How do you create content that really makes an impact for your brand?

That’s a question marketers spend a lot of time thinking about. In the world of digital marketing, there’s often a pressure to focus on quantity, with channels like social media, email newsletters, and your blog demanding a stream of new content to keep you top-of-mind.

Of course, there’s value in creating a steady drumbeat of communications with your audience, if you have the time, skill, and resources to do it well. FATFREE wouldn’t have a blog if we thought they were a waste of time!

But I also want to advocate for another digital marketing tactic that sometimes falls off the radar screen. It can take a bit more investment (thought, time, money, and expertise) to execute, but the efforts can reap big rewards.

I’m talking about interactive content: branded quizzes, calculators, games, or anything else that invites your audience to actively—rather than passively—engage with a piece of marketing material you create.

That’s the power of great interactive content. It places your brand at the center of a discussion (or, as with Spotify Wrapped, at the heart of a veritable cultural moment). It might even inspire jealousy among those who can’t participate—imagine how left out an Apple Music subscriber must feel on Spotify Wrapped Day.

The cultural juggernaut that is Spotify Wrapped

Let’s start out with an informal case study.

Spotify is a popular music streaming platform. Like Apple Music and others before it, Spotify tracks what you listen to on the platform. In 2016, Spotify decided to take this data, which might otherwise languish on internal analytics spreadsheets, and transform it into a piece of interactive content.

Thus, Spotify Wrapped was born, and it’s become a cultural phenomenon. In 2022, 156 million users engaged with Wrapped, which presents your listening data in animated, appealing, social media-shareable slides. The day Wrapped drops feels like early Christmas, with people rushing to compare and discuss their top songs, albums, artists, and podcasts.

Like all the most effective interactive content, Spotify Wrapped encourages interaction not just with the brand, but with others in your social circle.

Sharing your Wrapped results offers a chance to brag about your musical tastes, connect with friends who share your interests, and discover just how deep your love for a given artist goes (I wear my title as a top 0.5% Beyoncé listener as a badge of honor).

Spotify Wrapped has become a huge differentiator for the brand. No one talks about their top streams on Pandora or Amazon Music, but social media is absolutely inundated with Spotify Wrapped reshares and related memes. It even spawns think pieces across digital publications (this year the location of your “Sound Town” and what it might say about your sexuality was covered by NBC News, Forbes, Them, Time, and TechCrunch, among many others).

That’s the power of great interactive content. It places your brand at the center of a discussion (or, as with Spotify Wrapped, at the heart of a veritable cultural moment). It might even inspire jealousy among those who can’t participate—imagine how left out an Apple Music subscriber must feel on Spotify Wrapped Day.

That’s great for Spotify, but…

At this point, you may be thinking, “Sounds nice, but I don’t have the budget or resources of a company with an approximately $36 billion market cap.”

Fair enough. Spotify Wrapped is clearly an expensive endeavor, with a cadre of designers, developers, writers, project managers, and more creating an impossibly glossy finished product. But that doesn’t mean you can’t apply the underlying principles and create something great for your brand.

In the end, it’s most important that you create something meaningful for your audience (strategy should always come first!). So start with that simple question: What sort of interactive content would be helpful, fun, or otherwise significant to my audience?

• A regional bank might create a mortgage calculator that allows prospective borrowers to understand up-front and long-term costs, or what a hypothetical refinancing might look like.
• A DTC makeup brand might build a “find my perfect shade” quiz to help shoppers identify the right foundation formula from home.
• A general contractor might design an image slider on its site that allows people to scan between the “before” and “after” shots of renovation projects that turned dilapidated nightmare rooms into chic, modern spaces.
• A pair of authors who’ve written a book about famous expressions might launch interactive digital games to delight their linguaphile audience (Not a hypothetical example! FATFREE did this for Shirley and Harold Kobliner to promote their book, So To Speak).

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Ultimately, just as with all your other marketing efforts, great interactive content is about quality, not scale or size. Yours doesn’t need to be the hottest, splashiest interactive content out there. If it resonates with your audience and gets them talking and sharing, that’s all that matters.

If you’d like to chat with some creative pros about what interactive content might pique your audience’s interest (and how to build it!) we’re here.