Interactive Content can work miracles for your content marketing strategy. Interactive Content Marketing is more engaging, gives you more insights into your customers and can have higher conversion rates as compared to traditional content.

However, interactive content comes with its own set of challenges. Here are five challenges and how you can deal with these challenges.

1. Imperfect Understanding of Human Behavior

Customer behavior is dynamic, and you have to be on your toes to understand what resonates with customers, what their preferences are and how their expectations change. Predicting human behavior is quite a challenge as behaviors spring from psychological makeup, social factors, one’s personal history, economic status, genetics, external factors, etc.

How to Solve the Challenge?

There is still not a definitive answer on how to predict human behavior, but today you have the advantage of having access to massive consumer data sets available through their social profiles, browsing history, shopping carts, content consumption, search analytics, etc.

The actions we need to take are:

• Find the data, analyze it, segment it, and expand on it
• Develop a 360-degree profile of your prospect or your customer using their data
• Apply heuristics – analyze existing databases to check if a customer made a purchase, backtrack to find what led to the purchase, correlate this information with age, gender, income, location etc. and create a customer profile.

A customer profile will allow you to create targeted content with which he can interact. For example, an assessment on the type of car that would suit the customer’s needs, or a calculator that predicts the monthly EMI or fuel consumption based on his usage, or a quiz on his knowledge about your brand, the result of which can offer a discount on his favorite car.

2. Lack of Knowledge about Interactive Content

As interactive content is a relatively new form of marketing, there is limited information on how and where to use it effectively. Marketers are also uncomfortable with the technical aspects, and how to incorporate interactive content in content strategy and prospect management process.

How to Solve the Challenge?

• Participate in expert-driven training programs for interactive content. All stakeholders should take required courses or training to educate themselves.
• Identify areas of technical expertise and search for an event or a consultant to make the team comfortable with upcoming technology.
• Educate the team on how to integrate interactive content with the overall content strategy.
• Track and utilize customer data to produce actionable, targeted and engaging content.

3. The Difficulty of Creating High-Quality Content

Marketing teams are tasked with creating massive amounts of content, and the fear is – if the content is of higher quality, will it resonate well with customers? The other problem is that the existing static content doesn’t provide them with enough data on how customers are engaging with the content. How many people read the content once they download it or if they found it valuable? So, it becomes difficult to decipher what customers want to see and what drives them away or how much is too much.

How to Solve the Challenge?

Asa Hochhauser and Audrey Ross suggest repurposing content. They key is to take high-value assets and repurpose it in more engaging formats. You can use this repurposed content with interactive tools to add value to customers and solve their problems. For example, creating an interactive video on ‘DIY tips’, requesting user comments or experiences when they tried these tips, and then promoting the products that could solve their existing problems. This not only helps create high-quality content but is also engaging.

4. Evaluating the Right Communication Channels

One of the biggest challenges is to determine the most effective communication channel(s): websites, mobile, messages (SMS), emails, social media, etc. to interact with your customers. As customers go digital, the chances of them walking down a brick and mortar store or picking up the phone to ask for a sales rep are minimal. You have to understand how and when and on what medium your customers prefer to communicate the most.

How to Solve the Challenge?

• Create use-cases to explore how easy or difficult it is to find your products or services.
• Ask your prospects to explore various channels and gather their feedback on which was the most preferred channel and why (of course you’ll have to offer some goodies/freebies).
• Observe customer behavior across channels to gather information on journey completion or abandonment.

5. Budgeting

Creating interactive content is a resource and budget intensive task: you need tools, technology, staff training, customer understanding – and all of this has a cost. Most companies either don’t have the budget or tweak their existing budgets. So, getting a marketing budget for interactive content isn’t easy.

How to Solve the Challenge?

• Prioritize your interactive marketing tasks.
• Create an integrated plan for your content and evaluate the delta.
• Chart out the impact your interactive content could have and estimate ROI.
• See if you can let go of some other spends to accommodate interactive content.

Interactive content lets you have meaningful conversations with your consumers. Overcoming the challenges that interactive content poses to your content will help you to reach your content marketing goals.

Article written by: Vandita Grover