7-minute read
Everyone has a blog nowadays, so simply having and updating a blog is not enough anymore. Although it is definitely a good start, you need to be doing more to set yourself apart from competing blogs and strengthen your inbound marketing.
One of the best ways to do this is through the use of interactive content. According to 88 percent of marketers, interactive content is one of the biggest drivers of differentiating their brand from their competitors. Therefore, you need to know how to make your blog posts as interactive and engaging. Here are some tips on how to make that happen.
Include Quizzes or Polls
Who doesn’t love giving their opinion on things? That’s why you need to give your audience an outlet to do that, besides just having a comment section at the bottom of each blog post.
A better way to do this is to create a poll that you can then include somewhere in the middle of the article. This will give viewers a reason to engage more with the content, especially if it is a poll that features a divisive topic. They will not miss the opportunity to weigh in on something that they feel very strongly about. So find some questions similar to “should pineapple belong on pizza?” that are related to whatever you are talking about within the blog post and watch as the responses come rolling in.
But if a poll doesn’t really fit in with a certain post, then you can always swap this out for a quiz instead. These could come in the form of personality quizzes, trivia questions, rankable lists, free countdowns, and much more.
This will be even more interactive than a poll since it requires more than just hitting a single button and being done. So if used properly, this can be a great way to get people to spend twice as long on your blog posts while they finish the quiz.
Record Podcasts or Audio Versions
Not everyone wants to spend several minutes reading through a single blog post. But with long-form content performing better than shorter content, this puts you in a bit of a difficult position. You want your posts to be long enough that they rank higher on search engines but you don’t want them so long that they overwhelm or bore visitors and cause them to leave without even reading the content. The perfect way around this also happens to be a tool that makes your blog far more interactive. So it is literally a win-win situation.
What you need to be doing is creating audio versions of your blog posts or recording podcast episodes and then embedding these into the beginning of the article. This will allow someone to play the audio clip and then listen to the content without having to read through every sentence of a 2,000 or even 3,000-word article. It also means that they can switch over to other internet tabs or programs while still being able to retain the valuable information within your blog post.
A podcast is also a way to bring in industry experts or further expand on topics without having to take the time to write down entire novels when you want to create a new post. But whether it takes the form of a verbatim audio recording or a longer podcast episode, this additional audio component will be of great benefit to the 43 percent of readers who skim over blog posts or anyone who is more of an audible learner.
Create Custom Infographics
It should come as no surprise that visuals are a valuable element of any blog post. But one of the most important forms of visuals that you’ll want to include are infographics. And not just any type of infographic but rather a custom one. There are a few different reasons for this.
The most obvious reason is that infographics are a way to take a lot of data and make it much more visually appealing. Instead of just having a big block of text, you can transform this information into an eye-catching infographic filled with vibrant colors, interesting visuals, and giant text that can be easily read.
Infographics are yet another way that you can aid the nearly half of total viewers who are skimmers. Instead of having a bunch of transition sentences and filler words, you are only left with the most basic and essential information that a person needs.
The benefit to making sure that these infographics are custom creations is that they better establish your brand as an industry authority. If you are simply reposting the infographics of other people, then you will be failing to provide any of your own insights and statistics, instead choosing to simply regurgitate other people’s facts. But when you take the time to do your own custom infographics filled with reliable research information, then it helps make viewers take you more seriously.
Insert Charts and Graphs
Infographics aren’t the only form of interactive visual elements that should be included in infographics. They come in handy when you have many different statistics to get across. But when you are only dealing with a couple of different statistics, then you might want to instead rely on charts or graphs.
These are very interactive since they are easily shared and can even be made so that a bigger explanation of the data points appears when hovering a mouse over them. This is a lot more engaging than simply having a sentence with a percentage mentioned within it.
By including at least one of these elements in each of your blog posts will help ensure that you see higher rates of interactions from visitors. But if you’re really interested in maximizing your blog interactivity, then you’ll want to start integrating most or even all of these elements into every one of your posts. In order to get help with this or any other digital marketing tips, make sure to follow our blog at Truu Digital today.
