Interactive Content: Engaging Your Audience Beyond Passive Consumption
Interactive Content: Engaging Your Audience Beyond Passive Consumption
Why Buzzfeed *almost* had it right and what they missed
“The Unstoppable Rise of The Buzzfeed Quiz” reads the subheading of a 2014 Slate news article.
The New Yorker had just proclaimed 2014 “The year of the online quiz”.
At the same time, Buzzfeed—the most popular online quiz site—boasted 130 million active monthly users.
Even crazier, their most popular quizzes had a 13.8% social media share rate. (For context, a ‘good’ engagement rate is 1-5%)
Buzzfeed rode this wave of nearly insurmountable popularity and created a new news department.
They built enthusiasm and went public in 2021 after years of planning!
They are a great example of how engaging, interactive content can create a strong, loyal customer base.
…..or maybe theres more to the story.
Buzzfeed never had a true plan where the business knew how to balance its growth with actual long-term objectives.
Buzzfeed almost certainly created their popular online quizzes before having a strategy to monetize them. Once they built the systems1 to pump them out, they struggled to change course.
Without a strategy, they never had a chance.
Last week’s post talked about how podcasts are an unusually passive form of content. People listen while not really paying attention.
The same passive consumption that catapulted them into popularity is the reason why their adspace isn’t as valuable as similar channels.
This week, we're pivoting towards the other end of the spectrum: interactive content
We’ll explore :
why and how interactive content beats passive
What you should consider when making an interactive content strategy
Why Interactive Beats Passive
Interactive content differs from passive content in a few ways (other than just the user’s experience).
Let’s check out a few reasons why interactive content beats passive.
Enhanced Engagement
When audiences interact with content, they're making a conscious investment of their time and attention, which translates to higher engagement levels.
This is starkly different from passive content consumption, where it's easy to become distracted or disengage without losing the thread of the content.
Interactive content commands higher engagement levels—2x higher—with audiences than passive counterparts.
Passive content is consumed in a get-on-the-train linear fashion (like listening to a podcast).
Interactive content demands involvement, making the experience more memorable and impactful.
Better Data Insights
Engagement leading to conversion is the holy grail of content marketing.
Every customer interaction provides data about preferences, interests, and behaviors. Each of those data points can be used to further design your customer experience towards conversion.
Interactive content helps create better data insights by decreasing the impact of ad fraud and unintentional engagement.
Ad Fraud
Ad fraud in the US hit $84 billion last year. That means surface-level metrics such as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) are becoming increasingly undependable.
Deeper-funnel engagement2 leading into conversion is a better metric for reflecting actual behavior because there’s a much smaller market for gaming those results.
And interactive content delivers deeper-funnel engagement in spades.
Unintentional Engagement
Have you ever fallen asleep while watching Netflix?
Autoplay will serve up episodes for one or two in a row without needing any interactions. But eventually, Netflix will require interaction from the user to continue playing.3
That feature is designed to reduce the impact of unintentional engagement on their stickiness metrics.4
Imagine there’s a TV show SO BORING that 95% of people fall asleep within the 1st episode. Imagine they didn’t have this feature.
95% of users who start the show finish the entire season in the same session—in the same night, no less. Netflix’s algorithms would predict that this is the most engaging show of all time.
It would probably top the lists for recommended shows.
Netflix wouldn’t have the same quality real data without the (extremely minor) interactive content.
Personalization and Relevance
The nature of interactive content allows for (near)-real-time personalization.
Imagine a decision tree: Each time a user makes a decision, you get information about them, and they get a result tailored to their needs.
Note: This personalization can be only surface level, but it has to make people feel seen.
Otherwise, how could an internet-breakingly-popular quiz be about…what kind of chair you would be?5
This level of personalization is hard to achieve with passive content, where the one-size-fits-all approach6 often fails to resonate on a personal level with the audience.
Higher Retention Rates
You can also use the info you get during the personalization phase above to boost retention rates.
When users play an active role in their content consumption journey, they're more likely to remember the experience and the information it conveyed.
