The 2017 CMI Report is Out — The Future of Interactive Content is Now
I am in the interactive content business. Every day I wake up, I drink coffee, and I immediately start thinking about interactive content. In a lot of ways, I eat, sleep, and breath interactive content and the documentation created around it. I want to know who is using it, who wants to use it, who tried and didn’t find success, and who is a rockstar at it.
For the last two years, Content Marketing Institute has put out a research paper that feeds my hunger for data by answering the above questions. I know that interactive content is the future — I would not be working for a business that specializes in it if I didn’t believe that… And thanks to this report, I have rock solid proof that we are on the cusp of something great.
More and more businesses are looking to interactive content to capture their user’s attention and hold it longer than ever before. I have worked in this industry (content marketing) for the last seven years, and if I have learned anything about web browsers in that time it is this — their attention is damn hard to capture.
Each day we are inundated with millions of pieces of content. And each piece of content is tripping over themselves to get our attention. And to be frank, this blog post is an example of just that. I want you to read this, I want you to engage with it, and I want you to find value in what I say… but first, I have to get you here, and then I have to hold your attention.
The CMI Report shows us that this very problem is the reason so many businesses are flocking to the interactive content space to try and hold the attention of their prospects long enough encourage a conversion.
79% of Marketers Who Use Interactive Content Plan to Increase Usage
Wow! You know what that tells me? Interactive content works. Most marketers are willing to try something at least once, maybe twice before abandoning and moving on to the next strategy. With 79% of interactive content users saying that they plan to increase what they create, we are finding success with this type of content.
The majority of marketers who participated in the study agreed that engagement was their primary goal for using interactive content — 66% to be exact. Engagement is hard to measure in a static piece of content. For example, I can tell how many of my Twitters followers visited this blog post, and Medium could say how many read it but it is hard for me to know for sure what happened once you landed on it. Interactive content makes it easy to know what elements users were engaged with by analyzing what they clicked on, hovered over, or responded to within an experience. This is valuable to businesses as they look to learn more about their prospects.
In a recent webinar, ion interactive’s co-founder Anna Talerico focused heavily on the way that you can nurture your prospects by analyzing content that they engage with from your brand. For example, if your prospects answer questions to an assessment or quiz, you can capture meaningful data about that user and then place them into a nurture track that will send them additional content related to their unique choices. Inviting you to read this blog post is a great way for us to connect. However, I don’t know anything about you. And why don’t I? You should say hi in the comments!
But, if I had sent you to an interactive article, I could have asked you quiz questions or encouraged engagement with a reveal tile which would help me learn a little more about you and what interests you. This is where marketers are finding the most value in using interactive content — the learnings.
The CMI Report tells us a lot about what interactive content has done for the content marketing — — it’s changed everything.
To give our prospects the content that they want and when they want it, we need to learn about them first. As our prospects and customers are searching the web for educational material, it is our job to find them at that moment and give them engaging content about that topic. The CMI Report says that at this stage in the journey, assessments, quizzes, and infographics are most impactful when looking to educate these users.
I could go on and on with all of the valuable information that this year’s report provided me but, I think it’s best that you consume on your own and pinpoint your key takeaways from this robust report.
Above everything else that I have captured from the data in this year’s report, the strongest and biggest takeaway that I can share is that interactive content is changing the content marketing landscape, and I am glad that I am one of the content marketers lucky to be in the driver’s seat of this exciting industry.
ion interactive is excited to offer you the opportunity to view the 2017 CMI Report before it’s official release in June. Check it out here.
Stephanie Mansueto is a Content Strategist 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.
