What is Interactive Marketing? Types, Tools, Challenges & Examples

Interactive marketing is a two-way approach to marketing that focuses on collaboration and serving customers as they want. It's also known as event-driven, trigger-based, or one-to-one marketing. Interactive marketing campaigns are directly proportional to the results of a customer's actions, expectations, behaviors, or preferences. These campaigns - often called trigger-based marketing - leverage triggers, such as polls, contests, and quizzes, to communicate with consumers.

Interactive marketing campaigns are directly proportional to the results of a customer's actions, expectations, behaviors, or preferences. These campaigns - often called trigger-based marketing - leverage triggers, such as polls, contests, and quizzes, to communicate with consumers.

This method is reliant on the data collected while interacting and engaging with prospects.

What is Interactive Marketing?

Interactive marketing, also known asinteractive advertising, is a type of marketing campaign that reacts to and interacts with customers based on their actions, reactions, and inclinations. This type of strategy is triggered by the behavioral preferences of prospects.

The advancement of technology, internet penetration, and the rise in popularity of social media platforms has led to an enormous shift in focus for interactive marketing. Marketing in digital space was all about interactive marketing, but now that attention is shifted to personalization.

If your marketing campaigns are unfocused, it's not going to do much good. Consumers now expect personalized marketing that is targeted to their interests. Interactive marketing is a form of direct marketing that focuses on the customer and uses new technology to improve results.

Types of Interactive Marketing

There are many marketing approaches, because the goal is always to get people to respond. Here are some ideas you can use in your own content:

1. Interactive Storytelling Via Content

The variety of marketing formats that are available today means that marketers have more opportunities to be creative with their content. Creating ads with creative, story-driven messages or infographics can capture the attention of the consumer. Unlocking hidden opportunities for gaining insights through new forms of research creates innovation and sparks conversation.

2. Layering Information

Companies want to share as much information about their products as possible. But for some, it can be too difficult to read through all of the information. That's where interactive marketing comes in and helps them share what they need without overwhelming people with too much content. For an example, let's say you wanted to create an infographic with a detailed list of your product offerings. Instead of just posting an article that discusses all aspects, we would break the information into smaller pieces of creative content. This way is easier for people to read, and reaches larger audiences because of the images and bright colors used with infographics.

3. Personalized Content

While personalized content is becoming increasingly popular, it's only possible when the company has a lot of insight into the things consumers like to do. In other words, the company must have a lot of data about the consumer in order to predict their preferences and expectations.

Most companies keep a database of essential information about their customers, including their demographic and psychographic data. By understanding who your customer is, you can create advertising campaigns that are extremely targeted and tailored to the individual. Personalized content creates a more meaningful marketing experience that leads to higher conversions.

4. Two-way Interaction

The goal of interactive marketing campaigns is to start a conversation with consumers who will actively participate. The more people you can get involved in the discussion, the better your campaign is doing.

Major tools of interactive marketing

In order to make your content interactive, a marketer needs to maintain an open line of communication with the customer. There are a variety of types of interactive tools that can be used to foster engagement with the audience. Some of the mentioned tools previously include:

a. Contests

One of the oldest tricks in marketing books is hosting contests, and they are still successful today. The contest has come a long way. It's no longer just about a random prize to get people's attention; now, it's about creativity and marketing strategy. Nowadays, contests are one small part of a larger, holistic strategy which includes social media contests. These are a fun way to approach all your clients or focus on specific groups by offering prizes for those groups only.

b. Quizzes

In 2015, 90% of the most popular Facebook posts were quizzes. Those stats may not be out of date quite yet. Maybe you hated when your teachers made you take quizzes in high school, but companies have found ways to make them fun. The best thing about a quiz is that it's super shareable. If one customer takes the quiz and likes it, other people will likely see it from their friends or family who took the quiz and liked it too. Nowadays, companies encourage customers to take a quiz before showing them a catalog of their products. Based on how the customer does on the quiz, they'll get suggested products that they'll like based on what they scored on the quiz.

c. Polls

A poll is a much faster method of getting people's opinions. Some polls might even include an incentive to feeling accomplished. For example, finishing a poll would reveal the results immediately. Polls are great for engaging your audience but lack the ability to generate enough leads.

d. Videos

Interactive videos can take many different forms, but these typically include a call to action. This leads to an increased level of engagement from viewers, who have the opportunity to interact with the content again and again. Interactive videos have become so popular that they are now being used in films. They are also a great way to layer information for consumers, which makes them even more useful.

e. Emails

Email marketing is a common practice followed by many companies, if they have your email address. But with the increase in spam and junk emails, it can be difficult to ensure that you're receiving only the most relevant email marketing messages.

