Have you considered interactive content in your festive marketing campaigns? Delivering twice as much engagement as more traditional static content, Christmas interactive posts offer a way to create more meaningful connections with your audience.
What is interactive content?
Unlike passive content – where an audience can simply look at something and then move along – interactive content encourages people to get involved and interact in some way.
Whether it be responding to questions, exploring options with different outcomes, or simply making a yes/no choice, interactive content taps into our natural curiosity and drives us to engage in some sort of action.
Brands can use this marketing tool to establish meaningful relationships with their audience. When done well, the audience will feel like they’ve developed a real connection with someone on the other end who understands their challenges and might be able to provide solutions.
Interactive Christmas posts – ideas and examples
When it comes to interactive content marketing, few channels offer as much opportunity as good ol’ social media.
While social media is always a great place to share off-platform content, it’s also handy for creating native interactive posts directly on the platforms themselves. The big players – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. – all offer functionality to get creative with your audience engagement.
Examples of Christmas interactive posts on social media include:
Simple questions such as “What’s on your Christmas wish list this year?”Polls/questionnaires to get more in-depth data that could inform future campaignsMultiple choice questions where different reaction icons correspond to a different answerConversation starters that get people talking or divide opinion in a light-hearted way
These different types of posts all help to encourage engagement through likes, comments, tagging, and sharing (a.k.a. user-generated content – more on that further down). Other creative examples of interactive posts include digital advent calendars , spinning wheel videos, and Instagram story polls .
Branded games
If we’re talking about interactive content ideas, we need to be talking about online games.
By tapping into our natural instinct to compete and be rewarded, games can engage players for hours on end. They’re also ideal for combining with festive competitions, such as a “12 Days of Christmas” prize giveaway for those with the highest score on the leaderboard each day.
Better yet, branded games can include your company’s logo and other branding elements to raise awareness and build connections with a target audience. They also deliver on marketing objectives by incentivising mailing list signups and other specific actions.
Better still , you can double up on the interactive element by sharing the link to your game on social media and encouraging audience participation in the comments sections of your posts. Just take a look at Airship and sister company Toggle, who ran a campaign around a Christmas-themed Jingle Jetpack game and promoted it on LinkedIn to remind their audience that they were still in with a chance of winning a prize.
If you’re looking for something a little more fun and interactive this year, check out our free playbook, Game Time! Your Guide to Christmas Game Success. Here we cover everything you need to know about delivering a successful, interactive and playful Christmas marketing game campaign (on a budget).
Get your copy now!
Christmas quizzes
Ah, trivia. Who doesn’t love a good quiz to test their knowledge and fire up the old brain cells? Interactive quizzes have been around on social media for a while now, and the festive season offers up plenty of fun themes to choose from.
When it comes to Christmas interactive posts, Disney go big. Just look at what they did In December 2020, when they teamed up with Edith Bowman for a Christmas special of The Happiest Quiz on Earth .
By hosting the quiz live on Facebook, they gave excited families the chance to interact with the event in real time. We don’t know about you, but 17,000 comments on a single post doesn’t sound too bad for engagement…
The good news is you don’t need to go quite that big with your yuletide interactive content. There are plenty of options out there for branded, Christmas-themed quizzes that you can use to engage your own audience during the most wonderful time of the year.
User-generated content
Sticking with the theme of social media, the best way to have people interact with your content is to make it the kind of content that they’ll share around organically.
UGC – or user-generated content – is a great way to promote your brand, product, or festive campaign by encouraging your audience to get involved. Coca Cola does this well with its Christmas bow packaging, which encourages followers to post their own photos and videos of ‘unwrapping’ the bottle labels.
Interactive Christmas cards
We all know about e-cards, but the creative team at 14islands took it to another level in 2017 with their digital Christmas card .
Featuring 3D scenes, festive details, and music playing gently in the background, it was their way of spreading the Christmas cheer with their audience that year. You can click and drag to scroll around the interactive environment, with a waving Santa character following you around as you go.
For extra interactive-content points, they also posted about it across their social media channels to make sure everyone knew about it! 🎅
Interactive websites
Every year on Christmas eve, the Google Santa Tracker lets you follow Santa as he rides around in his sleigh delivering presents across the globe.
Starting at midnight in the easternmost time zone, you can track Santa in real time as he travels roughly one time zone west for each hour that passes. It even includes counters showing how far he’s travelled, how long to go until he reaches you, and the total number of presents delivered.
On every other day of the year, the interactive website offers up an array of helpful and entertaining content including videos, mini-games, quizzes, and other activities.
Interactive emails
Email isn’t known for being the most exciting marketing channel, especially when the average office worker receives 120 emails a day . That being said, it’s still an effective method for communicating directly with your audience and there’s a lot you can do to increase the chances of a click-through.
Enter interactive emails.
With your target audience likely to be receiving dozens – if not hundreds – of emails a day, this is a great way to stand out from the crowd and impress your readers with something new. Look at this interactive Christmas email from UK-based digital agency Two, which allows recipients to select various lighting options on the interactive Christmas tree.
There’s even an option to burn the whole thing to the ground! 🎄🔥
Looking for more Christmas marketing ideas?
For more tips and tricks on running successful festive campaigns, take a look at our related content:
Fancy a free resource to help you plan out some of your marketing activity and remind you of upcoming notable days? Our marketing calendar is a handy PDF that you can help yourself to right now! 👇
And that’s it from us – all the best with your marketing this Christmas!
