4 pillars of Interaction Thinking
4. Engagement
Turn passive into active
You've got less than 5 seconds to make someone think, feel and do.
Definition
82% of consumers with high emotional engagement would always buy the brand they are loyal to when making purchasing decisions, according to a Capgemini report on consumer loyalty
Engaging content is articles, social posts, product pages, emails and videos organisations create to increase:
- Likes, shares and followers
- Increase Click-Through Rate (CTR), dwell time
- Increase open rates
The science of storytelling tells us it's the best way to bring complex and boring concepts to life and keeps the people wanting more.
Everything has a story to tell, from insurance policies and monkey wrenches to sporting events and a sexy new outfit.
The key is to appeal to the emotional amygdala so it overrides the logical hippocampus. Creating desire, revenue and repeat business.
The way to capture anyone's attention is through emotion.
That arresting moment when a billboard catches your eye or an intriguing headline on a TikTok or webpage.
You stop because you feel something. It appeals to something nestled in your amygdala. It's something you want to know or appeals to who you want to be.
You need to say something new in a different way so the reader can see themselves in it by:
- Leading with the benefit
- Showing, not telling
- Finding the emotional hook and uses real lifestyle examples to bring it to life
Independence
Building a great widget that makes form filling easier is useless if no one knows it's there, so the journey needs to be looked at end-to-end, not in fragments
A Content Architect could help you
The ownership of the end-to-end journey with a holistic content strategy designed to grab attention, build desire, and create positive outcomes and experiences.
Building a great calculator that works out the value of your home insurance is useless if no one knows it's there, so the journey needs to be looked at end-to-end, not in fragments. Here's an example:
You've found out people don't know how much the contents of their home is worth so you build a calculator, with a "get a quote" next-best-action, lots of supporting articles about the benefits of this type of insurance, other types of home related insurance products and tips on how to protect your home, plus a video on how insurance is worked out. Once it's built, you need to get people onto your website or app, so you optimise the pages for search and find a good story to tell on social media about stats on break-ins or funny home accident stories.
A Content Architect will write and create the different bits of content that need to work the fulfilment journey to get people to their desired outcome. Whether they're proactively trying to solve a problem or by creating a desire to increase market share.
Discoverability is the road that links all the elements and channels, bridging the gap between digital and marketing teams. It's designed to make people think, feel and do something with cohesive storytelling at every touchpoint.
Interaction Touchpoints
Improve conversion and create the ultimate experience by knitting together content across all channels and for all purposes
Head
Always-on content in the active discovery part of the decision-making process. People may have come from Heart content but could be direct and standalone, supporting the product and/or proposition.
Content is meaningful educational articles, videos and infographics distributed where they are, like social media, CRM and search.
Heart
Inspirational content engages people's sense of self-actualisation through bespoke campaigns consumed passively, either through direct or indirect marketing activity. And passes the customer over to Head content.
Lifestyle content uses emotion to illustrate what the product or proposition enables for them. So it must be distributed where they are.
Hand
Action-led content designed to solve the problem outlined in Head and Heart content, as all content roads lead to here - creating an end-to-end CRO experience.
People get here through Heart and/or Head content and deliver your business objectives. This needs to have authenticity across all logged-in states, error messages, chatbot interaction and onboarding.
What's Interaction Thinking?
Online behaviour isn't linear or siloed. Strategically mapping the intersectionality of the content audiences interact with leads to better outcomes.
By considering customer and business objectives as an end-to-end journey, instead of fragmented solutions to a particular problem, you create better results, experiences and efficiencies.
1Immersion
Content is the thread that links marketing with digital, which audiences follow from channel to channel, around and back again.
Interaction Thinking is a triptych loop based on tangent behaviour patterns seen when audiences are passively or actively triggered to answer a particular question.
TL;DR the whole interaction dovetailing content that plays different roles in achieving the same objective.
2Purpose
This is the bread and butter of your business. The ultimate objective of content is to lead here.
Content with purpose acts as the 'hand' to DO something and is the point every journey has to get to in order to achieve business goals.
Content in this loop includes chatbot, web forms, ID verification, navigation, 404 screens, error messages, success screens, basket and logged in.
TL;DR the conversion interaction.
3Meaning
The middle of the tangent loop provides educational, informational and reasons to believe content.
It's the 'head' phase that makes audiences THINK. It's crucial for both active and passive triggers but leans more into active.
Audiences dip in and out of this content to feel confident, to verify decisions and get help and specific questions.
TL;DR the descision interaction
4Engagement
Catering predominantly to passive triggers, engagement content could be sought by active triggers looking for an emotional connection to the brand.
This content is the 'heart', designed to make audiences FEEL something.
This could be evergreeen lifestyle, inspirational content and fast-paced trend content seen on social media or CRM.
TL;DR the capture interaction.
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