What a difference a year makes. As we look back on marketing campaigns over the past year, there has been a huge rise of more instances of interactive marketing as brands look beyond audience reach to bring higher engagement into their campaigns.

There is a growing focus on attention as a qualitative measure of success. Numerous companies are pursuing routes that involve interactive marketing because it’s a great way to capture attention and drive audiences to take action.

In this overly saturated media world attention is a scarce resource and marketers who simply seek to drive a click risk alienating the consumers they are seeking to attract. We’ve become immune to the flashing colors on the side of the article we’re reading and close pop-up ads without even looking what they’re about.

With the continued use of social media and the increasing use of second screens interactive content will become even more vital for marketers. Brands should be focused on developing marketing that maximizes engagement, not disruption.  Brands need to embrace new media opportunities and encourage users to contribute, share and interact.

In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the most successful interactive marketing ideas from the past year.

Rosetta Stone

The language-learning company launched a campaign called the “World of Love” that encourages users to interact with an animated globe. Interested browsers can select a city marked on the globe with a small heart then explore various “love facts” about the area. Some of the highlights are: how to say “I love you” in the country’s native language, a love story from the country, relationship statistics, and romantic phrases to say in the country’s native language. Interspersed among these interesting pieces of information are a couple ads for Rosetta Stone’s software, a genius placement that appeals to consumers on an emotional level.

Game of Thrones

One of the most popular television series in recent years, Game of Thrones stepped up their marketing game this past year. Providing an interactive guide that chronicles all of the deaths from the series, they fascinated internet users. The guide was shared over 20,000 times shortly after it came out and is still viewed. The extensive guide chronicles all deaths on the show thus far (and there have been over 700), with information on who the character was, who killed them, how they died, and why. It’s important to note that the guide hasn’t yet been updated to reflect the deaths from the most recent season.

Hashtags

These social media staples have been around for a while, but it’s only been relatively recently that businesses have gotten on board with using them to generate consumer engagement and interest. A well-known hashtag marketing method was Coca-Cola’s #ShareaCoke campaign. The company played up the drink’s role in bringing people together and encouraged consumers to customize their own coke bottles for a loved one. Check out more examples of incredibly successful uses of hashtags for marketing.

Chatbots
More and more companies are beginning to use chatbots to handle basic customer service enquiries or in order to offer more services to users. A great example of this system is Digit, an app that helps users save money. Those who have the app on their phones can use an in-app messaging system (or regular text messaging) that allows them to ask a chatbot a range of questions and complete certain actions in their account.