keep in mind that interactive content can have many different formats. You can have anything from a simple infographic or ebook to a whole product tour. So, for you to choose the best format to use, think about your goals for the quarter: which metrics are you looking to improve?

If you’re aiming to increase lead generation, opt for content that is focused at the bottom of the funnel. Here, case studies and calculators work wonders. However, infographics might be a better bet if you’re looking for brand awareness.

Read also: How do we use interactive content in Rock Content’s marketing strategy?

The logic here is simple: The less the customer knows of you and your solution, the less they’ll want to read it, and the less data they’ll be willing to input on your site. That is why you need to focus on being illustrative and using interactivity to show them they have a need or problem.

On the other end, a customer at the bottom of the sales funnel already knows what you have and how you can help. Now, you just need to convince them you’re the best partner for their needs.

Lastly, consider how much time you have to repurpose this content and how extensive it would need to be. If you’re looking at a short deadline, consider choosing content that won’t need a full remake. Instead, it could go with just the addition of an interactive graph, a short calculator, or the inclusion of a few quizzes along the post.

Going for a Full Repurpose: A Case Study

We tried doing an in-house experiment and repurposed one of our own materials, the “Ultimate Buyer Persona Generator.”

How was it before the optimization?

Here is how the Ultimate Buyer Persona Generator home page looked like before:

It’s beautiful, in my opinion, but it’s still a common static page to download a static ebook. Regular and ordinary.

How does it look after turning static into interactive?

This simple GIF is just a sample; you can click here to live the complete experience.

While Pedro, our Digital Marketing Analyst, detailed the whole process in his article, where he goes from the choice of material to the final results, including how he processed the data, I’d like to summarize a few interesting points:

• We opted for a material that was very important to our persona but that wasn’t performing as well as expected. It was also aligned with our goal of increasing lead generation.
• Then, we looked at the whole of the material: How well the copy worked and if it needed any tweaks, the design, and the data he wanted to gather from the experience.

The results were clear: By implementing these adjustments, he was looking at a 178% increase in traffic and a 431% increase in conversions.

Just Adding Some Flavor: Embedded Micro-Experiences

If you don’t have the time or the need to revamp your content, micro-experiences might be a good idea. It’s a quick and easy way to add more interactivity to your content.

If you need an example, this very article has some interactive points created through micro-experiences. Can you spot them?

One of your customers did the same with one of their articles. They’re a big company that works with higher education, and they embed interactive quizzes on their blog posts as a way to help their readers understand what the best career path is for them.

Out of the 25 posts that received this update, 84% showed a decrease in bounce, and 88 percent improved their engagement rates. Not only that, but this also allows this customer to understand which courses have the highest demand and to gather first-party data.

The Creation of the Experience: No-Code Solutions

I mentioned before that you didn’t need any programming skills to create interactive experiences. Tools such as Ion allow you to create it just by clicking and dragging elements to the screen.

If you’re curious to learn more about no-code solutions, consider reading this article.

Increased Results with Minimal Effort

By now, I hope to have convinced you that adding interactivity to content you already have can be easy, cheap, and quick, and it will lead you to increased performance. Give it a try.

Something like an interactive map with tooltips can be the only thing standing between your blog and 100 percent more engagement.

Check this page to see how interactive content can help your company meet your consumer’s expectations.