5 Inventive Examples of Interactive Marketing

Whether you’re a brick-and-mortar business or an online store, your top priorities are to find ways to stand out from the competition and create a positive customer experience to grow your company. And with over 20% of retail purchases taking place online in 2024—a number that’s only expected to grow in the coming years—a strong online marketing strategy is key. That’s where interactive marketing comes in: you’ll be using marketing materials to start conversations with your audience online.

What is interactive marketing?

This online marketing strategy uses engaging, personalized content in its marketing efforts to attract and capture your audience’s attention and start an interaction. Interactive marketing is designed with customer experience in mind. It replaces tired marketing tactics with customized content and strategies.

While interactive marketing does use existing digital marketing campaigns, such as email or social media marketing, its incorporation of customer data is key for driving higher engagement.

Your business can also use interactive videos, conversational chatbots, visual aids, or online surveys and quizzes as part of your strategy. Marketers use these innovative marketing approaches to present your business’s products or services in more creative and engaging ways, with the goal of increasing their interactions with your business.

How does interactive marketing differ from traditional marketing?

Interactive marketing doesn’t cater to one large, general audience like traditional marketing is known for. Instead, it personalizes marketing interactions with customers based on their preferences and past actions and behaviors. That way, your audience receives more relevant marketing content suited to their needs.

Interactive marketing also changes how you get your message across to your target audience. Unlike traditional marketing campaigns, one of the goals of interactive marketing is starting a two-way conversation and drawing in your audience through engaging marketing materials like quizzes, infographics, or videos.

5 Common Types of Interactive Marketing Materials

Interactive marketing materials are designed to not only attract an audience but get them to interact with your brand. Here are five common types to consider for your business:

1. Interactive Videos

You’re probably familiar with linear video content, where a user can watch, pause, or rewind the content but can’t do much else. Interactive video takes this a step further, allowing users to engage with video content in various ways. Depending on the functionalities, users can scroll over different areas of the video to learn more about a product or service, answer pop-up questions, or click on a call-to-action (CTA).

An interactive video is a great option for explaining your offerings in-depth and giving customers an entertaining peek into your business. They’re also more immersive and engaging than traditional linear videos, which helps improve viewing times and the chance of conversions.

2. Quizzes, Surveys, and Polls

If you want to boost your website’s engagement rate, consider interactive quizzes, games, or polls. These fun digital tools serve multiple purposes. First, they help get more customers to interact with your business and keep them on your site longer. Second, you can use surveys and quizzes to gather insights about your customers in addition to their entertainment value. Lastly, they help your audience learn more about your business and the products or services you offer.

For example, a medspa company may use an interactive quiz to help customers determine which skincare products would work best for their specific conditions. The quiz not only helps the customer learn more about your products, it sets them up for a more personalized, satisfying experience. Plus, your business can use quiz data to learn what customers are most interested in and refine your offerings from there.

3. Personalized Content

When it comes to interactive marketing techniques, personalization is king. Personalizing your marketing campaigns helps your audience feel like you’re talking directly to them and encourages more engagement. While it does include simple personalizations like using first names to address customers in emails or chatbots, taking it a step further by curating product recommendations, specific content, or a series of ads can be more effective. The goal of this technique is to make your audience feel like they’re interacting with a friend who knows them well.

4. Interactive Storytelling

Another way to capture your audience’s attention and keep them engaged is by sharing stories and real-life examples. Storytelling marketing strategies help your business connect with customers on an emotional level. They include brand stories that share your mission or your company’s history to connect with customers over shared values. You can also use storytelling to show how your product solves a specific problem of your target audience or share a customer case study. Adding other interactive elements and visual aids like videos, GIFs, or charts within your text can also increase engagement.

5. Calculators

This interactive marketing technique is ideal for businesses that handle a lot of data, such as banks and auto dealers. Your visitors can insert their own data into the calculator to generate personalized results for auto loans, mortgages, and more. Calculators share information to educate your audience and help them feel confident they’re making the best decision. The value they offer helps you attract and retain more customers.

Direct vs Interactive Marketing

Direct marketing distributes traditional marketing materials like direct mail and print catalogs straight to consumers—without using any advertising media. In contrast, interactive marketing relies on digital marketing channels like email, text messages, websites, social media platforms, and other technology to deliver ads that promote customer engagement. While a business will send direct marketing materials to its general target audience, it can’t be segmented or personalized in the same way as interactive marketing.

