Make it interactive! Nine top tips for creating videos with impact

by Brock Horning | February 2026

Impactful videos reel the viewer in. By adding interactive elements, your audience can tailor their experience to their personal needs, interests and preferences. They can explore in the way that suits them.

Our expert creative team has pulled together nine top tips for creating videos that drive engagement and have real impact:

By giving your audience agency, you are inviting them into a two-way conversation. They are actively involved and leaning forward, ready to tailor their experience. Leave pauses for the audience to have their say and engage with your video in their preferred way. This could be a branching scenario or a menu of options. If viewers can plot their own path through the video, they will be more invested in the outcome.

Plan out your storyline using Stornaway’s story map editor before you start creating – even if you are working with pre-existing linear videos. This will let you step into the audience’s shoes and playtest the flow and structure of your video before you have any media to upload.

Audiences will quickly tell if you are only giving the illusion of choice. If you want viewers to engage with your video, they need to know their choices will impact their experience and that you are listening. This is especially important to keep in mind if you are reusing existing linear content.

Stornaway inventor, Ru Howe, strongly recommends giving your audience their first interactive option or decision moment within the first 30 seconds of your video. This catches the viewer’s attention and sparks their curiosity straight away, letting them know that they can influence their experience.

Did you know more than 90% of videos are watched on mobile devices? Consider which device your audience will use to watch your video and optimize for that. We recommend the square format as a great all-rounder that works well on desktop and mobile sites.

Once your viewer has watched your video, where do you want them to go next? Consider where your video sits in the wider context of the overall experience. Do you want them to head to a specific product page? To re-take a learning quiz? To fill out the details on a form? In Stornaway, all of these can be embedded within your video to seamlessly connect your various platforms and owned channels.

Interactive is all about accessibility and personalisation – no more one-size-fits-all linear videos. Make your Stornaway as relevant and inclusive for the viewer as possible. Add a preferences and settings menu at the start of your video and allow audiences to watch with subtitles, in different languages, or with a range of accessibility features.

The journey isn’t over once you hit ‘publish’. In Stornaway, every view and every decision moment is tracked and recorded in Stornaway analytics dashboard so you have the opportunity to learn more about your audience in real time. The data panel can tell you how viewers are moving through the experience, what interests them most and whether the video is achieving its goal.

Videos with the strongest ROI are the ones that are replayable. When designing your video, think about the reasons why someone would watch your video again. Are there other choices that audiences will want to explore? Or perhaps you can watch the events again from a different perspective? Maybe it’s branching scenario training that will produce slightly different challenges every time you watch?

It pays to have your story map ready to run through and play when communicating with your creative team or wider stakeholders. It can be challenging to convey specific scenes in an interactive video and how it will play through, so share the mapped-out storyline in Stornaway to keep everyone on the same page.

Create guided, clickable experiences using videos, images, 360 and more in Stornaway.io. Engage your viewers like never before with interactive experiences that produce real results.