Want to add engaging interactive media to your site? Here’s what you need to know.
Humans crave interaction, engagement, and a sense of discovery. This has led to a rising trend of incorporating interactive elements into digital content, such as videos and images. Interactive media actively involves the user in the experience. They can participate, explore, and even create their own outcomes. A platform like Cincopa allows you to easily incorporate interactive elements into various media types. The blog “Everything that you need to know about maximizing your website with multimedia” gives you step-by-step guidance on using your videos and images in a way that boosts engagement.
Creating videos with interactive elements
Traditional linear video only allows viewers to stop, pause, and play video content. Interactive video engages viewers during the viewing experience. Various interactive features are available to add to your videos. You can include clickable links to take viewers to other videos. CTAs, annotations, video chapters, and watermarks are other interactive elements.
A clickable CTA can lead directly to a product page for viewers to check out. This makes your videos shoppable.
Video chapters divide up video content. This makes it easy for viewers to go directly to the chapter they want to watch rather than having to watch the whole video.
Quizzes relevant to your brand help you to educate your audience and keep them engaged. You could give those who complete quizzes a chance to win a prize or get a discount on your products or services. Buzzfeed is famous for its quizzes that are shareable on social media and have created a highly engaged audience.
Annotations help you to provide supplemental material without taking away from the flow of the video.
Watermarks establish ownership of digital assets and help to protect confidential information.
Interactive content can be a powerful tool for education as it allows users to interact with the material in a more hands-on way. This means that they retain more information. The learning experience becomes more active and students have more control over the pace of learning. Educators can assess how much they retain by using quizzes and using watermarks to prevent unauthorized access to content.
When using video marketing, marketers can enhance product demos by incorporating clickable CTAs. They can take viewers to further information or allow them to make a purchase.
Using the Cincopa platform makes it surprisingly easy to seamlessly integrate interactive elements such as CTAs, annotations, video chaptering, etc. into your video content. You will experience higher conversion rates with engaging video content. You can even create video playlists to create a more personalized experience for viewers.
Making images interactive
Interactive images can offer additional information without cluttering the visual presentation. This information only becomes visible on a user’s demand. Ways to add interactivity to images include using clickable tags or information pop-ups with annotations.
You can use interactive images in many different ways, from creating corporate content and training resources to using them as catalog images in ecommerce.
Cincopa offers many templates you can customize to create a photo gallery. You can easily add clickable links to grid images or slider images in an image gallery.
Best Practices for Interactive Media
Guidelines and best practices will help you to integrate interactive elements effectively in your media. For effective digital marketing interactive media should add to user engagement rather than distract from it.
User experience should be the top priority
Interactive media such as videos, audio clips, gifs, or images should be visually appealing, intuitive, and easy to use. You should always be careful to design it for user experience.
Set clear goals
Before creating interactive media, you must know what purpose you want to use it for and what goals you hope to achieve by using it.
Guide the user with clear actions
User’s brains can become overwhelmed when faced with large blocks of text or too many buttons. Using descriptive links, clear CTAs, and animations can reduce the cognitive load on them. When you spell out what they must do, it motivates them to take action. Keeping interactive media simple and focused avoids overwhelming users with too many choices and options.
Choose the right media form to convey ideas
Digital engagement strategies involve using different forms of media such as animated graphs, audio clips, images, and videos. It can be challenging to decide what form of content to use. A video can summarize a whole lot of text in a short space. An animated video can describe a complex concept in a simple way. You need to choose the type of content that aligns with your goals and resonates with your audience.
Customize your video player and media assets
Customization is a powerful way to create a better experience for users. Cincopa offers ways for you to customize a video player, thumbnails, and more to encourage brand awareness and offer users a unique experience.
Incorporate social sharing
Social sharing will help to extend the reach of your interactive content. Make it easy for users to share by using sharing buttons and CTAs.
Optimize for mobile
More and more users are accessing content on mobile devices. You need to make sure they have a good experience when accessing interactive content on their mobile devices.
Use insights from analytics
Interactive content allows you to collect valuable user data, such as demographics, behavior, and preferences. Using advanced analytics tools, you find on a platform like Cincopa gives you insights that help you to discover how well your interactive content is working. Heatmaps allow you to observe viewer behavior while interacting with your content. You need to constantly analyze performance and make adjustments if you want to optimize your results.
Conclusion
Traditional media forms like radio and television require no active participation from users. Interactive content is a powerful tool to help users play a more active role in media consumption. It enhances their experience which helps to drive more traffic and increase conversions. By using Cincopa, galleries, content creators, marketers, educators, and others can enhance a website’s visual storytelling and functionality.
