It’s no secret that consumers these days expect more. Regardless of the industry you’re operating within or the corner of the market you’re hoping to capture, prospective clients want and need to engage with your business on a far deeper level than ever before. Able to entice and inspire such consumers, and to call out to them whenever their need may occur, interactive media can help your business to reach further, shout a little louder and better meet its clients' needs – and we’ll tell you how.
What is interactive marketing?
Also known as trigger-based or event-driven marketing, interactive marketing is a dialogue: a two-way communication that takes place between a consumer and a company in order to encourage a transaction to take place. Often undertaken online, interactive marketing most commonly takes the form of emailed newsletters, social media and blogs, and even hash tags, although it’s also present across the online retail industry under the guise of suggestion. How many times have you been shown a list of products based upon your recent searches, or advised of items you may like depending on who else may have bought them? This is interactive marketing in play, creating a dialogue based upon your initial contact – however fleeting. Interactive marketing is a retort – a response to an action performed by a consumer or potential client. More than that, though, interactive marketing is a means of enticing and engaging potential consumers and of finding out exactly what they want before it's offered. Far from advertising a product in a particular way, this means of marketing will enable you, the business, to determine what it is a customer wants to see, and how your product could best service that need.
The benefits of interactive marketing in the entertainment industry
Used widely, interactive marketing is particularly prevalent across the entertainment industry – well, where else? Such marketing allows studios to engage with audiences long before a film, album or video game is released, and to gauge responses to the content that is soon to be released. Often rewarding audiences with free downloads, hidden content, backstage gossip and the ability to alter outcomes on stage and screen, interactive marketing positively thrives in the entertainment industry. No longer passive, audiences consume and engage with content and actively seek it out when it’s released. To those ends, interactive marketing involves consumers rather than selling empty ideals, and ensures that elements of sound stage, screen and console exist far beyond the realms of our imagination.
The benefits of such strategies, including increased sales, improved customer satisfaction and lower marketing costs are sought throughout the marketing process, but perhaps most eagerly by the studios. After all, who is to benefit most from such efforts? Relativity, led by Executive Ryan Kavanaugh, is one such studio; a next generation venture that has everything – including its diversity and ability to engage with its audiences – to prove. Indeed, as a private studio, Relativity perhaps has to reach a little further, shout a little louder, in order to make sure it’s heard – although, as a specialist in branded entertainment, the studio is certainly capable of holding its own.
Music
The music industry relies on interactive marketing to entice new fans and to encourage lovers of songs and melodies to buy into the adventure that each new artist is embarking upon. Interactive marketing can connect fans and artists, allow music fans to interact with one another and sell an ideal – as well as creating an online community that supports one another. One fantastic example of such a strategy is Arcade Fire’s ‘We Used to Wait’. Rather than releasing a song online to be passively listened to, the group connected music and meaning via a project named The Wilderness Downtown. Incorporating the address of the listener’s childhood home with images taken from Google Street View, the project combined nostalgia, experimentation, technology and music to give consumers an experience that was incredibly personal – a money-can’t-buy marketing campaign.
Film
What better way to connect studios and their offerings, and consumers, than by involving audiences in their productions? These days, social media and blogs are increasingly being used to advertise extra roles, and crowd-fund as well as appeal to audiences to request showings of movies. The film industry is more interactive than ever, and audiences become a part of the story they could have written themselves. Alternate reality campaigns only add to this new sense of reality that interactive marketing can create. Audiences have a new sense of ownership over the movies they see, and are able to use accompanying marketing strategies to explore plotlines long after a film has finished. Donnie Darko, which quickly became a cult classic, was accompanied by an intricate website that could be explored for many hours – fans could be far more involved than if they’d simply seen the film, and they thrive on such interactions.
Video games
The video game industry is another that benefits from the viral marketing campaign, allowing game footage and previously unseen details to draw an audience in like never before. Again, social media comes into play, connecting gamers, introducing the players that may become teammates, and encouraging a dialogue between the studio and consumer in a way that has never been possible before. While drip-fed footage puts consumers into the world of the game before they’ve made their purchase, viral marketing campaigns are something else entirely. The interactive marketing strategy for Resident Evil 5 involved sending would-be gamers on a gory hunt across London’s Trafalgar Square in search of body parts – many of which went missing. These days, gamers don’t have to wait to play, and are finding increasingly creative ways to do so prior to a game’s release.
The future of interactive marketing is an uncertain one, although not due to its lack of success, or an inability to propagate exponentially. When it comes to interactive marketing, one can only ask: “Where next?” Marketing is no longer a one-way street and has become more dynamic, more engaging than ever before. The consumer has been placed in the driving seat and is now allowed to interact with the studio prior to the release of an album, movie or television show – just how can companies top such a strategy?