One of the most difficult aspects for people to engage with is their healthcare, but interactive content can be an excellent way to divert the many challenges and complexities that occur with most people. As healthcare providers, catering and keeping the attention of patients online to your content can not only help enhance your practice but also expand your patient’s sense of knowledge and understanding of their healthcare and medical treatments when they need it most. However, these days, engagement and interaction are crucial, and one method of changing up your usual blogs is with interactive content.
Interactive content encourages user participation; it includes concepts such as quizzes, e-books, animated infographics, and surveys to evolve from the idea of passively consuming content on a day-to-day basis. From quizzes that test health knowledge to surveys that capture patient opinions, the goal of interactive content is to personalize the user’s experience. If you want to change up your marketing efforts, here’s some insight on how you can make the most of interactive content on your website.
The Value of Interactive Content in Medical Marketing
Unlike traditional, passive forms of content, interactive content such as quizzes and surveys provide more active participation for patients. This type of engagement works to make engaging with healthcare thought-provoking and fun and has the opportunity to help patients learn more about their healthcare and interact with your practice. It also serves as a tool for your practice, as it can offer invaluable insights into your patient’s preferences, behaviors, and areas of improvement that you can aspire to.
If you’re looking to make your content worthwhile, there are three aspects that interactive content needs to to be considered successful:
Increased Engagement
Interactive content grabs attention and keeps people on your site longer. Why? Because it’s fun, engaging, and offers something in return for their time—a result, insight, or even just the satisfaction of sharing their opinion.
Enhanced Patient Education
Healthcare topics can be complex, but they’re crucial for everyone. Interactive content breaks down these barriers, making learning about health enjoyable and more easily retained. For instance, a quiz on heart health doesn’t just tell you what’s good or bad for your heart; it shows you through your answers, offers tailored advice based on your results, and can help patients make better health decisions.
Data Collection and Patient Insight
Interactive content provides invaluable insights into what your patients know, think, and feel about various health topics. This data can help you refine your marketing strategies, develop more targeted content, and even improve your services, and can be used to understand broader patient trends and preferences.
The Types of Interactive Content and How To Use Them
Interactive content—quizzes, polls, and assessments—each uniquely captures interest and facilitates learning. In the following sections, we will explore how these types of interactive content can engage your patients and help improve your digital presence.
The Power of Polls
Polls are a quick and easy way to engage patients. By asking for their opinion on various health topics, you show that you value their input and increase their engagement with your content. Polls create a two-way conversation, turning content that would normally be scrolled by into active discussion. When it comes to creating an effective poll, here are some key considerations to take into context:
- Keep questions simple: Complex questions can confuse respondents. Stick to straightforward queries that are easy to understand and answer.
- Make it relevant: Your polls should be closely related to your audience’s interests and needs. The more relevant the question, the more likely patients are to participate.
- Offer immediate results: People love to see how their opinions compare to others. Providing immediate results encourages participation and can spark further interest in your content.
When your poll is completed and the results are in, they will offer insights into your patients’ opinions and can even aid you in future content creation. These results can be discussed in newsletters, the topic of future blog posts, and used to reframe your business model in a way that shows that your patients’ opinions matter to you.
Assessments and Surveys As Your Best Tools
Assessments stand out as a personalized form of interactive content, offering ways for patients to engage with the topics you care about beyond the surface level. These surveys provide a form of tailored engagement that focuses on the individual’s needs, whether physical fitness, mental health, or risks related to specific conditions. These assessments need to be designed carefully, however, for them to be truly impactful, and thus require certain qualities:
- Focus on the user: Ensure questions are relevant to your audience’s health concerns and interests.
- Provide actionable insights: The results should offer clear, actionable advice or resources, helping patients to take the next steps in their health journey.
- Ensure privacy and trust: Be transparent about how you will use the data and ensure confidentiality to build trust with your participants.
Using assessments and surveys on your website requires some strategic planning and marketing promotions to make them effective. To make them useful to your practice, these surveys can be promoted on social media, pushed through email campaigns, or featured on relevant service pages or blog posts. You can analyze the data gathered from these surveys over time to help refine your content and services.
