How to master the interactive blog post format

Interactive blog post format

Interactive content is a new king of Digital Marketing! Interactive blog post format is not just a trend, it is a great way to become closer to your readers and turn them into clients. 

The team of AtomPark Software is good not only in developing professional software for email and SMS marketing but also in blogging. For 10 years already we run a blog and educate our readers on how to succeed in their marketing efforts.   

This year we experimented with interactive content marketing. So, in this article, you will find the results of our experience. We will speak about what is interactive blog post format, its efficiency, and tools of its creation.

What is interactive content?

The simplest definition:
Content that requires the participants’ active engagement — more than simply reading or watching. In return for that engagement, participants receive real-time, hyper-relevant results they care about.

SnapApp

In simple words, it is the dynamic content that reacts and changes under influence of the user actions.  

It transforms an ordinary viewer into an active participant of the two-way dialogue with the brand or the author. Visualization of the information via active content elements wakes up the attention of a bored reader and speaks to his curiosity. The interactive blog post format elements make people do right now actions.

But the real power of interactive content is in a simple intrigue of free benefit hidden behind the button click without any danger (to know or get something useful, for fun, to know yourself, to become a part of the process, etc.).

That becomes a key factor of Interactive Content Marketing — to use the power of interactive elements in business needs (unobtrusively engage the reader into the sales funnel).

Why interactive content is perfect for e-commerce?

47% of buyers read 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep.

Hubspot

The better quality will be this moment of user interaction with the content, the higher the chances to gain his/her loyalty for successful cooperation. Moreover, it’s not a secret that millennials prefer to have a two-way dialogue with the brand, and interactive blog post format elements are the great way to set up this connection via blog content.

Let’s define the reasons why marketing uses interactive content. The statistics say that:

• 75% agree that interactive content is perfect for educational goals;
• 59% say about its engagement power;
• 58% claim lead generation advantages of interactive posts;
• 57% use it because it helps increase the brand awareness;
• 49% of businesses value its conversion efficiency;

It’s also a great way to know your audience better, collect data about user preferences, etc.

Wanna proofs? Just look at this sample case from Beaumonde:

But if it is so good why organizations prefer static content?

We can’t help you with the budget, but able to change the rest of the statistics.

The top formats of interactive content for a blog

Quizzes

What else could take the first place in our top? For a quite long time poll, tests were favourite engagement tools of top blogs.

Want examples?

• This “How well can you tell factual from opinion statements?”  quiz of Pew Research Center was published in June 2018. Now it has 67.6K shares!

Impressive, doesn’t it?

• Annmarie Gianni? American Beauty, Cosmetic & Personal Care brand created a quiz “What’s Your Skin Score?” on its blog to help their visitors understand if they could have better skin and if so, what to do next.

They promoted this LeadQuizzes blog post with Facebook Ad, website pop-ups.For two months this brand had $200,000 of new sales and 20,258 leads.

• Integrative Health – Scotland clinic, wanted to grow their email list. They published the quiz to help people understand what kind of risk they were at for having a thyroid problem. To get the results of which user could on the personal email.

This way they grew their local email list by 1,600 people monthly and received 40-60 new consult requests per month.

Interactive stats in blog-posts

There are dynamic infographics, videos, and maps in favour now. Here are the examples:

• The visualcapitalist.com made the visualisation stats of an ICO investment data.

• Interactive video from Honda. The user can change the video by clicking the “R” button on the sensor screen.

Watch it here.

• The dynamic map by San Francisco Chronicle shows the progress of fire perimeters in Southern California, along with air quality, in a map at sfchronicle.com.

This content has 32.8k engagements.

• Interactive Infographic. The impressive visual content to create which you may need web-developer help. For example, Goldman Sach’s (a leading global investment banking) infographic of millennials data story:

Thus people can interact with data at their own temp.

Dynamic questions, surveys

In-article question? the great way to collect the data from your audience personal preferences. Just ask the user the question you interest while he/she read the article.

How to create interactive content? The list of tools

What if I say that not all the listed above interactive formats need web-developer or a big budget? There are free to use specialized services you can easily use to create interactive blog post format on your blog.

For our AtomPark blog on WordPress system, I’ve chosen two variants: Apester and Playbuzz.
They are almost similar, let’s compare them:

Features	Apester	Playbuzz
The post formats you can create	Polls, Quizzes, Interactive videos, Story, Personality test, Countdown and Article	A story, Video, Big picture, Convo, Personality Quiz, Trivia, Poll, Flip card, List, Ranked list, Quote, Summary card
The ability to edit the images design (colour, size, add animation effects)	+	+
Animation reactions on user answers	+	limited
Free media library	+	+
Upload media	+	+
Tags	+	+
Easy settings customization	+	+
Ability to share a quiz on social	+	+
Embed on a website with a special code	+	+
WordPress Plugin	+	+
Analytics	+	+

The Apester editor design:

The Playbuzz editor design:

How to work with these interactive services?

The instruction is the same:

1. Visit the website.
2. Log in the system.
3. Choose the post format you want to create (use the template or create a new one).
4. Add text, customize the design of media elements.
5. Check the preview (on Playbuzz only).
6. Click “Publish”
7. Embed the code in your website or share the post via social media.

Note, that if you have a WordPress website, you should add free Apester or Playbuzz plugin there first. Then you can create any of its items directly in your WordPress editor:

Takeaways for interactive blog post format in your blog

There are several important things you should think over before start:

• Would your ideas of the interactive blog posts be interesting to the audience? They should bring some value, but not only fun.
• Do you have enough staff to make your idea real? Are these people experienced in this field?
• Is your team excited about creating and launching the content? You will get the cool product only if the Content Creator would enjoy the process, but not because he/she has to do it.  

If it’s ok, go ahead! Create your textual masterpieces!