In our fast-changing world of content marketing, social media marketing and SEO, specialists understood that reading words or watching videos wasn’t enough anymore for clients to engage with your business and generate leads and revenue. Interactive content, on the other hand, has gained a wild popularity in the last years – and BuzzFeed is probably the best support for this theory.

Viral websites like BuzzFeed truly engage their viewers with quizzes and polls, enticing users to comment, share, and become part of a community. This real-time engagement helps a business not only gain visibility, social media interaction and returning visitors but also learn essential information about the users. Even if infographics are a little dated in our time and day, there are plenty of other interactive ways to attract and engage customers – and today we will go through some of them.

Quizzes – The New Content Marketing Trend

According to recent research, BuzzFeed and The New York Times found out that their most appraised, shared and popular content on their websites were the quizzes and not the well-documented and solid articles or editorials. Quizzes have become the new rage in content marketing – but there are some things you should know about them before you blindly jump into this ocean of opportunities:

• Quizzes are by definition entertaining, but they should also be educational
• Quizzes help you understand your target audience but never use one to collect personal information about the users in order to generate leads. A “bad practice” example came from SnappApp a few years ago, as the quiz required the participants to fill in a form with their names and emails to get their results – a practice close to trapping and therefore a big no.
• The most popular quizzes revolve around three main domains that attract people: celebrities, characters, and cities. Of course, you can create quizzes that are closer to your business, such as food, books, and cars and so on.
• Just like everything in content marketing, quizzes work amazingly with images, so if you plan to engage your audience this way, make sure you pick proper pictures that explain, illustrate and support the answers.
• Just as we focus on peoples’ attention span and focus and don’t write 5,000 words blog articles, we should also focus on the quiz’s number of questions – specialists recommend we don’t use more than 12 questions. Anything above that makes users lose focus and interest.

It is not rocket science to create a quiz, but you should pay attention to all possible details and always analyze the end results for future improvements.

Trivia Games – A Special Type of Quiz

Besides asking your users what Game of Thrones characters they are, you can also ask them how much they know about your brand or your products in a fun manner. Let’s say you sell sporting equipment – what better way of engaging your customers than attracting them with a sports trivia game? Trivia games have the purpose of increasing brand awareness and letting you learn how much users know about a brand or a particular interest field.

Whenever you ask your users about a certain topic, make sure you rate them at the end and allow them to share their results on social media with their peers. Some trivia games examples you can adjust to your business go along the lines of:

• How many 90’s fashion items have you worn?
• How many of these famous movie cars do you recognize?
• How well do you know the world’s most famous touristic landmarks?
• How much do you know about cars?

Trivia games should be built on the same principles of quiz games: they should be supported by well-designed images, provide the users with the correct answers (this is the educational component) and allow users to easily share their results on social media.

Polls as a Doorway to Your Users’ Thoughts and Feelings

All brands and businesses, no matter how big or small, still need constant feedback from their users and customers. Polling and online surveys are not a new tool or strategy, but with the current technology available, they have become some of the most entertaining and engaging means of learning what your users really want, think, feel and plan.

By asking your customers what you really want to learn, you will be able to target your future messages better and keep them closer to your brand. Polling can be achieved in a great number of ways, and there are plenty of third-party survey applications and tools to make the survey fun and shareable instead of turning it into a third-degree interrogatory. There are some tips and tricks to use in order to create an interesting poll that makes people want to answer your questions and not ignore it:

• Make the poll visually fun with images and well-designed forms and make sure you pick a catchy title for it. You can easily understand the difference between “We want to learn why you do or don’t buy our products” and “Organic cotton baby clothes – Aye or nay?”
• The poll should make your users feel that will be fun and exciting to participate in your poll – you can achieve that by making it clear that you are there to listen to them and value their time and effort they spent answering your questions.
• Always publish the results in a fun, light and easy to understand manner. A poll is content marketing as it engages your users once when they answer questions and the second time when they read the results. This is a double-content technique that adds value to your content marketing strategies, but make sure you offer the results in a laidback manner – nobody wants to read and understand advanced statistics.

Games as Long-Term User Engagement Tool

Gamification is on the rise even if it is a long-term and quite expensive marketing strategy. Allowing users to engage in a game is worth it because it keeps them there, fully aware of your brand and 100% invested in your brand and products. Some of the best gamification success stories are Verizon, Samsung, and Club Psych and after reading their case studies, you might feel compelled to find your own ways of using gamification as a content marketing strategy for your own brand.

Usually, games entice users to participate in some simple activities, review some products, keep score, play with/against other users, share their results, engage with the existing content of your website or products, and watch your videos and so on. You don’t need to start big to make it big – a simple flash-based interactive game can become viral, boost brand awareness and generate skyrocketing reach, leads, and CTR.

As a final thought about interactive content marketing, make sure that quizzes, polls, trivia, games and other such strategies like calculators or brackets come with shareable results, while their actual content is displayed in big attractive fonts, but is short in length.