Leverage your marketing automation efforts using interactive content data

When it comes to decision-making, a digital world requires digital solutions. 

No wonder automation has become essential to any marketing strategy since it allows companies to use data to achieve better results systematically.

However, filtering out relevant information remains a challenge. The good news is that gathering data can be easier with interactive content.

Infographics, ebooks, quizzes, and customized calculators are everywhere — and they are now trending as one of the best practices for Content Marketing.

A study conducted by Content Marketing Institute confirms that, compared to the previous years, marketing campaigns used 63% more photos and infographics than any other visual media.

If you are wondering how you can extract data from interactive content and put it to work in your favor, you are in the right place.

In this article, you will learn:

How to gather data from interactive content?

Marketing automation systems are often home to thousands of leads. In order to deliver more relevant nurture streams, smart marketers break their universe into addressable segments.

Interactive content is a powerful ally for that since it engages the audience in its experience. 

While people get what they were looking for, the content is collecting valuable data for you.

Think about an interactive calculator. For example, this one calculates the ROI, which means people can see the return they’ll have over the investment made:

Made with Ion

In less than one minute, we enter the numbers and voilà — our ROI calculator gives us our potential results.

How does it help us? Whenever people insert their data to use this interactive tool, they provide you valuable information about them. 

With a simple calculator, you can map your customers’ profiles: how many employees they have, their marketing budget, etc.

Remember that your sales department needs a helping hand to identify their best bets. 

The next step is to create a database that segments information by category to tell one buyer’s persona from another.

More content types, more data

Interactive content is available in many forms. Let’s take a look at some of the most interesting for a Digital Marketing strategy:

• surveys and polls
• webinars
• flowcharts, diagnostic tests, and troubleshooting tools
• ebooks
• emails
• augmented reality media
• mobile games
• apps
• interactive 360º videos

They all have their own way of collecting data, so you can combine the ones you need in order to get more details about the prospects. 

The digital journey can be a long one — with many touchpoints from form submits, to ebook consumption, to self-assessments, to solution building, budget calculating, and so on.

The main goal is to organize the strategy to separate the ‘best bets’ from the worst ones. 

How to use them in marketing automation?

Getting the worst bets off your radar minimizes distractions and the consumption of your resources. 

Meaning, you need to segment out your ill fits so that you don’t waste time and money catering to them.

So first things first: define your strategy and the infrastructure your teams will have in hand to manage that data. The platform must facilitate high fidelity segmentation from explicit rather than inferred data.

Also, it has to communicate with all the interactive content you offer. There is no automation in personally transferring data from one software to another.

Define your metrics

Monitoring results is crucial for the success of an automation strategy. The point is, the challenge goes beyond establishing a daily routine of making decisions based on information.

By adopting metrics, you enhance your automation system with more practical functionalities, considering what needs to be improved.

Think about the way your CRM performance depends on reliable data. As soon as you gather the information collected by interactive content, you need to create a pipeline to deliver it through the CRM.

It starts with your goals. Do you need more qualified leads to improve your actions in the middle of the funnel? Create some interactive content to the top of the funnel and do the data segmentation.

Quizzes and personality tests are good options. Along with profile data, they collect information about prospects’ pains or interests. 

At this point, you can strengthen ties with your best leads — but that does not mean you can’t find even better opportunities.

Create a scoring program

Scoring sorts the wheat from the chaff. Inferred scoring — based on digital body language of clicks, downloads, views, opens — is guesswork subject to sub-optimal accuracy and noise.

Explicit data, in turn, minimizes the guesswork and improves the accuracy and reliability of scoring programs. Then you can work with targeted content.

Based on the data you gathered, you identify the buyer persona and adjust your marketing actions to be personalized. Instead of a single newsletter, for example, marketers will deliver specific messages to each group or person.

What about a deeper experience with a solution that enhances your strategy and makes it easier to manage?

How Ion can help with that?

