Could interactive marketing be the catalyst that your business needs?

In a world where the supply of information far exceeds the demand for it, the ability to be relevant and stand out from the crowd becomes more and more important. And what better way to achieve that relevancy and uniqueness than actually interacting with the customer in real time through the use of interactive marketing?

But small businesses don’t exactly have a stash of cash conveniently sitting around to just invest in new marketing ventures. How much time will it take to adopt this new idea? Is it within our budget? Are there similar businesses with real life proven results so we know this is actually legitimate and not just some industry trend?

We’ll be diving into all of that in this article. Keep reading to discover if Interactive Marketing is really worth your time!


Static vs Interactive

To find out if you should start investing in Interactive Marketing, you need to have a proper understanding of what it is.

Static content is basically content that does not require the end user to actively engage with it. Some examples would be blog posts, web articles, white papers, podcasts, data sheets, case studies, etc.

Interactive content on the other hand is content that requires the end user to actively engage and therefore ‘interact’ with the audience. Some examples would be contests quizzes, and surveys .


Are Users Still in Love with Static ?

Effective content is engaging content. Period.

And if we can’t capture your attention by engaging you within 3-8 seconds?

You’re gone.

And that rings true as Microsoft released a study proving your attention span could be shorter than a goldfish.

Studies done by the Content Marketing Institute  shows us that a whopping majority of businesses have trouble with creating effective content.

62% of business to consumer (B2C) businesses and 70% of business to business (B2B) businesses say they have trouble with their content marketing strategy.

And in those same studies, creating more engaging content is cited as the top concern for 72% for B2B businesses & 73% for B2C businesses.

Instead of spending more money into creating more content or higher prices for more engaging content. You can choose to invest in interactive marketing which requires engagement to even exist as a marketing asset.

If nobody is participating in a contest, you remove it or change it up. Which takes little to no time.

If a blog post isn’t generating traffic, you might wait longer for the engines to crawl it or spend more money by creating more.



~ Scott Brinker, ion interactive, author of ChiefMartec.com, in a guest post on Copyblogger.


In addition, it appeals to our primitive human desire for interactivity. Unlike utilizing demographics for paid advertising campaigns, Interactive content gives you access to much richer data like psychographic information, which far transcends the basic information.

As a result, future paid campaigns rise in effectiveness as your targeting options are alot more specific.

Some examples quoted by Scott Brinker:

  • People rank themselves via assessments
  • Quizzes indicate what participants do and don’t know
  • Prospects identify specific parameters when using a calculator product configurator

Here are some ways you can use interactive marketing today.


1. Quizzes

Quizzes are an easy and attractive form of interactive marketing

Source: https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/tackling-the-real-issue-of-fake-news


Simple quizzes can work wonders. Like this one held by Straits Times to tackle the issue of fake news.

According to iProspect, 90% of the most shared Facebook posts in 2015 were quizzes. And we’re pretty sure you did not forget that time. Everyone was doing them.

‘Which type of Sandwich are you?’

‘How much do you actually know about Singapore? ’

‘Which Marvel Character are you?’  

Once you create a quiz that attracts your ideal customer. Make sure you get your integrations right with the software you’re using or you might have trouble utilizing it for running ads. It’ll take a month or two to optimize but after that, you should be seeing significantly increased conversions.

You can also add an extra boost to your quizzes by implementing a shareable results feature . Add a prompt asking them to share it once they are done with the quiz. Sometimes people need to be told what to do.


2. Contests

According to an analysis done on the Kontest app that has raised up to 600k in funding and have been around since 2010, 70% of their players have entered into some form of a gamified marketing campaign in their lives.

Unlike blog posts & white papers, contests help to ‘humanise’ the brand-consumer relationship as it seems like you are giving to people.

It also deeply attracts our humans desire to be part of a competition. The higher the stakes, the better.

Check out this contest run by Smiggle to attract more leads.

All you need to do is register as a parent to stand a chance to win a $50 in-store voucher.


3. Polls

These days you can see it everywhere. It’s even on YouTube.

Interactive marketing is everywhere nowadays, even youtube
Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/jWNwK

What better way of getting vital feedback with enough volume of respondents to matter in a short period of time, while also being cost-efficient.

Polling is so effective because of its ability to allows a very public platform for users to express themselves and be part of the conversation.

Source: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/yahoo-poll-proud-singaporean-230031468.html

In conjunction with the 53rd National Day of Singapore, Yahoo held this poll and had over 5000 responses.


4. Calculators

Calculators are great information collection tools because customers usually actively look for calculators to use. Their inherent usefulness makes them stand out from other forms of interactive marketing.

DBS has up to 8 types of calculators on their website.

Calculators are a great form of interactive marketing because their usefulness naturally attracts customers
Source: https://www.dbs.com.sg/personal/calculators/default.page

Since users come looking for the calculator, their intent and initial data from their usage can be used as incredibly useful insights to start a sales conversation for your team.

If you can somehow find a way to integrate a calculator as part of your overall marketing strategy, it would definitely bring a large contribution especially when generating precious leads.

You could find an integration using your website builder to create a calculator. Here’s an example from Wix.

Source: https://www.wix.com/app-market/calculator-builder/overview


5. Emails

Most businesses already have a variation of this strategy implemented into their business.

We decided to include it anyway as many businesses are nowhere near tapping into the potential of email marketing as a strategy.

When done right, email marketing could potentially account up to 30% of your yearly revenue.

Almost every company has some form of a newsletter

Source: https://www.redcross.sg/publications/e-newsletter.html

See for example the the website of Singapore Red Cross, where they have a page for registering to their newsletter.

You’ll be able to collect a wide variety of information from the data. But you’re also more likely to get long-form survey answers. This is because email is an intimate form of communication for most people.

Perhaps the biggest highlight for email marketing is that it barely costs anything.

Coupled with a basic automation strategy based on user behavior, you can create very highly engaged customers that is almost unachievable on any other platform aside from the traditional brick and mortar or by using an on-site sales rep.



At the end of the day, what matters is if your marketing campaign has a real ROI. If it’s already fine, you probably don’t need to jump ahead into it.

But early adoption of new technologies usually result in long term benefits to your overall marketing strategy. They lower ad costs, increase the rate of user base expansion and create higher conversions.

Also, if all your competitors are currently using similar advertising techniques, you can easily stand out by utilising interactive marketing and stay far ahead of the competition for a long time.

Either way, if you’re looking to ramp up your marketing strategy, looking to expand into new avenues, or you’re just growing really fast. Short term financing options are usually a real pain. Especially when it comes to SME’s.

Banks are more reluctant to approve loans due to a myriad of reasons. On top of that, the approval waits are pretty long. With FS Bolt, you can easily avoid all of that.






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