Interactive marketing is defined as a type of marketing campaign that interacts with existing and potential customers as per their actions, reactions, and inclinations. Interactive marketing strategies are triggered by the behavioral preferences of the prospects.
The advancement in technology, internet penetration, and the popularity of social networking platforms has bought an enormous shift of focus for interactive marketing. This marketing technique was applied in digital marketing for years but, now the focus is shifted to personalization.
Types:
Two-way Interaction
The content you share in a public space should have the ability to start a conversation of some sort. That is what makes interactive marketing a successful endeavor. Active participation on the part of the consumer is the goal of these campaigns.
To make your content interactive, a marketer needs to keep communication open for the customer. There are various types of interactive tools a marketer can incorporate into their content. A few of the tools mentioned above include:
Contests
Companies have been hosting contests for ages now. It is one of the oldest tricks in the book of interactive marketing. Contests have evolved, but they succeed at catching the audience’s attention. Raffles, giveaways, or social media contests are proven ways to capture the audience’s attention. Now contests are not approached as a standalone strategy. Contests are a single aspect of the complete and holistic marketing strategy. They are a fun way to approach all your clients or focus on a specific group of clients based on the prize that may interest only that group.
Quiz
In 2015, 90% of the most shared Facebook posts were quizzes. That data may not be so outdated yet. You may have hated quizzes back in high school, but companies have found ways to make quizzes fun. The best thing about a quiz is that it is an inherently shareable piece of content. If one customer takes the quiz and likes it, that quiz will likely be shared with friends and family of that customer. Nowadays, companies first encourage customers to take a quiz before showing them a catalog of their products. Based on how the customer fares in the quiz, products that will suit them are suggested.
Videos
Interactive videos can be of many types but, these include a different call to action. As a result, it is easier to capture and retain the audience’s attention as they are constantly re-engaging with the content. Interactive videos have become so popular that now they have entered the film industry in the form of interactive movies. An interactive video is also a great way to layer information for the consumer.
Polls
Polls are usually quicker to complete as opposed to a quiz or a contest. An incentive to finish a poll is that people want to know how similar or different their views are from others. This encourages them to at least finish the poll and be rewarded with immediate results. Polls are a great tool to enhance user engagement but are not great at lead generation.
Emails
Email marketing is a prevalent practice followed by most companies if they have access to your email address. However, with the increase in spam and junk emails, it isn’t easy to ensure that your email marketing efforts are fruitful in being interactive.
Personalized Content
Personalized content can only be created if the company has an insight into consumer behavior, preferences, demands, or expectations. This means that the company needs a lot of data about the consumer to guess their likes and dislikes.
Most companies maintain a database with essential information about their customers. This includes their demographic, psychographic data, their contact information, email ids, etc. The more you know about your consumer, the better your ad can target the customer.
Layering Information
Companies now strive to share and disseminate as much information they can to their customers. Creating information-heavy content can become too dull for many. As a result, interactive marketing acts as a marvelous approach to layering information for consumers. A way to do so is to break detailed information into smaller pieces of creative content. An easy-to-read infographic would appeal to larger audiences than an all-informative blog.
Interactive Storytelling Via Content
This form of marketing allows marketers to seize various opportunities to be as creative with their content as possible.
Creating ads that depict a story or adding animations or infographics to a blog post, the range is enough to scratch the creative itch of marketers. The discovery of information through innovative channels creates more interaction.
Advantage and Disadvantages
Advantages
- It decreases the risk factor from a marketing campaign, plus it optimizes lead generation and sales as it is tweaked as per the customer behaviors and desires.
- It enables companies in fulfilling the customers’ desire of companies making efforts to exceed their expectations, as marketers can respond to the inclinations and actions of the customers.
- Using interactive marketing is useful in boosting sales, lowering marketing costs, increasing customer satisfaction, and channelizing automated campaigns.
- The personalization factor of interactive campaigns makes them more conversion and ROI driven.
Disadvantages:
Control:
As this is a direct contact between the company and the customer, so it is clear that company does not have proper rule to take control over customers. Moreover, the different ways of sharing designs of their requirement may create problem for a company.
Accessibility:
How to know about a product? The accessibility to an advertisement depends on some particular products. Suppose for a website, a purchaser must have a suitable peripheral as computer to access the internet to see the products.