While there’s still plenty to be said for conventional static content formats like blog posts and long-form articles, you don’t want to ignore the potential impact that interactive content could have on your content marketing efforts.
Options like animated infographics, fun personality tests, and interactive videos demand people’s attention and help them feel like they’re part of the content they consume.
It’s incredibly effective from a marketing standpoint, too. According to DemandGen, interactive content is twice as likely to engage a user as static content.
It’s also highly likely that your competitors are already using this type of content to their advantage, with 73 percent of marketers agreeing that integrating interactive options into a campaign drastically enhances overall message retention.
That’s where Ion comes in. This comprehensive solution takes the guesswork out of creating and publishing interactive content that demands attention.
The following Ion guide covers everything you need to know about how this all-in-one solution can streamline your marketing campaigns and help you achieve your goals.
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What Is Ion?
Being ready to get your brand in on the interactive content trend is one thing, but actually doing it is another story altogether.
Ion is a comprehensive platform that gives creators and marketers all the tools they need to produce memorable and effective interactive content experiences that engage users and drive results. Among other perks, Ion offers users access to the following:
- An approachable no-code creation experience
- More than 180 dynamic templates that you can customize and make your own
- Seamless integration with your existing customer response management (CRM) and marketing automation systems
- A suite of managed services to help you make the most of your content experiences
Marketers can leverage Ion to create a variety of unique content pieces, including prime examples like ebooks, interactive quizzes, infographics, interactive calculators, assessments, and more.
It is a tool used by marketing, design, and advertising teams seeking to improve their audience’s experience and generate results through modern, effective, and measurable interactive content.
It’s equipped with advanced editing, monitoring, and data-driven features that make it a true hub for content creation and marketing management.
The huge variety of configuration and customization options is also a factor worthy of attention.
As of 2017, Ion was offered by ScribbleLive, a North American company acquired by the Brazilian multinational Rock Content in 2019, adding Ion to its catalog of content experience solutions.
What Can Ion Do?
Given that every point of contact with your buyer persona is an opportunity to get to know them better and build a relationship, Ion’s goal is to help companies engage their audience and leverage their brands through interactive experiences.
The platform allows you to create content for all stages of the sales funnel, meeting all demands of your Inbound Marketing strategy.
However, Ion’s resources and versatility also benefit companies with a communication focus on paid media.
The characteristics of interactive content alone tend to promote engagement and increase page time.
In addition, materials created with Ion come SEO-optimized, resulting in additional benefits for a wide range of contexts, whether you’re looking to strengthen traffic or increase your conversion rate.
There’s also the possibility to obtain valuable information about your audience and qualify leads “live”.
As highlighted by Mary Ward, Chief Customer Officer at Rock Content, interactive content drives people to give feedback.
This illustrates a true horizontalization process, as suggested by Philip Kotler in Marketing 4.0, in which a real-time exchange of information between producer and consumer establishes a legitimate act of co-creation.
Who Is Ion For?
In just 60 minutes (or less), a user can create interactive content on the platform, increase audience engagement, collect marketing data, or both. And all this without having to write or edit a line of code.
Although this functionality doesn’t require a developer, there are advanced functions that users may need a little more time to become familiar with.
The platform is rich in features for professionals of all types and levels — from content producers to marketing managers, beginners to experts.
The key aspect of Ion, though, is its focus on Digital Marketing. More than a mere content creation tool, the platform provides an analytics panel, SEO optimizations, A/B testing, and numerous other resources for creating, measuring and analyzing your marketing strategy.
In this case, the learning curve is impacted not by the complexity, but by the vast repertoire of possibilities Ion offers.
The good news is that Rock offers a 3-month onboarding program, with platform demonstrations, tutorial videos, courses, and all necessary support for the customer to be able to use the service independently in a short time.
Why Use Ion? Main Advantages
As a result of the immense supply of information available today, capturing consumers’ attention demands more effort and creativity from companies.
With that in mind, interactivity serves as another tool to attract and engage people.
Check out the advantages Ion brings to adopting this new format!
1. Global support and onboarding
Ion was originally created as a platform for the North American market, but its email, chat, support, and onboarding services are now offered in several languages, expanding its global impact.