Ion Interactive is a Rock Content’s solution to create interactive content without the need for coding. In our software, you can create different formats of content and analyze their performance. 

Here are 7 ways Ion leverages interactive content marketing data in marketing automation.

1. Segmentation

Assessments, report cards, and conversion paths are among the interactive content marketing experiences that yield explicit segmentation data. 

Ion combines all that rich data from buyers’ answers to strategically designed questions into a single Ion mashup field exported to the Marketing Automation Platform (MAP).

MAP allows you to scan the Ion mashup field for highly qualified answers and then add matching buyers to segment lists.

2. Best bets for Sales

Ion is uniquely suited to provide descriptive data that can be matched to surface best bets based on explicit data from their interactive journey.

The amount of high-fidelity data generated throughout that journey is both awesome and intimidating. Ion provides unique, explicit data for marketing automation pattern matching.

It uses rules to look for combinations of responses across touchpoints that indicate ‘best bets’ for sales. 

For example, a buyer may respond that they have a budget in one touchpoint, that they have pain in another touchpoint, and that they are the decision-maker in another touchpoint.

By having an automation rule look for that pattern in the data Ion pushes into the MAP’s mashup field, we can surface ready buyers to sales. 

Marketing also uses ‘best bets’ as their most senior segment for judging performance — meaning, if marketing efforts don’t perform well with ‘best bets’, then there’s a marketing problem to solve.

3. Worst Bets for Sales and Marketing

By the same token as ‘best bets’, certain combinations of buyer responses in their interactive journey indicate that they’re likely to be a waste of time. 

For example, they may indicate that their industry is outside your target, combined with their company size, making them an ill fit.

Integration is crucial here since that information may come from different touchpoints across the journey. 

Marketing automation needs to look for negative response patterns in the Ion mashup data field and segregate those matching leads so that sales don’t waste resources.

4. Targeting

Relevance drives results. When each subsequent touchpoint in the digital journey can be smarter and more relevant, it accelerates revenue, and business value improves.

Some examples include gender, industry, and seniority. Write targeting data into the Ion buyer profile and use that to make subsequent experiences dynamically more relevant. 

Rules within Ion make that dynamic relevance possible.

5. Personalization

Helping people to feel known and understood can make them feel more comfortable and willing to interact. Eliminating redundant personal data collection (and friction) is the key.

With Ion, you create a buyer profile for each user and append that profile throughout their journey. At some point, an anonymous lead becomes known when they engage in touchpoints that yield their personal information. 

The keys here are to only ask for data once, to ask for a few data points at any one time, and to ask for new and deeper data in subsequent visits. This is like a much smarter and smoother version of “progressive profiling”.

For example, Ion dynamically changes fields shown in forms based on what’s already in the buyer profile. Forms dynamically shrink, making follow-on conversions more likely. Profile data is also passed into the MAP and leveraged in nurture programs.

6. Scoring

Buyer responses from their interactive journey are saved to their Ion profile and simultaneously sent to the MAP as part of the Ion mashup field. 

Then automation rules in the MAP increment or decrement of the explicit side of the lead score.

This high-quality, highly reliable explicit data provided by Ion enables scores to climb more rapidly and accurately, accelerating lead scoring programs and, ultimately, pipeline velocity.

7. Full Circle

So far, the first six ways to use Ion data in marketing automation have focused on leveraging Ion’s high fidelity information on the MAP. Well, it works the other way too, and the business value is enormous.

Ion’s experiences can dynamically change based on data passed in from marketing automation platforms.

The code-free rules that enable this can consume everything we’ve discussed above — segments, targets, personalization, scoring — and make the user experience more relevant, personal, and effective in real-time. 

This high-fidelity dynamic relevance is the wind beneath the wings, driving the acceleration of the journey and the pipeline.

As you can see, interactive content is central to any marketing strategy, especially when we seek automation. So take these insights to your company and watch your marketing ROI grow significantly!

Do you want that automation level in your company? Then request an Ion Interactive Demo right now!