Interactive content adds greater value

Interactive content adds greater value

The mantra “Content is King” is now  about three years old, geriatric in web years.

Now almost everybody is doing it, certainly almost everyone small businesses need to compete successfully against to survive.

Content is rapidly becoming a commodity, something to be “sourced” as you would a new printer cartridge, or replacement part for a bit of machinery, the only real challenges left are to know where to look, how to sort through the options, and how much to pay.

Given this is the case, how should forward thinking marketers, particularly those on small budgets set about  differentiating themselves amongst the welter of competing attention grabbing options available?

The answer is pretty easy to say, but not so easy to execute.

Find ways to actively engage the individuals in your market with your content . Just getting them to read a post, or even download a white paper is no longer good enough, you have to find the means to put their brains into gear, rather than just letting them operate on autopilot.

Turn a white paper into an interactive performance measurement tool,

Build a quizzes and games into your infographics,

Create questionnaires to complement your best practise databases,

Throw out the product brochure, and let customers design their own product and add the extras.

There are a few services evolving to assist the process, several tailored for specific social media platforms, but the hardest bit is to find the creativity, imagination, and market insight that will allow you to understand the interactions with your product and its competitors sufficiently well to know what sort of activity will engage them.

Get it right, and you will also get to gather an extraordinary array of customer behavioural data that can be leveraged, delivering value to your business and your customers.