The goal of direct marketing is to promote brand awareness and entice the audience into making a purchase, but it doesn’t try to engage or interact with the audience in any way. Interactive marketing, on the other hand, allows businesses to start a two-way conversation with their audience and offer a more customized experience.

6 Benefits of Interactive Marketing

With interactive marketing, your brand can experience:

Boosted Conversion Rates

Interactive marketing materials allow for more conversion opportunities. You can add CTA buttons to videos or social media ads and more easily direct users to product pages when they take a quiz on your site. Plus, the personalization used in interactive marketing means your target audience sees content and ads that are more relevant to their needs, making them more likely to continue on their buyer’s journey and convert.

Increased Audience Engagement

By its nature, interactive marketing is more likely to attract interest from your target audience and encourage them to take action. That’s because interactive marketing is more engaging—it enables your audience to be an active participant versus just viewing an ad. It provides more helpful and valuable information that encourages customers to interact with your brand.

Instant Feedback

Surveys, polls, and quizzes are great tools for gathering important feedback from customers and leads. Your business can quickly learn how customers feel about your products or services, identify friction points in your buyer’s journey, determine if your website is mobile-friendly, and more. From there, you can make needed improvements to help grow your business.

Qualified Lead Generation

Using targeted content and interactive questionnaires can help your business attract more leads overall. It’s also key to qualifying your leads, as you can more easily weed out those less interested in your brand or products and focus more effort on leads in your ideal customer segment.

Virality and Sharing

When you create entertaining and interactive content, your audience is more likely to share it with others. As the number of people who view your marketing content increases, so do your leads, conversions, and return on investment (ROI).

Personalization

People don’t want to feel like any other generic customer. Instead, they want brands to recognize and address their individual needs and preferences. Interactive marketing allows marketers to create personalized emails, share relevant content, and customize chatbot conversations, giving your audience a truly custom experience that increases satisfaction and loyalty.

5 Examples of Interactive Marketing

Companies are finding new and innovative ways to appeal to and engage their target audience. Here are five interactive marketing examples to consider for your own brand.

User-Generated Content

Interactive marketing can be as simple as asking your social media followers to get involved. Consider running a contest or a hashtag campaign to promote a specific product. You’ll post the contest information on your social media page, asking your followers to share their own experiences. User-generated content (USG) can include customers taking a selfie with your product or a video of them using your product and sharing what they like about it.

Augmented Reality Shopping

Augmented reality allows prospective customers to try out your products before they make a purchase—whether that’s seeing how they’d look in an outfit or a new pair of glasses and how other items would look in their homes. With this technology, your customers can swap different options, engaging with your products in a more interactive way. Plus, augmented reality can help online shoppers feel more confident about making a purchase.

Interactive Series on Youtube

A new marketing trend to consider is developing an interactive video series for YouTube where the customers help guide the content. For example, maybe you want to promote a new product line. You’d create the first video introducing each product and asking viewers to choose which they’d like to see next and the type of content that would be most helpful to them. Having potential customers direct your content series based on their own interests and preferences not only gets them more involved, raising engagement levels, but can also help increase conversions, too.

Conversational Marketing

Chatbots are an easy way to increase engagement and personalization of a customer’s experience with your website. It uses conversational AI to make customers feel like they’re having a real conversation with a person. Conversational marketing helps them learn more about your services or products and reduces points of friction in their shopping process. Since it can provide a customized experience, your customers will have a better overall experience with your brand.

Interactive Virtual Events

Interactive marketing is a great way to make your virtual events more engaging. Consider skipping the video element and producing an all-audio event so customers don’t have to be stuck in front of a screen to attend or participate. Listeners can join in from their home, office, or even while out running errands and may feel more comfortable participating knowing they’re off-camera. Additionally, letting attendees pick and choose from your event’s session ensures they’re attending the events that interest them the most, which contributes to a better experience for everyone.

Boost Your Interactive Marketing Strategies With Podium

Transforming your marketing tactics into more two-way interactions with your potential customers is easier with Podium. Our platform offers integrated, automated solutions to help you send more personalized emails and content recommendations. And, with our AI Employee on board, your business can communicate with customers around the clock, helping you drive engagement and make more sales. Watch a free demo to learn more about Podium today.