Why Interactive Marketing Makes Growing Your Business Easier
- Amelia Thompson
- Jun 16, 2017
- 3 min read
Marketers love to throw around buzzwords to describe how important what we do is. Hey, branding is a part of our job! One of those buzzwords that is least understood is interactive marketing. The truth, of course, is that all effective marketing is at least a little bit interactive. So what exactly do we mean when we discuss “interactive marketing,” and why should you care?
In a nutshell, interactive marketing refers to any marketing tactic executed in response to an action taken by a customer or potential customer. That sounds complicated, but it isn’t. One of the most common examples of interactive marketing is the phrase, “Would you like fries with that?” That particular phrase is an upsell tactic triggered when a customer orders a burger with no sides. If he or she had ordered a coffee, instead, the cashier wouldn’t ask them if they wanted fries with that. It’s an automatic, effective tactic triggered only by a specific action on the consumer’s part. And it’s sold a heck of a lot of fries over the years!
Interactive marketing goes far beyond french fries, of course. The reason you should care about interactive marketing is because it increases automation, lowers marketing costs, increases customer satisfaction, and increases sales—in other words, it does everything businesses want their marketing to accomplish! The best part is that digital technology affords us better and more sophisticated opportunities for interactive marketing today than ever before.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of digital interactive marketing is retail giant Amazon. Like many Silicon Valley leaders, Amazon collects and analyzes past visitor behavior, allowing the company to show more meaningful information to customers in the present. For book buyers, Amazon offers “suggested reading” selections based off of customers’ previous book searches or purchases. This way, the company designs a very comfortable and personalized shopping experience, leading to longer stays on their website (often referred to as “stickiness”) and more purchases (often called “conversions”).
A local, digital marketing agency like Studio Brand Collective can’t turn your business in to Amazon.com (would you really want us to?). What we can do, though, is implement some of the same digital marketing techniques that made online businesses such as Amazon so successful. We create a customized, one-to-one marketing strategy for Houston businesses that reacts and changes based on the actions of the individuals consuming (and interacting) with your digital content.
Why? Because it’s a necessary step to make our clients stand out in a competitive marketplace. Interactive marketing engages the creative part of consumers’ brains by popping against the background noise of boring, samey, recycled content. Rather than reproducing plain, vanilla marketing that everyone is becoming immune to, it encourages and persuades the viewer to take an action step—the only one that matters.
For your business, that could mean buying your product, booking an appointment, or sending your sales team their contact information. No matter what your business or organization does, we have the digital strategies ready to deploy to make your customers’ experience with your company more automatic, more personalized, and more useful. Our mission is to make it easier for consumers to do business with you. If you’d like to know how we do it, give us a call today! We’ll run a free audit of your online presence and discuss how we can make your customer experience more interactive than you realized was possible.