Imagine you sign up for an account on a sporting ticket sales website. If you get a plethora of emails about every sport, you might be likely to unsubscribe.
If you’d filled out a personalized quiz during account creation about your favorite teams instead, they could only send you targeted emails—doing the double duty of increasing how relevant they feel AND showing you a fair value exchange for your data.
What to Consider in a Strategy
Monetization Plan and KPIs
Always keep your business north start in sight. It doesn’t matter if you create the world’s most popular Tik-Tok—if there’s no mention of a company or plan to bring customers in the door.
Plan your interactive content with the end in mind. For each piece of content, consciously choose what you want the customer to do.
Is it to sign up for a newsletter? (Please do)
Is it to buy a trial for your product?
Is it to understand the breadth of your company product catalog?
Figure out the end before you start.
When it comes to KPIs, think about your business before listening to a vendor. Any third party will pick metrics that make them look the best—figure out your best path before letting them influence you.
Don’t be swayed by fancy vanity metrics if they don’t actually show how your business is doing.
Keep the old rules of marketing in mind—actual sales are king.
Extra Effort and Complexity
Creating interactive content requires a significant upfront investment in terms of both time and resources.
Unlike passive content, interactive pieces like quizzes, polls, and interactive videos mean you need to consider more than the journey any single customer takes.
Just writing out the plan for Netflix’s Bandersnatch—an interactive movie—must have taken 10x more effort than a normal TV episode.
The effort extends into managing and interpreting the data these interactions generate. Each path chosen might generate a data point instead of just that something was consumed.
This means you may need advanced analytics tools or platforms to capture, process, and act upon user responses.
Interactive content introduces complexity in data flows, demanding a more technically-thorough approach to content management and analytics. (Yes, that means talking to IT before coming up with a new data stream)
Marketers must ensure that data collected through interactive means integrates with existing data platforms to enable a unified view of the customer journey.
Risk of Over-Segmentation
While the granular data from interactive content can significantly enhance personalization, there's a risk of over-segmentation.
Marketers might be tempted to micro-target to the extent that it could reduce the efficiency of marketing campaigns.
You could end up narrowing the audience too much or by creating segments that are not actionable due to their small size or specific nature.
You may also run into overfitting to your previous data and will find that customer behaviors change over time
Privacy Concerns
With the increase in user interaction data comes greater responsibility for privacy. Users are becoming increasingly aware and concerned about how their data is used.
Interactive content strategies must therefore be designed with privacy at the forefront, ensuring compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
Transparent communication about what data is being collected and how it will be used is crucial to maintaining trust. A feeling of a fair value exchange helps this interactions immensely.
Conclusion
If you’ve already managed to make waves with your traditional content marketing, then consider branching out to interactive content.
Although there are big gains that you can find from interactive content, there are also big jumps in complexity.
In this post, you saw the rise and fall of Buzzfeed. What specific area did they do poorly that led to their failure?
They failed to think about the end before beginning. They created (and managed) viral sharable quizzes that made users feel seen. But all that didn’t matter because they didn’t have a way to turn that into a deeper monetization than accepting the scraps ad vendors would offer them.
Now, a decade later, legislation and competition has changed. You need to take a more contentious strategy towards interactive content.
The potential for interactivity-enhanced engagement and insights into customer preferences and behavior is significant, but it requires a thoughtful approach that respects user privacy, aligns with brand values, and leverages technology effectively.
The long-term benefits of building a strong, engaged community can be substantial.
Both people and process systems can be tough to change
Someone filling out an in-app survey is more meaningful as an intent indicator than just the act of downloading an app—something easily gamed
If you’ve interacted with the UI in any way—pausing, rewinding, even just showing the menu—this question won’t appear
Yes, they say its so that you don’t overuse your internet and don’t lose your place in the series. But a company wouldn’t ever lie, would they?
I’m a swivel chair if you’re curious
You shouldn’t have a one-size-fits-all approach in copy anyway, but thats a matter for a different post