Challenges of Digital Marketing

Interactive marketing can be very useful in providing favorable and conversion-driven results. A lot of people, however, don't really understand how interactive marketing works and have misconceptions about the capabilities of this marketing approach.

Interactive campaigns can be tricky because there are so many moving pieces, and they're all constantly changing. Finding the right customer data can be difficult, and is often the backbone of every successful campaign. But personalized customer intelligence, or PI, is unavoidable if you want a complete understanding of customers.

Managing the excessive amounts of data related to data warehouses, contact centers, CRM systems, and more is challenging for interactive campaigns. These are some other notable challenges:

- Providing valuable content

- Optimizing the conversion of site visitors to leads

- Ensuring marketing efforts more customer-centric

- Increasing the reach of your content

- Automating your marketing tasks

Advantages of Interactive Marketing

When you're doing interactive marketing campaigns your notable advantages to keep in mind are:

- It enables companies in fulfilling the customers’ desire of companies making efforts to exceed their expectations. Marketers have better awareness of the customer's needs and can respond quickly, if necessary

- It minimizes the risk factor from marketing campaigns by optimizing lead generation and sales adjustments.

- Interactive campaigns create a personal touch that give them an edge of conversion and revenue potential.

- Interactive marketing enables you to grow your business in a variety of ways, including increasing sales, lowering marketing costs, improving customer satisfaction, and so much more. This is why interactive marketing is one of advertising's most powerful tools.

Best Practices for Effective Interactive Marketing Campaigns

1. Identify your target market and segment your customers

To start, any company needs to have a clear understanding of its target audience. Once it knows who it's selling to and what this group wants, it's easy to segment existing customers into different groups. However, some interactive marketing campaigns won't click with every audience. To avoid that problem, create detailed personas for your buyers. This will help you when you create content for them—the content will be more engaging because you created it specifically for this targeted audience.

2. Figure out which triggers work the best

A trigger campaign includes sending a message more than once in exchange for an event happening. Trigger messages are a great way to keep interacting with the user naturally, which can be a welcome message when first visiting the website or app. Other triggers might take place after some time has elapsed and encourage users to re-engage with your brand. In order for this to work you need to define the channel. Triggers should be omnichannel when they're urgent, like a security breach. And if less relevent, but not so urgent triggers are shared across various channels, it could annoy your customers.

3. PERSONALIZE your content

One of the best ways to create a personalized experience for a user is to personalize your interactive marketing efforts. From greeting customers with their name in an email, or starting a social media conversation, we've shown how personalization can be as simple as our data backlist. We also demonstrated how birthday wishes and prizes are such a big way of making the most out of customer data. Personalization starts by updating our database, so good databases are essential to making personalized interactions possible.

4. Create incentives for your customers

Why do humans interact with content? Well, there are a few reasons. Sometimes people interact because they like what they see or there is an incentive to do so. Contests and giveaways help people to engage if there's something in it for them. This insight into what people prefer can teach you a lot about their taste and preferences.

5. Make the most out of modern technology

With the advent of technology, marketers can now collect a lot more information on their customers than they were able to before. This includes personal data like email addresses, phone numbers and social media handles, which are collected with the help of various tools such as:

- Data Visualization Tools - You're probably wondering what an infographics is. Well, data visualization tools can help you create them out of multiple charts or other data sets. Which is why they have become increasingly popular.

- Chatbots - Chatbots make it easy to interact with your customers and answer common questions.

- Virtual Reality - Augmented Reality creates an interactive environment that is perfect for demonstrating products and services in a virtual domain. Virtual reality isn't far behind either, with even more exciting possibilities for seamless integration.

- Interactive Videos - Interactive videos, mentioned earlier, help keep audience members engaged while they follow the instructions at their own pace. It's a spectacular and ingenious marketing method that is amazingly user-friendly.

Interactive Marketing Examples

1. Conversion Marketing by HubSpot

HubSpot has a new approach to marketing that utilizes messaging apps instead of email. This allows it to reduce the friction in the buying journey of its audiences and optimize lead generation and conversions.

2. New Zealand tourism industry Quiz

In the quiz above from the New Zealand tourism industry, it's clear that many of those who finish all the questions and answers will be interested in camping responsibly with Holiday Parks of New Zealand.

3. Motor Oil Polls

The MotorOil Polls example above is an example of how marketing decisions like changing your logo can be made by interacting with the gallery and engaging them with visuals or videos within your content.

Conclusion

Interactive marketing campaigns allow audiences to interact with your marketing content, which is effective in running a successful marketing campaign. One of the key benefits of interactive marketing campaigns is that it provides insight into details about the people that are being marketed to. This includes key insights and inclinations so you can create personalized campaigns and convert those who have interacted with your content.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)