Content Is King But The King Has New Clothes

Andrew Beelitz September 10, 2015

The way that both consumers buy and companies sell has changed drastically in recent years. A buyer journey that was once driven by the sales rep is now driven by the consumer. Potential buyers are self-educating before making a purchase; which is why it is imperative to have content that engages, educates, and nurtures prospects to a point where they are either ready to purchase, or at least ready to begin a conversation with your brand or company.

Visual Content Calls for Action

Content isn’t just text. The impact of hi-quality visual content is becoming more important as readers’ attention spans wane, and the speed of content consumption increases. The ability to quickly engage and educate a consumer with images, videos, and animated infographics increases awareness and credibility with consumer, and marketers are doing everything within their power to do so. But content marketing isn’t just about cool visuals either. Every image and every video should call for action, and that call to action should be only one click away.

Static vs. Interactive Content

Content marketers go to great lengths to create engaging visuals, and often contribute a hefty portion of their budget to graphic design, animation, and video; however, it is generally done so without a clear idea of how well it engages consumers. The ability to easily hyperlink visual content with various web resources opens unprecedented opportunities for content marketers. 

So what exactly is an interactive image? Interactive images are static images enhanced with web content (“rich media tags” or “hyperlinks”), effectively allowing for a more engaging experience. For example, a static image of a vacation rental can be enhanced with more detailed images of the various rooms and amenities. 

Hotspots that appear directly on the image make content consumption easy for the consumer, while also allowing the marketer to create a truly entertaining consumer experience.

Interactive media platforms such as ThingLink provide content marketers with comprehensive analytics on the consumption of their content. This allows marketers to analyze consumer interest in a new way and get a better understanding of what exactly it is in visual content that triggers consumer action. This level of engagement and depth in analytics simply isn’t available for plain static content.

Using Interactive Content in Your Marketing

How can marketers ensure that they are harnessing the power of interactivity in their content?

Those who have the luxury of having both graphic design and development talent on staff sometimes choose to build their own local solutions for websites or blogs; however, tasking the team with such a project is generally costly and on a lengthy timeline.

Using a self-service interactive media platform like ThingLink allows any marketer to easily (and quickly) create and implement custom interactive images into their blogs, websites, social media, and other digital content channels. Something that previously took days and cost thousands, can now be done in minutes.

The following are examples of where interactive content excels within your marketing plan:

• Product marketing (Samsung): Interactive product update on Facebook News Feed
• Real estate marketing (Florida Real Estate): Interactive floor plan 
• Sports marketing (Miami Dolphins): Interactive player introductions 

With all the awesome new content hitting the web each day, you want to be sure that yours is standing out. Click below to request a free demo of how you can harness the power of interactivity in your marketing.