Digital marketing is now widely used by most companies big and small, but not everyone relies on a strong interactive marketing strategy – in fact, not everyone knows what interactive marketing is. Here’s what interactive marketing is and five reasons to use it as a part of your strategy.
Before we get into the benefits of interactive marketing and reasons to use it as a part of your strategy, it’s important to understand what interactive marketing is. To put it simply, interactive marketing is a type of marketing that heavily relies on customer actions. It is usually very personalized and is often adjusted to meet customer expectations.
Interactive marketing is quite different from traditional marketing because it relies on more specific tactics rather than mass marketing techniques. At the same time, it is quite difficult to pull off because you need to have access to data that will give you a full picture of your audience and your customers. Yet, it yields outstanding results if done right.
There are many types of interactive marketing or rather different approaches used within it, but all of them rely on personalization and often dynamic or interactive content. Some examples include personalized recommendations and content, interactive storytelling (especially through ads), and two-way interaction through relevant content (e.g. quizzes).
First of all, you will stand out from the crowd. Interactive marketing is not something commonly used by brands and businesses which is why adopting it will already make you different from everyone else. And, of course, being unique is one of the most important things nowadays because the market is way too saturated.
Imagine that you are launching an ad campaign. If you only have regular ads, no matter how well they are designed, they will most likely be ignored by the majority of your audience just like all the other ads from different brands. But what if you make the ads interactive? This way, they will probably attract way more attention and will already demand some engagement from your audience which is unusual. In turn, they will yield better results.
Another thing you will notice is that your engagement will improve dramatically. Engagement is crucial for any business because it not only leads to more subscribers and sales, but it also shows online platforms that you are becoming a topic of interest for Internet users. If your site is getting more traffic, it will rise in search rankings. If your social media accounts are getting more visits, your posts will be shown to more users on the Explore page.
For instance, you might be writing your content yourself, but you could hire a professional writer from a writing services reviews site like Online Writers Rating who will do it instead. This way, you will have more time to dedicate to your interactive ads that will help you generate more traffic to your website. This traffic will be the result of the engagement you get on your interactive ads.
One of the biggest issues for any business to deal with is the sales – or namely, the types of sales they make. It is considered more expensive to have one-time customers rather than returning customers which is why it is so important to turn your one-time customers into returning clients. No doubt, interactive marketing has been used for this before too, and has proven to be quite effective on this front as well.
A good interactive marketing example that showcases this benefit would be the email campaigns you launch. Instead of sending out general emails, you can send personalized emails with recommendations and discounts based on what the customer has viewed or bought on your website. This way, the customer will be more likely to purchase from you again, especially if they see that your offers are truly relevant to them.
It may seem counterintuitive, but interactive marketing is actually considered to be cheaper than traditional marketing. This is probably because traditional marketing uses mass marketing techniques that strive to raise awareness and attract more customers while interactive marketing focuses on existing customers and current potential customers who can be converted into returning clients.
And, as mentioned above, having returning customers is cheaper than trying to attract new ones. So, for example, you can use a professional writer from a custom writing reviews site like Best Writers Online to constantly create personalized offers for your one-time customers who can be transformed into returning customers. It’s much easier to have a writer doing this than constantly launching more and more pointless non-interactive ad campaigns.
Last but not least, you will increase your sales by using interactive marketing. There is a reason why it is so valued even though not many businesses use it – and this is because it is so effective at increasing sales. Basically, by having more returning customers, you guarantee for yourself that there is a steady flow of incoming purchases from these returning customers who enjoyed your products and got new and relevant offers from you.
In addition to that, the interactive ads you put out also contribute to your sales. Because interactive ads work better than regular ads, you can expect more traffic on your website. This will lead to higher rankings and more page views. In turn, these page views will turn into sales. Even if you have 1% of visitors making a purchase as you did before the ad campaign, you will still have more sales because you will already have more site visits.
Having an interactive marketing campaign extremely beneficial for you if you know what you are doing. Start using interactive content marketing and you will see that your marketing efforts have become more effective and efficient. Interactive marketing might not be popular yet, but it has definitely proven to be a powerful marketing tool already.
Frank Hamilton is a blogger and translator from Manchester. He is a professional writing expert in such topics as blogging, digital marketing and self-education. He also loves traveling and speaks Spanish, French, German and English.