6 interactive content ideas and how to execute them

Interactive content drives two times more conversions than static or passive content, according to a study by Demand Gen⁠(opens in a new tab or window). With interactive content marketing, you can take your audience's experience from passive consumption of your content to active engagement.

The best part? There are a lot of ways that you can add interactive elements to your marketing campaigns without straining your budget, time, and other resources. With enough inspiration and the right tools, any marketer can create effective interactive content.

Quizzes, questionnaires, and surveys are inherently interactive. But by adding personalized elements, you can encourage more users to take the quiz or fill out the survey.

To add interactivity, you can show different questions depending on how a user answers a prior question.

Let’s say you distribute a questionnaire⁠(opens in a new tab or window) to marketers, and one of the questions asks about one of their priorities for the upcoming year. If they answer “search engine optimization,” you can then ask them more specific questions about SEO⁠(opens in a new tab or window).

Include links to other relevant content within your quizzes, questionnaires, or surveys to generate traffic to other areas of your website. This way, users can learn more about a topic or get additional context for the questions.

Make user results shareable by providing them with a link. With quizzes, especially, you can make the results shareable, so people can share their results on social media or other platforms and encourage more people to participate.

Canva has an array of templates for quizzes, surveys, and questionnaires⁠(opens in a new tab or window) to help you design them in an engaging and interactive way. Plus, Canva helps you create content faster⁠(opens in a new tab or window) than other tools. You can design a survey like the one below in a matter of minutes.

Use this template⁠(opens in a new tab or window)

Interactive presentations⁠(opens in a new tab or window) are a great way to encourage audience engagement and keep them focused on the message you’re trying to deliver.

In fact, one study suggests⁠(opens in a new tab or window) that when users can interact directly with a presentation, they are 41% more likely to get to the end of the presentation and spend 21% more time reading than with presentations without interactive elements.

In this webinar, Canvanauts share actionable tips for creating impactful presentations and show you how to create slides that communicate clearly. Also, you'll learn a ton of the tips and tricks to create more consistent and visual presentations and how to deliver them to your audience without leaving Canva:

Include quizzes, polls, Q&A sections, or ice breakers. These are all elements in which the audience can interact directly with the presentation. For example, you could add an ice breaker at the beginning of the presentation to ask everyone where they’re joining from. Or you could add polls to your presentation to allow users to give their opinions or feedback.

Add videos. Videos can be helpful in educating your audience on the more complex topics in your presentation. For example, if you're giving a presentation about a new marketing automation software, include a video that shows how it works and what features it has.

If your presentation is downloadable or on-demand, you can get even more interactive by using a “choose your own adventure” style, where different choices lead viewers down different paths. This style of presentation can be especially engaging for training sessions or webinars because it allows participants to choose what they learn about. You can search for specific themes of presentations with Canva's Ai Presentation⁠(opens in a new tab or window). It will help you in preparing for your interactive sessions.

Infographics are popular to share on social media. One study⁠(opens in a new tab or window) showed that infographics resulted in

“significantly greater … social media attention” compared to text articles on similar topics. You can use them as part of your overall marketing strategy or as complementary visuals in your blog posts and other written content.

Embed the infographics on your website and then use hover animation, so users can see more about a topic or section of the infographic. The user moves their pointer over it and a box pops up with more information. You’ll need to add some code to your website tomake the infographic hoverable⁠(opens in a new tab or window). If you use a website builder or CMS, you can likely do this yourself. Otherwise, your web developer can do this for you.

Then you can share an image of the infographic on your social media accounts with the link to where it sits on your website and let people know they can click the link to interact with the infographic.

To design your infographic, Canva has hundreds of engaging infographic templates⁠(opens in a new tab or window) to get you started. Customize the infographic so it matches your brand style or the aesthetic you’re aiming for.

Add Flourish app to Canva⁠(opens in a new tab or window)

Using less text on a landing page can improve conversions on that landing page⁠(opens in a new tab or window), according to one study. You can reduce text on a landing page by using elements like interactive calculators, videos, or question pop-ups.

A simple way to add some interactivity to your landing page is with a video.

According to Wyzowl, 87% of marketers⁠(opens in a new tab or window) who responded said video has helped them increase traffic. To make it more interactive, make sure you’re talking directly to your target audience in the video rather than “at” them.

You can even ask questions, giving them more to think about as they watch your video.

Add animated headers, buttons, pictures, or text to make your website experience more unique than other websites. There are lots of different ways to use animation.

On the Canva website editor for example, you can make your text and images fade, rise, or pan across the screen. You can even control the speed of your animations.

Design a visually appealing and interactive landing page with Canva’s landing page templates for websites.⁠(opens in a new tab or window)

Interactive elements in an Ebook can help people learn and understand concepts more effectively than just reading text. In one study⁠(opens in a new tab or window), interactive activities helped students retain six times more information. Ebook interactivity can be as simple as being able to click on a word or phrase to get more context or as complicated as creating an entire game out of the book.

Include clickable links to engage your audience with your content. If there are words or phrases that are complex or need further explanation, add a link to that word or phrase so that when a user clicks it, a box pops up with more information.

You can also format the content in your Ebook in a collapsible or “accordion” format, where users have to click a “+” or another icon to expand the section. This enables readers to hide sections they’re not interested in, so they can curate the Ebook content for their own needs.

Add quizzes at the end of each chapter, so users will be more likely to remember what they learned. Research has shown⁠(opens in a new tab or window) that testing a person’s knowledge retrieval skills can help them retain what they’ve learned.

Use this template⁠(opens in a new tab or window)

Maps with interactive elements are entertaining for your site visitors—and they can help keep your brand top of mind when those people need something from you. Expedia, a travel company, made an accent map⁠(opens in a new tab or window) of the British Isles, where users can click on a region and it plays the accent from that area. A map like this helps bring in people who see travel as a fun experience and puts Expedia in the front of their minds.

There are a few ways to use interactive maps for your brand. Use one if your business has multiple locations, so users can hover over each location to see the hours, address, phone number, and other location-specific information.

Or make a map that’s related to your business, like Expedia did. Expedia created a map that showed regional differences, which can lead to thoughts of travel. If you’re a food-related company, you could create a map showing the most popular food in every state.

You can create a map in-house if you have a graphic designer or use a map-making tool like Canva⁠(opens in a new tab or window).

And maps don’t have to be geographic in nature—these same ideas apply to other types of maps. For example, if you want to use a “concept map”⁠(opens in a new tab or window) and not a geographical map, Canva has many templates for those, too.

Use this concept map template⁠(opens in a new tab or window)

Identify two or three types of interactive content that are feasible for you and your team. Estimate costs, time, and any other resources needed to determine what’s doable for you. Identify your target audiences and what they’re likely to need from you, so you can create engaging visual content⁠(opens in a new tab or window) for them.

Once you’ve implemented some interactive content, you can analyze it against your other static content to see which is more engaging for your customers and potential customers. The metrics you look for will vary, depending on the platform you use, but look at things like views, comments, and shares. If you post on social media, look at likes and reactions, too.

Canva has thousands of templates and interactive elements to help you accomplish your interactive content goals. Our templates are designed to be easy for marketers to make and engaging for viewers to see.