A Definition of Interactive Marketing
Interactive marketing is a one-to-one marketing practice that centers on individual customer and prospects’ actions. Interactive marketing involves marketing initiatives that are triggered by customers’ behaviors and preferences; for this reason, it is a major shift from traditional campaign-based marketing efforts. A customer-centric strategy, interactive marketing involves reacting to customer actions and striving to meet their expectations and demands.
In order for marketers to pull off successful interactive marketing efforts, they must have access to advanced technology that delivers complete, 360-degree views of customers.
See how our Intelligent Engagement Platform offers a 360-degree customer view.
Types of Interactive Marketing
Interactive marketing includes many types of initiatives. Marketers may interact with customers via dynamic content such as visual storytelling, personalized content, layered information, and two-way interaction. No matter which type of interactive marketing initiative you implement, the goal is to make content engaging and relevant for customers.
- Interactive Storytelling – Marketers can seize opportunities to be as dynamic with content as possible; this may mean adding an animation or infographic to a blog post or creating native ads rooted in storytelling that incorporated mixed media elements. Break up long-form posts and advanced landing pages with text divisions, video and audio clips, and interactive components that allow sharing and discovering more information.
- Personalized Content – Use advanced technology to gain insights into customers’ demographics, geographic data, lifecycle information, and more to deliver personalized, relevant content and offers. When you know as much as you can about your customers as individuals, you can create the most meaningful experiences for them. Customers will relate to the content more fully when it is personalized appropriately, and they will be more apt to interact with the content by sharing it.
- Layered Information – Educating customers has become a top priority for marketers, and interactive marketing is a smart way to layer in information for consumers by delivering detailed content in increments. Marketers have the ability to tell brand stories by providing snippets of information in easy-to-read quick takes and then delivering more detailed, informative content in other layers to audience members who want to know as much about a topic as possible.
- Two-Way Interaction – Two-way interaction initiatives are at the heart of interactive marketing because they give consumers a vehicle for active participation. For example, interactive tools such as quizzes, calculators, branching content, games, and interactive videos provide a more powerful experience for the audience.
Challenges of Interactive Marketing
One of the hurdles marketers must overcome when utilizing interactive marketing is a lack of access 
to all customer data. Without individualized customer intelligence from all sources, marketers cannot gain a complete view of customers. In fact, interactive marketing is an incredibly difficult undertaking for organizations that have disparate customer data; data in warehouses, CRM systems, contact center applications, data lakes, and online and social activities remains siloed, and organizations struggle to know customers on an individual level, when they do not have a customer experience platform that aggregates data from every available source. Thankfully, these difficulties can be overcome with software capabilities, such as our Customer DNA – which gives a data-fuelled, real-time perspective on every customer.
Other challenges of interactive marketing include grabbing the audience’s attention because of all of the content available today, converting viewers to leads, making marketing efforts more customer centric, increasing the reach of your content, and achieving marketing automation.
Benefits of Interactive Marketing
There are substantial advantages to using interactive marketing, especially now that consumers expect companies to exceed their expectations. With interactive marketing, organizations increase their chances of meeting customer needs because they already show an interest in the product and marketers have the ability to respond to their actions. Interactive marketing reduces risk and increases sales because it is rooted in customer behaviors and desires. The personalization associated with interactive marketing results in more conversions and higher revenue. Overall, interactive marketing can boost sales, enhances customer satisfaction, lowers marketing costs, and opens the door to automated marketing.
Interactive Marketing Information
For more information about interactive marketing, visit our blog. For your convenience, we have linked to three of our most recent interactive marketing posts below:
- Interactive Marketing Solutions for Marketers: Get an Interactive Marketing Tool with Actionable Insights at Your Fingertips with NGDATA’s Lily Enterprise
- Guide | Three Steps to Take to Go from Campaigns to Interactive Customer Conversations
- How to Leverage Customer Intelligence to Gain a Competitive Advantage: Advice from 29 Analytics Experts
- 50 Must Read Interactive Marketing Learning Resources