Content Marketing has undergone a series of diverse transformations from the first newspapers and travel guides up to current corporate blogs and social media.
Interactive content is the next stage of this journey, remarkable in the extremely engaging experience it offers users.
Enter Ion: a platform entirely designed for Marketing professionals, which provides complete control over strategies, from creation and configuration of pieces, to launch and analysis of results.
Equipped with the latest technology to develop pages and interactive materials, it’s presented to the user through an intuitive interface, allowing professionals to create content experiences with ease.
In this article, we’ll show you everything you need to know about the Ion platform, including its numerous features and the benefits it can bring your business. Take a look:
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What is Ion?
Ion is a platform 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 are 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.
What are the advantages of Ion?
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 adopt 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.
What are the main features of the platform?
When discussing a platform aimed at creating interactive content for companies, we can’t forget to list the possibilities it offers. With Ion, you can create:
- quizzes;
- online tests and questionnaires;
- calculators;
- ebooks and white papers;
- lookbooks;
- landing pages;
- resource libraries (facilitates access to materials);
- solution finder (directs a user to recommend content through questions);
- videos (inserts interaction buttons);
- graphics (with intuitive presentation templates to aid understanding);
- maps (with hidden data and display options);
- games (quick discovery, guessing, or comparison games).
To develop and track the results of content, Ion also provides in-depth resources.
Check out the key offerings below!
1. Easy Quick Starts
This feature allows users to create interactive content in just an hour, through a practical step by step creation phase based on previously configured models.
Although the platform delivers the entire base, it still offers the freedom to make several changes. The user never loses creative control over the project.
This is the fastest way to produce questionnaires, white papers, infographics, and other interactive materials.
2. Sell-Side
Sell-Side functionality 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 smarketing.
3. Responsive Features
Responsive layouts today are a must when presenting online material, and it’s no different for interactive content.
Within Ion, you can check that all versions of your content display correctly for desktop, tablet, smartphone, portrait, landscape, etc.
The best thing, though, is that if a version doesn’t display correctly, it’s possible to create specific adjustments for it.
This way, you guarantee that your content will work well on any device.
4. A/B Tests
A/B tests are a feature in several marketing tools and have become an essential resource for verifying and improving content performance.
Ion’s advantage is that it allows you to manage all items of this process (such as results, conversions, bounce rate, and traffic direction) within a single panel.
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.
5. Marketing reports
Ion’s dashboard has flexibility similar to WordPress. You can choose which data and platforms are displayed and organize them in the most convenient way for your productivity.
Display element options include analytics to show your traffic over the last 30 days and your top 10 campaigns with the best results.
By clicking on each, you have access to more detailed information, such as users’ location, access channel, filter respondents by 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. Marketing automation
Ion also provides marketing automation features to optimize your work. Customized reports, for example, can be automatically sent to your board, as often as you wish.
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: what results does Ion deliver in practice?
Ion is recommended by major global companies, such as eHealth, HP, Salesforce, FedEx, and Symantec.
Check out the success case below!
Dell
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.
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.
Want to learn more about Ion? Get in touch with one of our consultants and find out if this is the right solution for you!
