Elizabeth Wellington
Just as bread is a staple of your kitchen, blog content is a staple of the content marketing world. Yes, we all love a plain slice of toast, but even the crustiest baguette is made better by condiments, meats and veggies — the perfect sandwich.
What can you add to your blog posts to give them a bigger bite? Interactive content adds spice to your typical offerings, complementing long-form content and multiplying its impact in your community. Here’s how introducing a poll or quiz into your blog post can create the most delicious experience for leads:
1. Strengthen Two-Way Communication
Ad Week states that unlike prior generations, “Millennials don’t want to be spoken to; they demand to be spoken with.” Static content like blog posts and white papers educate and entertain the target audience, but fail in creating a dialogue. With marketers sharing more content than ever, meeting the need for a two-way conversation can move your company forward.
But 37% of marketers find this to be their greatest challenge: how do they maintain increasing two-way conversations with their audience at scale? Here’s an easy answer: add interactive elements to your static pieces.
Integrating a quiz or a poll to your blog post takes minimal effort and can yield big results — and it doesn’t require that you whip up content from scratch. These interactive formats build on themes you’re already using, repurposing language and increasing the impact of your hard work.
2. Build Engagement & Community
Polls and quizzes not only engage your audience in the moment, but they build a sense of community that enhances connections over time. Through a poll, individuals can gauge their opinion against other audience members, offering a cohesive picture of your community — and and their place in it.
DDI, a global talent management consulting firm, found that prospects who completed their “Common Leadership Styles” quiz were 6x more likely than others to open future emails. Including an interactive element in their outreach paved the way for a positive, long-term relationship.
The rule of seven states that individuals need to hear the same message many times before making a commitment. Just as with any form of communication, the more ways you can find to connect, the greater the trust that develops between you and your leads. Adding a quiz or poll at the end of your blog reinforces your connection and deepens learning.
3. Use the Data You Gather to Create More Content
Data from polls and quizzes makes it easy to refine your understanding of potential leads. By asking questions relevant to your data points, you pave the way for greater clarity between your company and its audience.
When LivePerson created their Digital Engagement Selfie assessment, they built on the idea of a “selfie” to assess executives’ digital engagement strategy. LivePerson received almost 300 responses, which they fashioned into an e-book and webinar discussing the state of customer experience. They recycled their data into their own strategy as well as into a powerful takeaway for their audience.
Marketers can use this same tactic to understand and tailor the impact of their work. Include a few questions about your subject matter in a quiz or poll — or even ask your audience whether they gained anything from your content. Yes, data can help you to learn about the nature of your audience, but it can also help you to find room for improvements within the content you create and promote.
The best brands continually implement customer feedback to improve their strategy. And using a short quiz or poll (unlike a long, emailed survey) reaches your audience on their terms, in an engaging, snackable piece.
4. Boost CTA Click-Throughs
Does your blog post CTA need a new approach? Try integrating it into a poll or quiz. When Fit Marketing introduced their CTA through a quiz, more than 17% of users who took the quiz clicked through to an official offer. With a typical CTA yielding only a 1-4% click-through rate, a piece of interactive content can make a huge difference in propelling your numbers forward.
CTAs integrated into quizzes yield higher click-through rates because they create a personal connection before suggesting next steps. This kind of one-to-one marketing allows you to segment CTAs to different audiences, which in itself converts 42% more leads than general CTAs.
As Wendy Bryant-Beswick says:
“You can no longer “target” the masses; instead you have to think about how to build those relationships with much more relevant content. Be human – gone are th edays of corporate speak and dull, boring campaigns. Becoming less formal in your messaging is going to be critical in reaching potential customers.”
Birchbox’s marketing is an innovative example of this approach — a disrupter in the beauty market, Birchbox incorporated a playful quiz into their website that allowed them to dig deeper than traditional questions with a light tone.
With “What’s Your Makeup Brand Spirit Animal?” they asked about music tastes, preferred footwear and the ideal vacation spot before matching a visitor’s personality to the ideal beauty brand. Only then does Birchbox introduce a personalized CTA, suggesting that their audience see the rest of their “spirit brand’s” offering through a link. Through their entertaining take on segmentation, they offer meaningful content and personalized, relevant CTAs.
5. Increase Social Share Rates
According to the Content Marketing Institute, an effective content mix always includes entertainment. Given the addictive, share-worthy quality of interactive content, blog posts with quizzes or polls will cause more ripples within your social communities, too.
Buzzfeed’s effectiveness as a brand relies heavily on the social shareability of their content. After all, how many times have you seen a friend share one the results of one of their quizzes on Facebook? If you want to boost your social shares, create a personality test — based on SnapApp customer data, they exhibit an average share rate of 4.04%, the strongest of any type of quiz.
Dr. Stuart Brown states in his TED talk, “Play is not the opposite of work.” Build on the notion of “play” in your content, allowing people to engage with meaningful content in their own way.
Even if you need to keep a more serious tone, your social media impact will benefit from gamification. BBC, the world’s oldest broadcasting channel, takes this approach to cover the news — they compliment their content on serious events with quizzes and polls. Their weekly news quiz keeps their audience up-to-date with the most important events. Here’s an example of a recent news quiz they ran:
Just as this approach boosts social shares in brand marketing, it does within serious journalism as well.
Conclusion
Getting amazing results from your blog isn’t easy. It takes work – but there are tools to help you get more out of the hard work you’re already putting in.
Using interactive content like polls and quizzes gives you the ability to amplify your amazing blog content with engagement, community-building, and increased data capture and conversions.
With these 5 tips, you’re all set to incorporate interactivity and get great blog results.
Which tactics are you excited to try? Let us know in the comments, or in this quick poll!
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