How to Maximise the Success of your Interactive Content

Rebecca Carey 7 years ago

The creation and outreach of interactive content is an essential element of setting the internet alight. Contagious content will set you apart from your competitors and help you obtain links from valuable and well-respected blogs and websites, providing you with great link equity, and driving traffic to your site.

This post will take you through a step-by-step guide of the content creation and distribution tools we use at Zazzle Media to maximise the success of the interactive content we create for our clients - and show you how you can do the same!

In order to make this as realistic as possible, we are going to look at one of our biggest success stories. SKYN Condoms reached out to us with a very specific brief –to become a recognisable brand within its industry - and wanted us to create a piece of content that would appeal to its target demographic. We decided the best way to do this would be to produce something which would really get people talking, so created this quiz based around the release of the film Fifty Shades of Grey.

But how do you make your content go viral?

There are thousands of great infographics, blog posts and articles published every second that we never get to see, content doesn’t go viral by luck, it’s down to exact planning and hard work.

Content is more likely to go viral if you stick to three basic rules:

Positivity – Positive content is more likely to be shared then negative content; people like to feel good.
Emotions – Are you evoking any emotions out of your reader?
Use – Is the content of use to your target audience?

Interactive content ideation

It’s time to go back to basics: What exactly does the client want to achieve from this project? Ensuring a particular demographic recognises a brand is the primary aim of any content marketing strategy; informative and engaging content needs to be provided for this to happen. Content needs to entice the reader by offering new information and ideas. How can you expect content to be shared and if it is mundane and been seen before?

Ideas for the SKYN interactive piece were created using our famous ideation process. A brainstorm, bringing together the most informed people from each team across the business, is held to come up with great interactive content ideas, providing the user with informative content they will associate with the brand, in this case SKYN.

Stick to the brief

It is vital to keep in mind the creative brief set by the client: Think about why you are creating content, who are you creating it for and what are you trying to achieve? Now, is a good time to really think about what type of content your consumer will be engaged by?

Choosing your content

Taking the ideas from your brainstorm, it’s time to decide how your interactive content is going to be delivered. The SKYN brief was all about raising brand awareness, so a strong social campaign to ensure the brand name would be recognised across multiple channels was imperative. Keeping in mind the key demographic (typically men and women aged 22-29 who enjoy sex and aren’t afraid to try new things), we decided to engage with the reader through a strong topic. Focusing on an upcoming film release we were able to ‘piggy back’ on other PR campaigns, to increase the potential for the content’s success, and with this the ‘How Grey Are You’ quiz was born.

Ahrefs & Buzzsumo

Tools such as Ahrefs & Buzzsumo will help you find the most shared content on the internet.

Understanding the link between the types of content you are creating, their purpose, and your end goal are really important in helping identify and outreach to the best possible sites for placements.

Relevance and timing

The aim of the ‘How Grey Are You’ quiz was to determine how risqué you are in your sex life. Timing this with the release of the much-anticipated Fifty Shades of Grey film, helped create a buzz around the piece and saw its share stats rocket. Think about how you can apply this to your content marketing strategy? Is there a film release you can tap into? Seasonal opportunities work really well too and should be a firm fixture in your yearly content planner.

Know your audience

To do your content justice, it is important to ensure the right people see it. This part of the creation process is know as ‘distribution persona profiling’, it involves identifying the type of person who will most likely engage and share the content and the niche of site you think the target demographic will be reading.

Persona profiling involves pulling out data (often from social and or search/analytics data) to create persona including:

Gender
Age
Profession
Lifestyle & interests

YouGov Profilers

A helpful tool for persona profiling is YouGov Profiler. By searching for a brand you can discover a variety of stats and figures on its typical consumer.

Profiler is a media-planning product for the use of agencies and brands, powered by data collected in the YouGov cube, holding 120,000 data points, from more than 200,000 UK members.

These include:

Demographics: Gender, Age etc
Region
Likely professions
Personality traits
Average monthly disposable income
Brands they like and use
Where they spend their time online

The last point is really important to a successful interactive campaign, it’s critical to identify how your target audience is consuming content and when. This is really simple to get hold of using Google Analytics. By looking at the behavioural pages within your site you can easily identify the percentage of users using mobile devices (including tablets) against traditional desktops. Using this information you can ensure you test your interactive content on the different platforms consumers use.

Image sourced here

It’s also important to look at when your audience will be interacting to understand when to post to gain the most coverage. There has been a tonne of research into the best time to post on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, found here, but as a general rule of thumb, content is more likely to be shared between the hours of 7pm-10pm.

This is also a great time to do a competitor analysis. Brainstorm what your competitor has already done successfully and make sure you do it better, as shown above from searching Durex (one of Skyn’s competitors) on YouGov profiler.

Ask yourself:

How can we target the key demographic?
What type of site does the target demographic access, what are their interests?
Is the content relevant?
Will people be inspired?
What quality do we want the site to be? (Now is the time to set metrics.)
Is the content easily shareable on these sites and how can we encourage social shares?

Identifying the type of sites you want to host the content, is now of great importance. Ensuring you get this right is the difference between your content going viral or laying dormant on sites no one is visiting. For SKYN it was really important to outreach to sites with high traffic and visited by the brand’s key demographic.

Glamour and Cosmopolitan magazine fulfilled all requirements, their online media channels were accessed by SKYN’s demographic; the type of content published was relevant and tied in well with the Fifty Shades’ theme. Securing a placement on a site like this would give the interactive content a real chance at going viral.

Vocus

In order to outreach to the best sites and blogs not only in the UK but also throughout the world, Vocus, a PR database of contacts is really helpful. By searching desired niches, you can contact and build relationships with journalists and bloggers.

As shown below, for SKYN key terms to look for included: Affluent lifestyle, romance and relationships and sexuality.

Ignite Conversation

The distribution of your content is just as important as the creation itself.

It pays to ask yourself: Have you provided site owners and journalist with interesting and unique content? Will respected and authoritative sites publish the content you have produced?

Measuring your results

Once all the hard work is done, it’s important to measure the results of your interactive content closely to ensure it’s achieving what you want it to.

One of the main reasons for the success of the SKYN quiz was the quality of placements obtained. By creating a watertight plan of action and using a variety of techniques to reach out to sites and journalists, the PR team managed to secure 10 high-end placements in just two weeks including: Daily Star, Women24, TNT Magazine & Metro Radio, which proves it was definitely worth all the hard work.

This equates to 1,879,000 combined average monthly traffic figures, with the quiz on Buzzfeed alone securing 2.1k views. Looking at the social stats and shares is equally as important, with Facebook ads reaching 306,683 (600 shares within the first week).

Looking back at the original brief: ‘To become a recognisable brand within its industry and appeal to its target demographic.’ What did we achieve?

148% increased search visibility
232% increase in sessions on the Skyn website
52% reduced bounce rate

Google Analytics

The main objective for SKYN was to ensure consumers were completing the quiz. As an incentive, they were offered one free condom sample. SKYN set aside 10,000 samples – and they were all sent out within the first week of the quiz being live.

In order to track this, we created a ‘goal’ in Google Analytics. Goals measure how often users complete specific actions. It is important to ensure you have a defined goal when measuring the success of an interactive piece of content.

Analytics would also be used at this stage to track how much traffic the content was driving to the site, answering questions such as: How long are consumers staying on the site? Are they bouncing off? Are they clicking through?

The secondary aim was for the content to be seen as successful on page content, this was easy to measure by the amount of likes, shares and tweets the piece received.

With adequate time and planning this guide shows that any high quality content idea can be a success, as long as you have a well-defined and thought out process.

Good luck.

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