For the most part, functions within the platform are represented with icons, further increasing the ease and practicality of creating, editing, and collaborating with global teams.
2. Multifunctional platform
The market already offers several tools for creating high-quality interactive content, from those with particular feature sets, such as popular questionnaire generators, to complete solutions that encompass various formats and functions in the same environment.
Ion falls into this latter category, which makes it a very attractive platform for marketers. Ion covers all needs related to interactive content, simply requiring integration with the manager’s CRM and social networks.
The platform offers native integration with the leading social networks and CRMs, including HubSpot and RD Station, in addition to several other Digital Marketing tools.
Ion also provides API integration, starting with the Ion PRO plan. Simply include the necessary documentation, and Rock’s team will set up the integration.
3. Versatile content editor
Ion’s biggest advantage — clear to see within the first hours of use — is the enormous freedom it offers content producers.
Despite delivering a final quality result, many tools are often quite cut and paste, which can compromise a brand’s visual identity.
With Ion, you have access to traditional templates — over 100 interactive prefab experiences — but you also can edit every aspect and insert all of your brand’s visual details.
Best of all, all of these edits can be made through a simple “click and drag” interface, with no need to worry about CSS code.
Users have the option to upload or embed images and videos from their blog, in addition to inserting animations and testing them on the panel itself.
There are even micro-themes with previously selected styles of colors, fonts, and other elements.
All this practicality and versatility allow any professional to produce interactive content at scale and create pieces that are much more faithful to your company’s image.
4. Cost reduction and simplification
In terms of finance and legal, users have additional benefits.
As everything is hosted inside the platform, you don’t have to worry about other costs that such jobs could bring; for example, investments in hosting, data security, and regulations (GDPR and LGPD).
This is one of the biggest advantages of using a unified platform, as producing content independently can entail each new material creating new costs.
With Ion, there is a single investment, regardless of the number of pieces created. This way, the more you use the platform, the cheaper it gets.
Besides, it’s worth remembering that the platform is now provided by a global company, which brings a series of advantages to contracting foreign solutions.
In addition to simplifying the documentation involved in the process, payment for services can be made in different currencies.
Ion’s Top 7 Features
So, what does Ion bring to the table as far as its main features go? Here’s a quick Ion guide to all of its best amenities.
1. Choose from a wide range of content options
The world of interactive content covers a lot of ground and includes many different choices. Ion can help with all of the formats you’re already familiar with, not to mention a few that you may not have considered.
With Ion, you can create interactive content like:
- Quizzes and questionnaires
- Interactive calculators
- Dynamic lookbooks
- Landing pages and mini-sites
- Interactive ebooks, white papers, and resource libraries
- Infographics
- Maps
- Mini-games
- Interactive videos
- Personalized solution finders
In other words, you’ll have access to everything you need to make your brand stand out in a crowd and reach your target audience through fun, engaging experiences that help them remember you.
2. Get started with user-friendly quick-start templates
The developers behind Ion understand how daunting it can be to get comfortable with a new platform. That’s why they’ve streamlined the process with a collection of simple quick-start interfaces that take out the guesswork.
Ion’s quick-start templates give you all the basics needed to create each content type right out of the gate, so your projects get done quickly—often in under an hour. Every template is also fully responsive and customizable, so it’s easy to make each interactive project your own.
Alternatively, you can turn to Rock Content’s team of professionals to handle the job for you, all the way from the planning stage to launch.
This is the fastest way to produce questionnaires, white papers, infographics, and other interactive materials.
3. Get insights with the Sell-Side functionality
Information and data are the keys to getting results from your digital marketing campaigns, and interactive content is a great way to get what you need to succeed.
How leads interact with your content could tell you a lot about what makes them tick.
Your sales team can leverage this knowledge to your brand’s advantage. And the information collected via interactive content is the type of valuable first-party data that brands need to get ahead in today’s cookie-free marketing world.
Ion’s sell-side experience is just the thing to give you a head start in the right direction. Use it to seamlessly supply your sales team with easy access to the organic lead information and data they need to be successful, all consensually collected via your interactive experiences.
Sell-Side optimizes how results are displayed so that tracking is clearer and more efficient for the sales team.