Making Quizzes Fun, Educational, and Engaging
Quizzes, the most obvious choice of interactive content, can serve any purpose. For healthcare providers, educating and engaging your patients is the goal, and these quizzes should be designed to help patients learn about themselves, their habits, and their health risks. These quizzes include personality quizzes, risk assessments, and knowledge tests, each type of quiz offering its unique way to help you interact with your audience and improve your services. Here are some tips that can be used to help keep your patients engaged:
- Keep it short and sweet: A too long quiz loses attention. Aim for 5-10 questions to keep users engaged without overwhelming them.
- Make it visually appealing: Use images, videos, or GIFs to add a visual element to your quizzes, making them more attractive and enjoyable.
- Provide feedback: Whether explaining why an answer is correct or offering health tips based on responses, immediate feedback makes quizzes educational and interactive.
Quizzes are only one small part of a larger content strategy, so they can be add-ons to relevant blog posts, social media posts, and email newsletters. Using a marketing strategy with this type of content can not only increase its reach but also help drive more traffic to your website.
Clickable, Interactive Videos
Interactive videos provide an excellent way for people to consume content by making the learning process engaging and dynamic. Unlike normal videos, interactive videos involve the viewer by allowing them to make decisions, answer questions, and navigate through the content. It makes it more personalized for your patients and helps them remember the messages being sent. If you’re wishing to explore this avenue of interactive content, here are some things to keep in mind:
- Keep Interactions Intuitive: The key to a successful interactive video is to make the interactions simple and intuitive. Make sure to complete the viewing experience with enough choices or complex navigation. The goal is to enhance learning, not hinder it.
- Focus on Relevance: Ensure the video’s content and interactive elements are highly relevant to your audience’s health interests and needs. The more the video resonates with the viewer’s health journey, the more engaged they will be.
- Provide Educational Value: Each interactive segment should offer clear, actionable insights or knowledge. Whether it’s a quiz question embedded in the video or a choose-your-own-path scenario, the viewer should come away with new, valuable information related to their health.
All of the interactive elements within your videos should make your content more memorable and provide you with data on your viewer’s preferences, knowledge levels, and decisions. These videos can become a richer, more creative avenue for your content strategy and help you gather insights into how your patients receive their care.
Insightful Words From You: Interactive E-Books
E-books have become a popular way for people to digest and read content at their own pace and have given people an easily transferable digital format that can be customized with your insights and expertise. E-books can be inclusive and offer hyperlinks to articles, quizzes, embedded videos, and engaging graphics that help make the knowledge you offer enjoyable and engaging and can help deepen their understanding of complex health topics that you specialize in. If creating an ebook of your sounds exciting, here are some aspects to keep in mind when trying to use it in your content strategy:
- Incorporate Varied Interactive Elements: Include various interactive features to maintain engagement throughout the E-book. Quizzes can test the reader’s understanding of a chapter, while embedded videos can provide deeper insight into a topic. Clickable infographics can offer quick, digestible facts or statistics at a glance.
- Ensure Content Relevance: The topics covered and the interactive elements included should directly relate to your audience’s health interests and needs. For example, an E-book on healthy living could include interactive meal planners or exercise trackers relevant to the reader’s lifestyle.
- Educational Value is Key: Every interactive element should enhance the reader’s knowledge or provide practical advice. The goal is to make the educational content more accessible and memorable, ensuring readers can easily apply what they’ve learned to their everyday lives.
Your e-books can be advertised in your email campaigns, social media platforms, and blog posts and can be used to help track what your patients find most useful or interesting. They can be used to educate, immerse, and help people become more involved with their healthcare, and can be used to boost your brand identity and expertise in your field.
Design Interactive Content With Our Expert Teams at Optimized360
Keeping up with your patient’s desires for engaging, educational content is now more important than ever. However, creating engaging, interactive content isn’t just about having the right ideas; it’s also about executing them in the best way possible. Optimized360 can help you create the kind of content that captures your audience’s attention and helps turn casual visitors into returning patients. If you wish to learn more, reach out to Optimized360 today, and let us help you make a lasting impression with our medical marketing expertise.
