10 Types of Interactive Content to Boost Engagement

Content is king, but blog posts can get boring. So, if what can you use to make your content more appealing and engaging? Well, you could spice up your content marketing with some videos and infographics. But even those types of media are becoming old hat.

The best way to fully engage visitors to your site is to let them interact with your content. Then, instead of being merely passive consumers of content, your visitors become participators in the experience. Here are ten interactive content ideas that will entertain and engage your audience far more than a blog post will.

Games

Embedding games on a website is far easier than you may have realized. And, games are a great way to get visitors returning to a site again and again. You don’t want the game to become the sole reason to visit your site, though. After all, you will want to tempt people away from the game to look at your offering. So, it is best to keep things simple with short, easy-to-play games. A quick search on Google will reveal sites like htmlgames.com, where you can get simple HTML games to embed on your site.

Quizzes

Quizzes can be relevant to any industry sector. And, people love testing their knowledge or discovering something about themselves. The other great thing about quizzes is that they don’t come across as a selling instrument. But, a carefully worded quiz can lead people towards making a buying decision. Moreover, it’s relatively easy to add a quiz to your website. For example, if you use WordPress, there are plenty of quiz builder plugins available for this purpose.

Interactive Maps

When people view geographic information, they are usually only interested in their own location. So, while a table will do the job, an interactive map will be far more valuable and entertaining. You could have a map that displays the location of outlets when hovered over, for example. Or a map with hover effects that leads to separate landing pages would work, too. Interactive maps are another example of interactive content that is valuable and can strengthen the sales message. A home security company, for example, could display the burglary statistics by region.

Calculators

There are thousands of potential uses for calculators on business websites. For example, you have probably seen the concept applied to mortgages and loans. But calculators can also be sued to calculate the cost of any service. Or, you could use the idea to show prospects how much money people would save by using your products or how much less fuel or energy they would use. Calculators provide visitors with a  far more personal experience. And they can help people arrive at the relevant buying decision.

Polls And Surveys

Interactive polls and surveys allow you to gather marketing data from your audience, and they can be entertaining, too. Revealing the results of surveys will also allow users to position themselves against their peers. Reasonably short surveys will usually work best. If you ask too many questions, people may get bored and quit early. And, it is best not to ask too many personal questions that some people will be reluctant to answer.

Interactive Page Elements

You can make a website more engaging by adding interactive elements, like hover effects on links or images. Even something as simple as user control over a gallery or image carousel will be more interesting than a passive page. However, it is best not to go overboard with the special effects. Too much animation could slow down the website, and it might be too distracting.

Infographics

Infographics have become relatively common on websites. But, interactive infographics are not quite so commonplace. Making an infographic interactive gives you much more scope for displaying detailed data. For example, you can display the high-level data in an infographic and allow the user to drill down to the underlying data. If you want to try your hand at building interactive infographics, check out sites like ceros.com or visme.com.

Graphs and Charts

Graphs and charts are helpful when they summarize data. But, when you try to cram too much information into a chart, you can’t see the wood for the trees. If you keep graphs and charts simple and offer drill-down via hover or click effects, you will make the data much easier to understand. Interactive charts and graphs provide data visualization, user interaction, and visually appealing content. So, you can replace boring tables of data with something that visitors will enjoy exploring.

Interactive Images

You can do some amazing things with photos and graphics to increase engagement. For example, you could display before and after photos with a slider that reveals the after shot. You can also add hotspots to images that trigger a popup or play an audio file. Enabling users to explore pictures in these ways increases engagement and allows you to gain more value from an image.

You could explain the features of a product in a product photo, for example. Interactive images turn a picture into a story, and it’s relatively inexpensive to do. If you want to give it a go, sites like genial.ly have a free option as well as premium options.

Timelines

Timelines can become too detailed if you display them in a static format. But interactive timelines look more appealing and give you more scope to display supporting information. For example, you can use interactive timelines to show the history of a brand or the evolution of a product. Or, service companies, such as web developers, could explain the delivery stages of a website.

Once again, there is a range of tools you can use to create timelines. Preceden, iSpring Suite and Sutori are three good examples of interactive timeline tools.

Conclusion

The above are only ten examples of the various types of interactive content. But you can add interactive elements, like hover effects, animations, and popups to almost any kind of content. And, the good news is that interactive content increases conversions because it personalizes the experience.