The best budget friendly interactive content

In the past few years, interactive content has exploded in popularity. Visual and interactive marketing is becoming more effective and popular than content.

However, interactive content can be difficult, expensive and time-consuming to produce. For those that have limited resources, interactive content often isn’t a practical investment. So what do you do if you think you can’t afford to produce good, high-quality interactive content? You don’t have to simply write it off because it’s deemed to be too expensive. Instead, you can invest your time and effort into budget-friendly interactive content.

So what economical, interactive, budget-friendly content can you create?

1. Quizzes

This seems almost too easy and an idea that wouldn’t have much success. However, the opposite is true. Back in 2013, The New York Times posted an interactive quiz which went on to be the year’s most visited story. Buzzsumo even undertook a study to find out the strengths of quizzes, and how powerful they are with gaining shares online. Just look at Buzzfeed - it’s reached over 198 million people with its quizzes.   

The secret to having a successful quiz on your website is to think about the end result first. After all, you don’t want people to spend their time doing your quiz, only to be disappointed with the end result. Consider whether you’re just using images, GIFs, or what copy you’re going to include in the result. Remember to also consider how long you want your quiz to be - too long and you’ll lose the attention of your audience, too short and it won’t be interesting enough. You want to aim to have between 4 to 7 questions per quiz. The final step is to come up with a title that will make people click on the quiz. If your title is boring, you won’t gain any traction and your quiz won’t be shared online.

2. Infographics

An infographic is a great way to visually present your data. It’s an easy way to make your data look far more interesting. Considering the huge interest in big data at the moment, an infographic is a great way to gain more social shares and traffic flow. In fact, infographics are shared and viewed more than any other type of content.

3. Competitions

One of the most effective ways to gain traction online is by holding a social media contest. This can just be done through your business' usual social media page, making it a quick and easy way to produce interactive content.

Simple ideas for social media competitions include asking people to:

• Like, comment or share a post
• Tag a friend
• Finish a sentence
• Upload their own image/video

Consider using branded hashtags to help increase the popularity of your competition.

4. Calculators

You can use online calculators to increase not only engagement but also traffic and, potentially, leads. Again, The New York Times published a great online calculator, titled Is It Better to Rent or Buy? This article resulted in 180,000 social shares, far more than others published on the same topic.

So how can you create your own online calculator? Think of something within your industry that people would be able to use a calculator for. Next, you want to ask for the person’s email address. This will allow you to not only send the results to them but collect a database of emails. Make sure you don’t over-complicate your calculator - if it’s too hard to use, people aren’t going to use or share it. You can use tools such as Outgrow to design user-friendly calculators.   

5. Interactive ebooks

White papers and ebooks can sometimes seem boring and information heavy. While they are a great way to build a database of emails, they’re not always appealing to everyone. You can increase the level of appeal by making your next ebook interactive.

Interactive ebooks aren’t just more appealing to the reader. They allow you to get more information about the reader too. With an interactive ebook, you can see what sections have been read, and where the reader entered information. This can be valuable information for your business’ marketing and sales team to gather. You would not be able to obtain this type of information from a generic ebook published in PDF format.

Next time you need to design interactive content without breaking the budget, consider one of these economical options for your website.

What other interactive content do you think is budget friendly? Let us know in the comments.