Using interactive content to promote your product

Interactive content is irresistible, even in the most basic format, the quiz. For instance, The Guardian newspaper featured a ‘The Hardest Game of Thrones Quiz Ever’ – 80 questions including some real puzzlers, while women’s magazines almost always include quizzes on fashion, love, or health.

Interactive format can keep customers engaged, can help lead generation, and can help qualify those leads, too.

The bad news? If you want to use it, for the moment, you’ll need to use your own blog or website, or social media. Amazon hasn’t quite delivered FBA sellers this functionality yet.

Possibly the easiest interactive content to launch is a Twitter poll. Make it relevant to your product and brand but also fun or intriguing. Suppose you sell pizza stones, you could have a series of pizza duels for the World Champion pizza: “Margherita or Hawaiian?” “Peking Duck or Goat’s cheese and rocket?” “Four Cheese or Four Seasons?”

Quizzes are fun to do, but you’ll need to spend a little time with an app like Interact (www.tryinteract.com) to create a good one. For instance, if you offer a variety of home accessories, you could have quizzes to help users define their decor style, then explain what choices might suit them. You might also offer a quiz to help with Christmas and birthday present choices, in which all the questions are about the person for whom the present is being bought; or a health and wellness quiz… the possibilities are endless.

By the way, make sure your opening and closing questions are really great. Make a good first impression and go out with a bang, that’s the way to design a great quiz.

Calculators are another great way to let customers interact. For instance, a lot of house-builder and bank sites offer mortgage calculators, while AirBNB landlords can rate their AirBNB listings online. Not all products will suit this approach, but here are a couple of ideas:

•      how long will your running shoes last? (weight, average distance per week)

•      which size dog carrier do you need? (breed of dog, carrying him or in the car?)

Surveys are fun to do and let you get useful data about customers’ preferences. For instance, the pizza stone vendor might want to know how often people eat pizza, whether they usually eat pizza with family, friends, or work colleagues, and what brands of pizza they like best. But it might also be nice to know what kind of music customers like (if, for instance, people who like Hawaiian pizza also like country music, you have the soundtrack for that recipe video!).

Clickable maps or images are huge fun to play with. “Where can our cable clips help you in the office?” “Which dehumidifier for which room in this house?” Or even “Match the owner with the dog”. Infographics also work really well with an interactive element, which is great if you have a product that has different sizes or variations that need explaining.

•      A beauty product e-commerce site shows six models’ faces, and you can click on lips, eyes, hair and so on to find out what products they used.

•      A home decor site allows you to click on different items to see where they were sourced from. It’s so much more user-friendly than having a small print list of products underneath the picture.

You may not be ready for all of this. Maybe you’ll just get started with a few Twitter polls. But it’s worth looking around to see how big brands and retailers are beginning to use interactive content, and getting ideas for the future. Because one thing’s certain – the more interaction you can create with your customers, the longer they stick around.