Have been exploring different methods of marketing to drive more sales to your business? Have you heard about interactive marketing? It is a relatively modern concept, as it makes use of the digital media for the most part.
This post is a guide to interactive marketing for both small and large organizations. It will benefit you to learn about the different types of interacting marketing strategies, even if you have not yet started your business. This kind of knowledge is not just advantageous to businessmen, but also to aspiring entrepreneurs, ambitious professionals and freelancers.
Before we discuss various examples of interactive marketing, let’s have a look at the definition of this contemporary concept.
What is Interactive Marketing?
Interactive marketing is a marketing method that uses a one-to-one approach to focus on your individual customers’ needs and take actions accordingly. It involves taking initiatives that are triggered by customer preferences and behaviors. It is thus significantly different from the traditional styles of campaigning.
Interactive marketing is a customer-centered strategy. It gets marketers to struggle to meet and exceed customer expectations. Shifting from the conventional method to this relatively new approach could cause hesitance and friction between old and established organizations. But it is openly welcomed by the new and modern businesses that would do anything to stand out from the global competition. If you are a marketer who wants to pull off successful campaigns, you need to have access to advanced tools and technology that allow you to look into the 360-degree views of your customers.
Types of Interactive Marketing Strategies
Interactive marketing involves many different types of strategies and initiatives. You can create various forms of dynamic content that allow you to interact with your customers online. Sometimes dynamic content is built to enable two-way interaction, which is even better for driving engagement.
No matter what type of interactive marketing effort you pursue, your goal should be to make your content as relevant and engaging for customers as possible. Here are the different types of interactive marketing strategies.
1. Interactive Storytelling
You can seize an opportunity to make your content very dynamic by adding an infographic to a blog post, converting a script into animation, or creating explainer ads based on storytelling. Interactive storytelling is getting more popular and is usually done via video marketing. Landing pages are split into sections with video and audio clips, text divisions, and other interactive components to keep the reader flowing until the end. This variety of components makes the audience want to share the content with others in their circle.
2. Personalized Content
Number two on our list of types of interactive marketing strategies is producing personalized content. It is not so hard for marketers these days to get access to valuable insights about their target customers’ geographic data, demographics, lifestyle, and other such metrics to deliver relevant and personalized content to them. The more you know about your customers, the more you can provide the most meaningful and relatable experiences. Customers usually resonate with your marketing message more if you personalize it for them. Interactive marketing is all about making your customers resonate with your brand to feel joy in sharing it and talking about it with others.
3. Layered Information
Many brands these days are focused on educating their target audience first and then offering a product or service that would make their lifestyle easier. Interactive marketing gives such educational information to customers in layers so that it is easy for them to digest it. Layered information comes in the form of detailed content delivered to the audience in stages. Offering snippets of information on a web page and then giving out more details in a digital download is a way of providing layered information.
4. Two-Way Interaction
This includes those types of interactive marketing strategies that give consumers a means to actively participate in the campaign. Two-way interactive marketing schemes include quizzes, branching content, interactive videos, online games, and other such events that let the audience have a powerful experience.
Challenges of Interactive Marketing
Before you implement interactive marketing into your business, you need to know how it works and the challenges it will make you face. One of the hurdles in using this method is that you might lack comprehensive and updated consumer data access. Following interactive marketing examples will become an arduous undertaking when you do not have individualized customer intelligence.
You need to have proper customer relationship management systems, data lakes, and contact center applications to practice the different types of interactive marketing strategies. In other words, you need to build a one-stop customer experience platform from where you can continuously extract that helps you aggregate data from every relevant source.
Other challenges of using interactive marketing in business include attracting the audience's attention. Sometimes marketers build up so much content that it becomes confusing for the audience to choose which one to go through first. As they feel overwhelmed, they might just distract themselves from everything a particular brand offers and go with a substitute brand with straightforward and formulated marketing messages.
That’s why it is sometimes critical to understanding the importance of maintaining simplicity and preciseness in your marketing strategies. The more customer-centric you become, the more you have to ensure that your customers can understand the messages you are conveying to them.
Benefits of Interactive Marketing
On the flip side, there are many benefits of learning from other interactive marketing examples and applying them in your business. It is common for consumers to expect organizations to exceed their regular expectations. By using interactive marketing, companies increase their chances of doing that. They enhance consumer interest in marketing campaigns by making them engaging and interactive. Once a customer segment starts interacting, the marketers respond to their actions accordingly. They judge each segment by their level of engagement with the ongoing campaign.
This, in turn, speeds up the lead generation process and helps the business grow its sales. The personalization factor associated with the various types of interactive marketing strategies brings in more conversions than you would otherwise expect. The overall results include boosted sales, stronger brand image, higher online conversion rates, and more opportunities for exploring different forms of automated marketing.
Inspiring Examples of Interactive Marketing
Here are a few interactive marketing examples that you can take inspiration from before applying the concept to your business.
1. We Are Superheroes
This non-profit organization indulges in interactive marketing to gather a crowd that can struggle unitedly towards a noble cause. Their website, which is built on Strikingly, mentions that the audience can choose to participate in any way that suits them. They have various channels open for the public to contribute to their initiative, such as donations, participation in a specific project, or simply sharing and spreading their message with the world via social media.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
2. Swish
This is an app for sharing and selecting hairstyles. Their website gives an option to users to submit their look to be featured in their community. This interactive marketing campaign makes the audience excited about getting popular with their style and outlook. Users who gain the most popularity become this brand’s ambassadors.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
3. Project Punchline
Notifying your audience or subscribers about your brand’s upcoming events is also a form of interactive marketing. Project Punchline uses this strategy by inviting site visitors to subscribe to receive emails with such notifications.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
4. Natural Shilajit
This company selling organic foods uses interactive marketing in monthly contests and giveaways to encourage its site visitors to subscribe to their email list.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
5. Nicecream
This handcrafted ice cream merchant offers its site visitors to create digital gift cards with yummy ice cream pictures to send to peers, colleagues, family members, and friends. This is the company’s idea of interactive marketing.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
As you can see above, most interactive marketing schemes can be offered through your brand website. If you are running a business and do not have a website to showcase your activities, you can create one quickly and professionally on Strikingly.
Strikingly is a growing website-building platform with many ready-to-use templates and hundreds of satisfied users. We update our features regularly to provide our users with a smooth experience of building and maintaining a website of their choice. Our user-friendly interface allows anyone without programming or coding experience to build a complete website to promote their business. We look forward to welcoming our new users into our community and thus keep our customer support available 24/7 through the live chat available on our landing page. Feel free to contact us anytime if you have any queries about our web-building tools.
