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Interactive Content Marketing Toolkit

CHAPTER 8

C H A P T E R  5

Defining Your Process

Defining Your Process

Ready to Get Started with Interactive Content?

Your great content ideas need to be coupled with a great process. Otherwise, you’ll get results that aren’t… well… great.

The most common stumbling blocks in interactive content are easily sidestepped if you take some time to plan your approach. At ion interactive, we follow a simple, 8-step project management process when building content experiences for our customers. This framework works well for every type of interactive content—from calculators and configurators to quizzes and ebooks.

In this chapter, we’ll be digging a little deeper into each one and giving you some tips to help your initiative go off without a hitch.

8-Step Project Management Process

Brainstorm

Brainstorm

Concept Brief

Concept Brief

Interactive Wireframe

Interactive Wireframe

Design and Build

Design & Build

Quality Assurance

Quality Assurance

Launch

Launch

Promote

Promote

Review and Measurement

Review & Measurement

Step 1: Brainstorming

Let’s be honest—coming up with great ideas doesn’t just happen. Earlier in the toolkit, we shared some exercises you can do to identify opportunities for content based on your buyer’s journey or the types of traffic you’re driving. Make sure you pull these back out when you head to the brainstorming table.

As you brainstorm, try to keep in mind…

What’s the goal?

Are you trying to generate new leads, or nurture existing ones? Is the goal a direct sale, or are you trying to create awareness? Do you want visitors to consume the content? Share it? Be specific.

Who’s the audience?

Who are you trying to reach, and what do they care about? What do they need?

Where’s the traffic coming from?

How will you be driving traffic to the piece, and in what context will a visitor be engaging with it? Will the primary driver be organic? PPC? Email? Display? This matters, because the intent of a visitor from each channel may differ.

You’ll also want to be certain that the campaign messages align with the content you’re driving people to—consistency is key to conversion. Match your traffic source message to the experience the visitor lands on.

What stage of the journey is the buyer in?

Different content formats are suited to different stages of awareness, interest, consideration and purchase, though it’s not a hard and fast rule.

Are we repurposing—and if so, how?

If you’re working from a piece of existing content, which pieces can you chunk out, and how will you repurpose them? Determine what’s possible to create from what you already have, and be open to embracing multiple different formats to suit different audiences.

Brainstorming

Two Quick Tips to Get You Going:

Bring a team

Bring a Team

They say two heads are better than one, and when it comes to brainstorming, the more the merrier—to an extent.

It’s wise to bring in those who will have different roles in the content production process—marketers, content strategists, copywriters, *developers and designers—to get multiple perspectives on the problem and avoid thinking too narrowly.

*If you’re building your experiences with the ion interactive platform, you won’t need these—but if you’re building from scratch, make sure they’re invited!

Eavesdrop on your customers and talk to sales

Eavesdrop on Your Customers & Talk to Sales

If you’re struggling for ideas, seek out online conversations where you can listen in on customer pain points, concerns and wish lists. Forums like Reddit, Quora or LinkedIn groups can be a great launching point, while reviews and testimonials (both your own and your competitor’s) can spark fresh ideas. And sometimes, the best source of inspiration is your own sales team. What conversations are they having? What resources would make their job easier? They know your buyer better than anyone and can provide a ton of strategic inspiration.

Step 2: Concept Brief

Once your brainstorming is complete, it’s time to create a project brief. Don’t skip this step! Documentation might not be sexy, and it’s rarely the fun part of creating interactive content, but having a written plan is crucial if you want to make sure everyone is moving in step and understanding the idea in the same way.

What is a concept brief?
At its most basic, a narrative of the experience that describes the interactive content and organization as clearly as possible.

It doesn’t need to be exhaustive—for example, you don’t need the exact copy you’ll use in the experience or have every last detail figured out. But you DO need a framework to guide the development of the rest. You need to document the organization and functionality of the experience, so everyone is on the same page about what is being created.

Concept Brief
Concept Brief

Concept Briefs

Concept briefs are usually 3 – 4 pages and include details on the following:

Background

  • Source content (if any)
  • Traffic sources
    Consider where traffic will come from and how the piece will be promoted—whether organic, PPC, social, trade shows, etc.
  • Success measurements
    Define the metrics you’ll use to measure your performance and ROI. This might be conversions, signups, increased awareness, social sharing or any other metric you define—but make sure these metrics reflect actual outcomes and insights, not just vanity metrics.
  • Technical considerations
    Note any custom development, integrations, programming details or other technical elements that need special consideration.
  • Samples and examples
    It can be helpful to draw on the work of others, or our Quick Start Cloud library of pre-built experiences. Having a comparison or reference point makes it easier to provide an idea of the expected user experience.

Details

  • Overview
    Write a paragraph or so that describes the overall experience.
  • Content outline
    Lay out, at a very high level, what content will go where. This might include where on your site it will live as well as a basic layout of the content inside the interactive experience (though you’ll do this in greater detail with an interactive wireframe).

Data flow

  • Expected marketing insights
    A list of the aggregate data from your visitors that you plan to surface and analyze.
  • Expected sales insights
    The individual visitor data that can be provided to a sales person to help inform great sales/buyer conversations and align sales & marketing.
  • Data hand off
    Of the data you collect, what can and should be exported—and where is it going?

Additional content opportunities

Sometimes when brainstorming a single piece of interactive content, lots of ideas pop up for other, related content experiences.

It can be helpful to summarize these ideas here for future notice, or current considerations if there’s some element of the interactive you’re creating that will overlap.

After you’ve finalized your concept brief, you’re ready to begin assembling your interactive wireframe.

