Before the advent of the internet, the most attractive things companies could offer were suggestion boxes and scratch cards that they handed out to you at gas stations.
In the online world, the ways to do interactive marketing are multiplying, benefiting both brands and people. It's about that: the smoother the communication, the better… This goes for everything in life, especially for marketing. Want to learn more about this type of marketing? We'll see that!
What is Interactive Marketing?
It is the marketing strategy that relies on two-way communication between brands and their audience. It involves carrying out actions aimed at collecting the opinions and preferences of the public and using them to make decisions that strengthen the relationship and improve the effectiveness of marketing.
When a brand does interactive marketing, it stops chasing the audience trying to make an impact with its message, listen to its audience, open direct communication channels and pay attention to what he says. The famous “active listening”.
These actions, unthinkable a few years ago, are now possible thanks to the internet and online tools. Brands have never had so much audience insight at their fingertips.
Interaction marketing allows companies to track their audience’s reactions, record them in a database, make decisions based on that behavior, and execute them in real time through their campaigns. It is even possible to automate the process and save each result to have the possibility to evaluate the success of the campaign and to optimize it.
Interactive marketing VS traditional marketing
In traditional marketing, the audience receives the impact of the brand without looking for it, without doing anything to make it happen. The most typical example is television advertisements or phone calls we receive from unknown companies.
This type of advertising is sometimes quite intrusive. Many traditional marketing actions interrupt our lives with information that we did not ask for, that does not seem relevant to us. And it works worse and worse, because the public no longer wants to be convinced to buy a certain product or service: they want to be informed, decide and give their opinion on what they have consumed.
Interactive marketing is activated in response to the actions of the public, to our actions. Any marketing strategy designed to be activated from an audience action is interactive marketing. Perhaps the best-known strategy for this type of marketing is search engine marketing.
For example, you go to Google and search for ‘buy Galician seafood'. And Google returns you a series of results. These results, whether organic or paid ads, are part of an interaction marketing strategy. Want to see Galician seafood? Okay, here are two hundred thousand results that companies selling seafood have prepared for you.
And then you enter a web page that appeals to you, and you start interacting with the site, clicking to find more products and offer that interest you. Here, Galician seafood platters at home! Cinema8. And they offer a bottle of wine with it! As a result, you order your seafood platter.
How did you get there? Why did you find this page? Because you searched. You got there through your actions. Don't feel guilty: I too would have fallen for the seafood platter (and too bad for the VISA).
But let's go further: that you are there is the result of the interaction marketing strategy carried out by the company from which you have just bought the seafood. In this case, they have prepared a content creation strategy to answer searches like yours and an SEO strategy to position their page ahead of the competition. They have created a website for you to interact with, reviewing the information they offer you and making a purchase.
One way to complement the interactive marketing strategy could be to give you the option to share your experience on social media or comment on it, monitoring your reaction to draw conclusions that will allow them to get to know you and improve their offerings.
Much, but then much more effective
Now imagine that the seafood company posts an ad on a bus shelter in your town.
Most people passing by won't even see the ad. Some people will see it, but will not pay attention to it, because at that time they will be in a hurry or think of something else.
What percentage of people who see the ad on the billboard do you think will buy seafood? Obviously a much smaller percentage than people who see branded content because they are looking for it. It is that we are so saturated with information that we no longer react to most stimuli. It's as simple as that we don't want to be bombarded: we want to choose.
In essence, interactive marketing works the exact opposite of traditional marketing: it's not the brand that talks, it's the audience. The brand must listen to its audience to learn the best way to meet their needs, so it must invite them to participate with their opinions and comments as many times as possible. In this way, the public feels that they are part of the brand.
The public asks questions, requests or proposes, and the brand responds. It's pure two-way communication. It doesn't just let you customize content and campaigns. It improves the relationship between the brand and the audience, increasing engagement and loyalty to it. And that translates into better results.
What types of interaction marketing are there?
Sounds wonderful, doesn't it? But you may be wondering how do we do it? We are going to see some actions or ways of doing interactive marketing:
Use interactive content
Sure! What's better than interactive content for interactive marketing?
This type of resource is very powerful when it comes to capturing audience attention, driving engagement, and improving their experience. The best interactive content comes in different formats such as interaction video, audio, GIFs, etc. and it is super appealing to the target audience.
With genially, you can create interactive content very easily without having any programming knowledge. In a genially, you can integrate content in any format, while adding different types of animations to make it more dynamic and even more suggestive.
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