5 Eye-Catching Ways to Make Your Content More Interactive and Engaging

The world of online media is vast and ever-expanding. With each passing day, hundreds of thousands of new web pages go live, each competing for a spot on the all-important SERP. Under these circumstances, it’s not enough to simply produce content; if you want to reach the first page, you’ve got to produce the best content.

While quality content is a non-negotiable part of any half-decent SEO strategy, ranking for the keywords of your choice is not the only reason you should be prioritizing this essential aspect of your online presence. Good content also improves your brand image, leads to increased sales and solidifies customer loyalty.

When it comes to gauging the quality of your content, one of the most important metrics is engagement. How long readers spend on your landing page, how far down they scroll and how frequently they leave without accessing another page on your site are all factors that can help you determine how engaging your content is.

There are a number of acceptable ways to increase engagement. You can optimize your on-page keywords to make sure that the searches you’re ranking for reflect client intent, or you can hire a content writer with a particularly succinct and eloquent writing style. These are excellent options no doubt, but there’s another excellent way to increase engagement quickly and effectively: interactive content!

Why implement interactive content?

For those who aren’t already in the know, interactive content can be defined as any element of a webpage that conveys its message by encouraging user participation. This type of content is sometimes obtrusive and visible, but it just as often tucked away at the margins of the page.

Regardless of whether or not the interactive content on your page takes center stage, page elements such as these are proven to engage readers. The simple fact is this: interactive content makes users feel included and dramatically helps increase brand-client connections.

Interactive content is also proven to prompt more user activity via social media channels. According to hubspot, interactive content received up to three times more social media likes and shares than similarly lengthy non-interactive content.

While interactive content is without a doubt an excellent way to increase engagement, it’s also great for compiling real, actionable leads and market information. The information compiled by surveys, polls, calculators and other interactive web page elements can be invaluable as a data gathering tool.

Interactive elements that are proven to increase engagement

Now that we’ve explained why interactive content is worth the time and effort spent implementing it, it’s time to ask which type of interactive content might be right for you. There are a variety of interactive tools, dialogue fields and other elements that can be incorporated into the design of your webpage. Today we’ll be showing you our favorites!

Infographics

One of the most compelling and universally applicable forms of interactive content is the infographic. These handy interactive elements can work in many different contexts, but they’re most useful when you need to convey large amounts of information in a straightforward, concise and easy-to-digest format.

Infographics can take many different forms, but they’re especially effective when their interactivity is maximized. Adding data points that can be hovered over and expanded entice the audience to explore the information presented, while animations that present data over time increase time spent on-page.

These tools can also be used to present more abstract information, presenting concepts in parallel with illustrations, animations and flowcharts. Infographics such as these are perfect for condensing large amounts of dense, abstract information into a shorter and more concise format for easy reading and excellent reader retention.

Calculators

Another excellent way to make your web pages more interactive is to add interactive calculators that can help readers find a concise, clear and actionable answer to their questions. For technical queries, even the most thorough and long winded articles often fail to equip the reader to solve their problem or even get the answer they’re looking for.

Interactive calculators can be used to answer a variety of questions, provide estimates and serve other more complex applications. A great example of a useful, lightweight and easy-to-implement calculator would be a plugin that provides clients with a cost estimate for a given amount of your product.

Calculators can also be used to provide your readers with information that isn’t directly related to your product. Something as simple as a percentage calculator, unit converter or other straightforward plugin can improve your reader engagement and customer satisfaction, with very little effort on your end.

Digital flipbooks

While static articles can often convey information in a manner that is adequately concise, there are few such publications that won’t benefit from the addition of an interactive digital flipbook. There are a number of useful tools that can be used to create such documents, but the end result is almost always the same: increased engagement.

These versatile digital documents are vastly superior to their antiquated cousin, the PDF. With slick animations, impressive functionality and a rich feature list, digital interactive flip books are a great fit for everything from displaying product catalogs to restaurant menus and everything in between. No matter what topic your article covers, chances are that a flipbook is a good fit.

Some digital flipbook services even offer engagement metric tracking which can help you pinpoint user engagement, how long users spend on each page, which elements they interact with and more.

Surveys

Among all the interactive elements you can add to your page, there are few that can rival the simple effectiveness of a user survey. Sometimes they’re brief and to-the-point, sometimes they’re lengthy and in-depth. Regardless of length, depth, topic and intention, their track record over the years has made one thing clear: they work.

The thing that makes polls so engaging is the fact that they ask users for their opinions and feedback. They offer the user a way to make themselves heard and seen in a way that few other interactive content elements do. From the client’s perspective, a poll is a way to talk directly to a corporate audience.

In addition to their ability to strengthen consumer-company relationships, surveys and polls also serve the crucial role of helping you gather information about your readership. Regardless of the nature of your product or service, there are almost valuable insights to be gained by extrapolating the statistics gained by your survey.

Videos

In the internet age, content writers, bloggers and corporations alike have all been made to confront a reality: the supremacy of video media over text. No matter the context, a short video is almost always going to be more positively received than the most eloquently written prose any writer can produce.

Regardless of what this may say about the artificially reduced attention span of the modern psyche, the undeniable truth is that video media is more engaging than print. If you want to engage with your readers then, you’ll want to supplement your content with video whenever possible.

Short informational videos are almost always welcome, as are longer and more thorough explorations of the topic at hand. No matter how you choose to format your video content, rest assured that it is proven to result in improved engagement.

On a final note…

In an age of constantly evolving technology and fickle trends that can shift dramatically at a whim, keeping your digital content engaging and immediate can be tall order. Hopefully, the info we provided here will be of some use in keeping your website at the forefront of your field!