11 Interactive Content Trends & Tactics Proven to Boost Engagement
Learn effective tactics and current trends in interactive content to help you boost engagement and ultimately boost sales.
When comment and reaction features were unleashed on the world in the early 2000s, social media users proved audiences craved more than passive content consumption. They want to feel involved, entertained, and valued. In fact, it’s been shown that interactive content can result in 2x more conversions. This shift has put interactive content at the forefront of engagement strategies, offering marketers the opportunity to connect with their audience in meaningful and dynamic ways. If you’re looking to stay ahead in digital marketing, understanding how to leverage interactive content is crucial to boosting audience engagement.
Here’s a breakdown of interactive content, why it works, the current trends reshaping the landscape, and actionable tactics you can start using today.
What Is Interactive Content?
Put simply, interactive content invites the user to actively participate. Unlike static content, such as blog posts or images, interactive pieces require input from the audience, whether it’s clicking, filling in an entry form, playing a game, answering questions, or exploring visual elements. The result? A personalized experience that feels more like a conversation than a one-sided message.
Examples of Interactive Content:
- Quizzes (e.g., “If you were a craft beer, what would you be?” or “What is your level of knowledge when it comes to investing?”)
- Polls and Surveys
- Interactive Infographics
- Contests and Giveaways
- Calculators (e.g., ROI calculators)
- Interactive Videos or Animated Explainers
- Gamified Experiences (mini-games with brand tie-ins)
Why Interactive Content Drives Engagement
Interactive content works because it taps into human psychology. People enjoy feeling in control, and they’re naturally drawn to experiences that pique curiosity or offer value. Here’s why it boosts engagement so effectively:
- Creates Personalized Experiences: Tools like quizzes or calculators deliver tailored results, making the user feel understood and valued.
- Boosts Time-on-Site: Interactive formats like clickable infographics or videos encourage users to stay and explore, which is great for improving your website’s performance metrics.
- Encourages Social Sharing: People are more likely to share a fun quiz result or a gamified experience, expanding your reach.
- Drives Better ROI: Interactive content tends to generate more leads, as users who’ve been engaged by your content are more willing to sign up or take the next step.
- Builds Brand Trust: Interactive content opens the door to two-way communication, helping you connect with your audience and show you’re invested in their interests.
Effective Tactics for Incorporating Interactive Content
Curious about how you can adopt interactive content into your marketing strategy? Start small and scale as you see promising results. Here are five practical tactics to get you started.
1. Launch a Quiz on Social Media
Create a personality quiz or knowledge test tailored to your audience’s interests. Fun or insightful quizzes such as “Which Pokemon character are you” or “How well do you know 49er football?” quizzes are proven to have high completion rates and get shared widely.
In this example, participants take a quiz to find out what type of wine they are by answering a few fun questions.
If you’re trying to stay “on-brand,” quizzes are easy to tailor to your business to attract the most qualified leads. For example, a handyman business could host a “How well do you know home maintenance?” quiz to show quiz takers that they may need to get busy on a house project sooner rather than later. Throw in an incentive such as a chance at winning a prize or a discount for completing the quiz and watch your participation rate soar.
2. Build a Contest or Giveaway
Marketers have relied on contests and giveaways to boost engagement for years. In the digital era, these tools have become a go-to because they’re so easy to host online. Not only do they tend to have a high ROI, but hosting regular contests and giveaways allows you to keep fans and followers interested for the long term.
Contests and giveaways are different, but each offers different benefits. For example, contests, such as photo contests, recipe contests, comment contests, etc., allow you to collect user-generated content (UGC) that can be used in future marketing. To boot, by collecting votes on contest entries, you make the contest highly shareable, as contest participants will want to share their entries to gather votes.
Giveaways, on the other hand, can be as simple as setting up an entry form and choosing a winner at random. To increase participation, make the giveaway an ‘instant win’ with the promise of instant gratification.
2. Add Polls
Engage your subscribers, fans, followers and readers by adding a quick poll asking about their preferences. For instance, a newsletter poll about the topic they'd like covered next shows you're listening while gathering valuable insights. Adding a poll to a social media post can quickly gauge sentiment about trending topics, business practices or even products.
For example, a motor oil company looking to update their logo and tagline may create a quick poll to add to a social media post or landing page asking their audience what their new tagline should be. Voters, whether their choice won the vote or not, will feel invested in the brand simply because they had a say in the company’s marketing.
3. Use Pop-Ups with Interactive Elements
Although some of us are slightly put-off by pop-ups, there’s a reason we run into them everywhere we click - they work. Pop-ups can help boost your conversions by as much as 4%. Adding an “extra step” such as an interactive element can boost that number even higher.
There are countless creative ways to make pop-ups more engaging. That “extra step” could be anything from spinning a prize wheel to selecting a mystery box or solving a word puzzle—transforming your pop-up from a common annoyance into an enjoyable surprise.
4. Use Calculators for Complex Decisions
Help your audience find solutions with interactive calculators. For example, investment agencies could offer an "ROI Calculator" to predict returns from investing. Fitness coaches and personal trainers can offer BMR calculators to help their clients get better results. Even restauranteurs and caterers can offer calculators to help customers figure out how much food to order to feed a crowd.
Online calculators are an evergreen tool that helps you drive traffic to your website and even convert customers all year round.
5. Gamify User Engagement
Engage users by creating challenges like puzzles, ‘guess the score’ contests, hidden objects games, or a time-based trivia game on your website with rewards like discounts for winners.
Top Trends in Interactive Content for 2025
If you feel like your interactive content game needs a little polish, here are some elements you can incorporate to keep up with trends.
1. Shoppable Content
Interactive videos are now enabling users to click on items featured in the video for instant purchase. This seamless integration of shopping and entertainment is driving engagement—and sales.
2. Immersive AR/VR Experiences
Brands are using augmented and virtual reality to build immersive experiences. For example, allowing customers to virtually try on products or envision how furniture would look in their space.
3. Interactive AI-Powered Chatbots
AI chatbots have become conversational, offering a natural way to engage users while guiding them to resources or products tailored to their exact needs.
4. Gamification
Gamified experiences, such as loyalty programs with badges or interactive mini-games, are becoming increasingly popular for retaining attention and rewarding repeat engagements.
5. AI Receptionist
AI receptionists that let users have real-time conversational experiences.
6. Data-Driven Personalization
Interactive content is now more intelligent, using collected data to adapt and evolve in real-time, providing users with hyper-relevant results that make them feel like the experience was made specifically for them.
Interactive Content: A Must-Have in Your Engagement Strategy
Interactive content isn’t just a passing trend. Its ability to captivate users, provide value, and foster deeper connections makes it a long-term investment for any brand’s engagement strategy. By integrating interactive formats into your marketing mix, you’re not only staying on top of digital marketing trends, but also building a loyal and responsive audience.
If you’re ready to take your content to the next level and need help implementing interactive strategies, now’s the time to act. Explore the possibilities, experiment with formats, and most importantly, create engaging experiences your audience will love.