When you know how your content is performing, you can make it work harder for you.
How to measure,
optimize and
scale interactive content
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When you know how your content is performing, you can make it work harder for you.
Wouldn’t you love to take an algebra test right now?
Okay, maybe that’s a stretch—algebra kind of sucked. But back in the day, you’d sit down to take an exam, and within a few days, it would be returned to you by your professor, fully evaluated and graded, with specific, actionable insight to help you with the problems that you got wrong. There was no mystery, and after the test, you knew exactly where you stood.
But marketers and designers are so often left with incomplete feedback on their work. There are some standard metrics that have traditionally been used for measuring success—of course, page views is one of those metrics—but views alone don’t tell a complete or convincing story. Views are only truly helpful in context, when you have reliable information around audience behavior after they opened the content. But if you don’t have that info, you might walk away thinking you aced the test when you actually flunked (or vice versa).
Complete feedback makes our work better, and interactive content is measurable in a way that static content isn’t, and so it fills in some of those feedback gaps for marketers and designers. With more robust analytics, they can find out exactly how their content performed in a number of different ways—how many people arrived, sure, but also how many people stayed, and for how long, and which sections enticed them to stay.
Content created. Now what?
Erin Cheatham is a senior manager of marketing technology at Applied Systems, an insurance software company. Her team used to publish information-rich reports in the form of a PDF, which would be shared with its audience of insurance agents. The feedback she’d get was limited.
"Because we were just linking off to a PDF,” Cheatham said, “we couldn't really track what page people read the most, or what pieces of information were resonating most. We could only track page views.”
When you publish a PDF, there’s no feedback. It basically gets sent into the abyss, and the only metric you can use to determine the success of the content is how many people opened it. And that’s not an especially strong metric, since it doesn’t always account for unique opens, engagement or time spent on page—or most crucially, which areas of the content most resonated with your audience. But today, Applied Systems is using Ceros to transform those bulky reports into rich, interactive content experiences.
Cheatham says that interactive is more enjoyable for her audience to consume, and that in itself results in more people staying on her content. But another added benefit is that it gives Applied Systems powerful intel on the areas that the audience cares about most.
"Interactive content analytics give us so much more information around our customers’ interaction,” Cheatham said. “What page did they spend the most time on? Which chart did they view the most?”
Those insights, Cheatham said, inform her team’s work in a way that wasn’t possible when it created static content only. Her team can optimize its content based on current data.
"We actually use our Ceros analytics—where people are clicking and what they're engaging with most—to know which resources we should update,” Cheatham says. “And we learn which resources people don’t engage with as much, so we can take them down and replace them with something a little bit more useful.”
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Integrating your interactive content platform, such as Ceros, into your existing workflow will supercharge your work. And with Gemma, an AI creative assistant, you can add some zip to your interactive content creation process and streamline your workflows.
Do you use a CRM to capture and organize information on leads? With Studio, you can seamlessly incorporate forms directly into your interactive experiences, thus enriching your CRM data in real time. Do you have a preferred third-party analytics platform, like Adobe Analytics? You can link Ceros analytics to your existing platform, allowing you to track events like hovers, clicks, and form submissions all in one place, (making it even easier to make data-driven decisions).
Another way to get the most out of new content capabality is to have a designer create a customizable template that anyone at the company can tailor to their needs.
For example, an interactive sales deck template that a designer whips up and saves on your team account. Complete with placeholders for brand-specific images and editable text boxes, any marketer or salesperson can duplicate and personalize it to suit their specific requirements.
Well, this is exactly what you can achieve with Editor. With this setup, your designer doesn't need to make minor customizations for each sales meeting. Instead, a marketer or salesperson can jump onto the platform, clone the template, make the necessary adjustments, and publish the content themselves. This empowers your non-design team members and releases your designers for more creative assignments.
Whether it’s for enabling the sales team or training new employees, there are plenty of underrated examples that are both deeply effective and easy to scale. And use cases like that are especially important when your bosses start to see the appeal of interactive content and ask for more of it.
"Our CMO definitely loves Ceros,” said Kristie Bauer, director of brand and design at Granicus, a municipal software company. “And I don't think she wants stuff that's not in Ceros, unless there's a very specific reason for it."
"Our CMO definitely loves Ceros, and I don't think she wants stuff that's not in Ceros, unless there's a very specific reason for it."
Kristie Bauer, Ceros user
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Interactive content for all
It’s easy to create average content—so many companies do that already! But in a world where every marketer and their cousin is competing for attention, your strategy has to be exceptional to stand out from the pack.
Rich, engaging content is a way to separate your brand from the noise, to elevate your work above the crush of information that audiences face online every day. We’re not saying it’s easy—nothing worth doing ever is—but once you figure out how to make interactive content work for you, content creation will never feel the same.
What is interactive content?
part 1
Build a team of allies
part 2
Anticipate your design needs
part 3
Make a business case for better content
part 4
Build, track and scale interactive content
part 5
This five step guide gives you everything you need to introduce interactive content to your organization.
Get interactive: the complete series
Request a demo
interactive content
and
When you know how your content is performing, you can make it work harder for you.
Admit it. You're ready to get interactive. Click now to access the full guide.
Get the guide
Start making interactive content. Click now to find out how Ceros can help.
Request a demo
What is interactive content?
part 1
Build a team of allies
part 2
Anticipate your design needs
part 3
Make a business case for better content
part 4
Build, track and scale interactive content
part 5
This five step guide gives you everything you need to introduce interactive content to your organization.
Get interactive:
the complete series
Read more
What is interactive content?
part 1
Read more
Build a team of allies
part 2
Read more
Anticipate your design needs
part 3
Read more
Make a business case for better content
part 4
Build, track and scale interactive content
Read more
part 5
This five step guide gives you everything you need to introduce interactive content to your organization.
Get interactive: the complete series