Step 3: Interactive Wireframe

Next to the concept brief, this is the most critically important stage of interactive content development—and sadly, one of the most overlooked.

Unlike a paper or static wireframe, with interactive content it’s best to begin by building an interactive wireframe based off of the concept brief you’ve already put together. This may be a coded version, or one built right in the ion interactive platform.

You don’t need finalized graphics or copy at this point—filler images and text will do.

This allows you to see how the experience is shaping up in real-time, including the user experience, content organization, logic and functionality of the content you’re building.

Wireframe Before

Interactive Wireframe - beforeNext

After: Final Experience

Interactive Wireframe - experience
Design and Build

Step 4: Design & Build

Now that you’ve built out the skeleton for your interactive experience, it’s time to let the developers, designers and copywriters do their thing.

If you’re using a platform, you’ll be able to skip the comping and coding because your experience has already mostly been built during the wireframing stage, and focus primarily on the design elements. This makes your team far more agile and efficient.

If you’re not using a platform, you might think of this step as split into two different steps: A design phase, where the wireframe is fleshed out into a more final state, and a build phase, where the elements that have been designed are brought to life through code.

Step 5: Quality Assurance

It’s tempting to push your content live the moment it looks done—but resist. A quality assurance phase will make sure you’ve worked the bugs out of your experience.

Use the content experience and do your best to break it—looking for ways to make things go wrong. If you can’t, you’re on the right track!

You’ll want to conduct both functional AND browser testing to make sure the content is delivered correctly. It’s also wise to test out your tracking and measurement before you launch to make sure you don’t miss out on the important data you’re trying to collect.

Quality Assurance
Launch

Step 6: Launch

And… you’re live!

It’s time to go back to your concept brief and implement the content as you planned—whether embedded into your site, or served up as a standalone experience.

The first few days after launch, it’s important you stay vigilant, watching how your visitors interact with your content, adjusting your strategy if uptake is poor, and making sure promotion is heavy and hard on the mediums you planned for promotion and distribution.

Step 7: Promote

Speaking of promotion—you DO plan to promote, right?

While we could write an entire white paper on just this phase alone, one important tip we can share is to keep in mind all of the different channels available to you in the form of paid, owned and earned media.

Paid media

Paid media is, as you might expect, paid advertising.

This format of promotion is great if you don’t have a large community of your own yet, or you’re hoping to gain exposure into new channels. It can also be very useful to ramp up traffic in a short period of time, and because spending is predictable (you set the price), the C-suite will have an easier time getting behind it.

Owned media

Owned media refers to the promotion channels you directly control—your social media accounts, websites, blogs and so on.

Owned media is fantastic for gaining initial traction, as your own community is likely to be among the most responsive in the early stages of your content launch. Keep messaging consistent across your owned channels, and don’t be afraid to promote a little more frequently—as long as the rest of your interactions still add value. People often miss your first tweet or Facebook post, so determining a reasonable frequency schedule is a wise move.

Earned media

Earned media is that coveted “going viral” everyone talks about—natural sharing by those who found your content compelling and want to pass it on, whether that’s on social, in their own blogs, or through word of mouth.

It’s the hardest kind of media to capture and is completely out of your control—so don’t put all your eggs in the “going viral” basket. The other two media channels can help give you a push in the right direction and facilitate sharing, but don’t count on the masses alone to carry your strategy.

Promote
Review and Measurement

Step 8: Review & Measurement

You didn’t just launch your content for fun, did you? You want results—and measurement helps you gauge them.

It’s important to have a strategy for surfacing the insights you’re getting back from your data to your salespeople and marketing teams, as the data you collect will give them some serious insights for future content, messaging and campaigns, as well as ideas for improvement in goal attainment within the experience itself!

We cover measurement in more depth in an upcoming chapter, including the metrics to watch and some tips on how you can collect them to assess your impact.

What Kind of Timeline is Reasonable?

The unpopular answer is—it depends on your situation. It depends on the type of asset your creating, the team you have at your disposal and the way you’re going about creating the interactive content.

A relatively simple content experience like a quiz will take a shorter time to launch than a detailed interactive white paper.

A small and focused team may be able to execute very quickly, for example, while a large team might spend more time coordinating and planning. And if you’re not building the experience using a software, the design and build stages will take much longer than if you are.

But many people are surprised at just how quickly a piece of interactive content can be put together, launched and measured—some in just a few days, and many in just over a week or two!

Here’s an example of what your timeline *might* look like:

Day 1 – 2:

Your team comes together to brainstorm, using about an hour and a half to take stock of your existing content, identify which part of the buyer’s journey you need to target, and generating some ideas for suitable content.

Reviewing the ideas, you pick a winner to pursue, then quickly write it up in a concept brief that outlines your approach.

Day 3 – 5:

Using a software platform, a designer builds out the content experience using both pre-built templates and a few easy-to-customize elements. You’ve now got a skeleton of what the experience will feel like.

Your graphic and copy people collaborate with those building the skeleton and get to work creating the content needed to bring the experience to life.

Day 6 – 7:

The experience is polished and tested, with multiple team members reviewing what you’ve built and trying to find problems or break it. Your measurement and analytics are set up and tested, so you’re certain you’ll be able track your impact and engagement.

With the testing complete, you launch!

Ongoing:

Once the experience is live, you continue to measure the response, surfacing insights to sales and learning from the feedback you’re getting in real-time.

What’s Next?

You’ve got a great process—but who do you need on board to see it through? The next chapter zeroes in on the tasks, roles and people you need on your side to make great interactive content happen.

©i-on interactive, inc.