Why No One is Interacting With Your Content (And How to Improve it)

All businesses need to promote their articles but what should you do when individuals don’t engage with them? Read on to find out.

Content is king. You’ve heard it a million times before, but creating interactive content is no walk in the park. Whether it’s Facebook strategies, content marketing, or even white papers, user interaction is essential. 

Even the best-planned social media marketing plans can prove worthless if your customers don’t engage, and with so many factors to consider, it is hard to tick all the boxes. 

There has even been some kick back against ticking too many boxes. Reaching the dizzy heights of Google’s featured snippet can work so well that it can actually lower your click rate. 

In this article, we’ll look at different techniques that draw in your users, and how to use that to improve your business.

Explore different interactive content types

We’ve all been there. Banging your head against a wall, wondering why your hard work on countless campaigns fails to gain traction. 

Online content is an ever-changing arena, which gives you a wealth of avenues to explore. While interactive videos have long been the king of the crop, there is a lot more on offer these days. 

The most shared interactive content 2016-2017. BuzzSumo. 

A great example is women.com – they even have a quiz section on their navigation bar. Their use of quizzes has been stunning, even brushing the mighty Buzzfeed aside. According to a study by BuzzSumo, women.com shared 1,402 quizzes In the space of just a year. That’s almost four a day. 

How to hook your users with interactive content

One key factor is sheer volume and consistency. They are easy and cheap to make, and if you use the right quiz tool, you can provide a winning user experience in no time. 

But what really sets the best content apart is the psychological element; it should be personalized and provoke an emotion. For example, an interactive car designer allows you to dream, a “test your trivia” quiz lays down a challenge, and a calculator showing how long it takes Jeff Bezos to earn your salary simply blows your mind. 

Going back to the staggering 1,402 quizzes per year by women.com, something you might notice (after finishing reading this article, of course) is that they are remarkably easy on the brain. You can excuse yourself for feeling proud when you pass with flying colors – that’s the whole point of the quiz. 

Whether it’s a quiz, a calculator, a Facebook poll, or an interactive infographic, your content must serve a psychological purpose. Luckily, every business has it’s emotional pull, and finding that is key to creating the right type of content. 

Universities offer the promise of knowledge and a higher salary, sports companies inspire, travel blogs give users an injection of wanderlust. Identify what makes your users tick, and you’ve already taken a huge step forward.

Quizzes that provide a challenge boost user interaction Typeform.

The UX revolution

UX has turned the digital marketing world on its head in recent years, and the standards are high. Never is this more important than when creating interactive content. Today’s world of online marketing is so vast that it’s hard to be heard above the void of noise. 

User experience can provide a massive boost to your conversion. Yes, it is a bottomless pit of complex, time-consuming adjustments, but it is worth the effort. For example, a 2009 UX renovation by Dutch airline KLM studied user eye movement on a screen. They implemented this information into their web page design, and hey presto, there was a 30% jump in conversions.

Over 10 years later, one of the major focuses is on webpage loading time. Nowadays, around 75% of online shoppers would no longer buy from a site if the page loaded too slow, or crashed. There are a vast array of ways to improve your site speed, but one easily applicable way is to convert images to .WebP format. These low-weight images can make a big difference and only require a simple online tool.

Intelligent design

Of course, the design of your interactive tools should be a top priority too, especially images. There are plenty of websites that gather the latest trends in graphic design, cutting a lot of the guesswork out of your creative process.

By optimizing your tools, you can capture user attention and allow your content marketing plan to take hold. With a bit of research and investment, site optimization can make a world of difference.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it

Once you’re happy with your interactive content plan, you need to make sure it works.

There is an ocean of statistics available for companies to check how their campaigns are performing. From email open rates and bounce rates to time on page and completion rates, you can track all aspects of your campaigns.

The next step is to try different ideas with some simple A/B testing. This will help to identify red flags and start to push you in the right direction.

To sum up

To make content marketing king, it needs an army of market research behind it. 

From a psychological point of view, you need to know what makes your users tick and how to craft your work around that. User experience, albeit not directly content, is the gateway to your content, and you need to make those gates as easy to open as possible.

In conclusion, like many things in life, it is better to work smart than hard. So take all the inspiration you can, and inject it into your own business.