Instead of analyzing all data from your interactive content, you can organize it into two categories:
- Creative (creation and marketing data);
- Sell-Side (conversion and sales data).
The information displayed on Sell-Side isn’t always available to all Ion users, but data can be shared. This brings even greater advantages to companies that have well-structured marketing strategies.
4. Ensure your content is fully responsive
Responsiveness is essential when creating content experiences with modern consumers in mind. One user may be interacting with your content on a standard desktop system while another is surfing the web on the go with a cellphone or tablet.
Ion simplifies the process of making sure that your content experiences display and function correctly on any possible screen. And it’s easy to make the necessary adjustments, too, thanks to Ion’s user-friendly interface.
5. Verify results with A/B testing
If you’re like many marketers, you’re a firm believer in launching several variations on your most important content experiences to get a better read on what your users like most.
A/B testing is the key to accurately assessing and comparing the results of different variations.
Ion makes A/B testing especially easy by allowing users to manage every step of the process in one simple, user-friendly panel. The features include user-friendly controls like slider bars that let you perpetually fine-tune the amount of traffic sent to each content variation.
Settings are presented in a very intuitive way based on their type: traffic allocation, for example, can be performed using horizontal bars. Therefore, after validating whether one version performs better than another, just drag the slider to 100% so that all traffic is directed to it.
6. Access comprehensive marketing reports
Ion’s dashboard has flexibility similar to WordPress. Its analytics system comes complete with everything you need to collect, organize, and review all data generated by your interactive content.
Easily display the information you need at a glance, and access detailed data on individual users, such as their locations, access channels, and more. Monitor your traffic over the last 30 days and your top 10 campaigns with the best results.
Everything is intuitively organized, so it’s always easy to find exactly what you’re looking for precisely when you need it.
Click on each report to have access to more detailed information, such as users’ location, and access channel, and filter respondents by a funnel, among others.
One note is that Ion does not use the traditional term lead. For functional reasons, this information is displayed as “converted” and gives you the freedom to define the type of conversion (minimum length of stay, click, subscription, etc.).
6. Enjoy seamless marketing automation
Best of all, Ion is fully compatible with your current marketing automation and CRM tools (including HubSpot, Salesforce, and others), helping you streamline the flow of crucial information.
You can finally achieve optimal alignment between your sales and marketing departments.
You can also have detailed custom reports automatically delivered to your dashboard at a frequency that works for you. With Ion, you’re always fully in control of how your interactive content campaigns play out.
Automation options are also available for A/B testing. You can configure the platform to automatically direct traffic to the best version when a certain goal or limit is reached.
Success Case: How Dell’s Results Improved With Ion
Dell, one of the largest hardware companies in the world, turned to Ion in 2010 with a clear objective: optimizing qualified lead generation, a job that took eight weeks to come to fruition.
One of the biggest advantages of adopting Ion, cited by Josh Mueller, then-manager of the company, was the decrease in production time.
Without needing to make technical adjustments or request IT services, the Dell team created lead capture forms with tremendous agility, without sacrificing quality.
In addition to increasing conversions and business opportunities, the platform simplified integration between the company’s various teams spread across the planet and contributed to the alignment between marketing and sales departments.
Wrap-Up
We know that Content Marketing is no longer just a trend, but one of the pillars of the modern market, and interactive content is its latest attribute, a fact already clear in studies.
Of the more than twenty thousand professionals interviewed in The Symphony of Connected Interactive Content Marketing survey, 87% agree that interactive content is more effective in retaining public attention, and 79% of the organizations interviewed plan to use interactive content in their Digital Marketing strategies.
This does not mean that images, blog posts, videos, and ebooks will be left behind. It just makes it clear that new formats are becoming more popular and increasing the richness of the universe of knowledge offered by companies.
As you can see in this article, Ion is a robust solution capable of meeting all the needs of a Digital Marketing team looking to add interactive materials to their strategy.
Ion’s functionalities go far beyond the information mentioned. Like any good platform, it’s important to know all the advantages and possibilities provided.
Are you ready to take your content creation efforts to the next level and beyond? Get Ion today, and start crafting incredible content experiences that delight your customers, generate leads, and drive conversions!
