Creative Storytelling With Interactive Content
When was the last time you heard a great story? Maybe you read a novel or a newspaper clipping. Maybe it was a long-form podcast that told the same story over a series of episodes. Or perhaps it was a TV show, and you’re still hanging on to last week’s cliffhanger…
Stories come in all shapes and sizes; some stories leave us on the floor laughing our heads off while others have us on the edge of our seat in anticipation. A great story sticks with us long after we close the book, click off the TV, and move on to the next podcast. A great story can alter our goals, empower our desire for change, and encourage us to want to learn more.
Not everyone enjoys reading but everyone loves a good story, and a good story can be told over a wide range of formats — through written word, on screen, or over the radio.
Sharing stories may be one of the oldest forms of human communication, long before man knew how to write.
Content Marketing Is Brand Storytelling that Educates
In the early days of brand storytelling, marketers would craft advertisements that told a quick story about their product or service to their prospects. These little stories aimed to engage customers into wanting to make a purchase. Content marketing aims to do more than simply convince the customer that they need to purchase your products. Instead, content marketing is used as a way to educate customers about the brand in a way that builds trust and connection with the audience.
When it comes to using content as a way to engage our users, nothing is more effective than interactivity. When a prospect visits your white paper, PDF or static infographic, they (hopefully) consume the content and then move on to their next Google search. From a data perspective, you have no way of measuring whether or not the content impacted that user or if they even consumed the content. Interactive content encourages the user to take a seat, get comfortable, and start interacting with the elements on the page.
Audiences Spend More Time On Your Content
A great story immerses the user by helping them imagine themselves in the scenery that the character is in. A good story can guide us to smell, feel, and taste the world described to us. A great story makes it easy for us (the reader) to see ourselves lost in it. When you’re immersed in a story, you cannot imagine ever leaving.
Why would you want to send your prospects to your content and never know if they got comfy enough to be immersed? Passive content doesn’t encourage engagement — it’s flat and predictable. Where static content fails, interactive content succeeds. With the addition of interactivity, your content is only limited by your imagination or the platform you pick to launch with.
Brands can leverage interactive content to ask simple questions to receive custom results or to be led down a segmentation path that is more personalized. These engagement points encourage the user to continue moving through the content while collecting data for the brand about what interested the user.
Interactive Content Gives the Brand Story Personality
When we create content that tells a story, the experience takes center stage over the product or brand. Brand stories are not supposed to be an ad or a sales pitch but rather an educational piece that tells the user why this product or brand rocks and how it can fill a need. A sales pitch will not attract and retain readers, but an engaging personality will.
Interactive content brings personality to the story by using animations to draw attention to key points or by placing questions that test users knowledge strategically within the experience.
Interactive Content Helps You Connect With Your Customers
The connection between a brand and a consumer exists because of the story the brand tells and the authenticity the customer finds in it. For each creative experience that you deliver, thousands have been written by your competitors. If you want to stand out amongst the noise, your content needs purpose and honesty.
Interactive content can provide you with a jumping off point to tell your story authentically and in a way that is unique amongst your competitors. No two interactive experiences look the same.
Later this week, I will be joining other professional content marketers and storytellers at Forward, an event hosted by Skyword in Boston. During my session, I will be discussing the benefits of interactive content for brand storytelling. For more information about the event visit the official Forward site and to see how ion interactive helped Skyword tell their story using interactive content, check out our case study here.
Mary D’Alatri-Ward is Vice President of Account Services at ion interactive and blogs about interactive content at medium.ioninteractive.com.
The ion interactive enterprise SaaS platform empowers modern marketers to produce data-driven interactive content at scale and without code. ion’s marketing technology and services deliver measurable business value for hundreds of brands and agencies. ion’s platform launches, customizes and tests all types of engaging interactive digital experiences — infographics, ebooks, assessments, quizzes, lookbooks, interactive white papers, calculators, wizards and configurators. The platform delivers competitive differentiation, conversion performance and lead quality for in-house and agency teams. Connect with ion interactive on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Medium or visit ioninteractive.com.
