Optimizely Content Marketing Platform vs. Ion, by Rock Content

I think it's really well suited for organizations that have either big marketing teams that are scattered across different regions and different time zones because it helps everyone be aligned in terms of what is happening at any given time. That to me is one of the best things it can offer. The second thing is the management of the processes. You are not constantly reinventing the wheel when you work in marketing, you tend to have a process for doing certain jobs. For example, if you need to do an email or if you need to do a webinar, you will know what steps you need to take in order to deliver that. If you have lots of stakeholders that need to review things and need to approve things before they can go live, the CMP is the best tool for this because it keeps track of everything that is happening. You can assign steps to your legal team or your regulatory team and they have to go into the platform, be able to review whatever it is that you need them to review or approve. It keeps track of when that happened. There's no guesswork. You eliminate having to send things by email, by teams, by smoke signals. It's all in one place and if you ever needed to go back into things, everything gets saved there as well. All your working files up to your final files are all saved within the platform. You can manage your versions, you can reuse things in the future. There's so many possibilities for it. It depends on what you're trying to do, but at bedtime, if I do anything, no matter what you're trying to do, you'll find the right application within the platform to be able to make your job alive easier.

Incentivized

I don't give 9 ratings easily. Anyone wanting greater user engagement would benefit from ion interactive. I can slap together a simple interactive tool for a social post easily. I also have a plan selector with complex logic built in that would have cost me $50k to build without ion. Now I'm able to duplicate it and make adjustments to use it for various other applications. We've created a couple dozen fun interactive tools for social posts and now we simply re-purpose them easily to create new ones frequently. I just created a new page for our website that we'll want to be fluid; so the site developers suggested we simply embed an ion tool to give us real-time flexibility. Marketers in other divisions are jealous when they see all the fun stuff we're doing--they're gradually becoming ion converts

Incentivized

• Customer Service: They'll contact you with a "we're looking at your issue" email within the hour, even on weekends and holidays. Beyond solving your issues/problems with the software, they'll also follow up later to make sure you don't have additional associated issues.
• Live Analytics: You're given a snapshot of how your blog content is doing at any point in time, since they've been tracking your posts/content. You can compare this month's traffic to last year's trafffic during this same month. Other data points include: Unique Visitors, Average Attention Time, Pageviews, Engagement Rate, etc...and you'll even get referral traffic source. There's much more that I'm leaving out here.
• CMP User Interface (UI): Love the easy to use interface to upload blog posts, to use for editing and publishing content, and broadcasting social shares. Besides easily identifiable icons, you can create/edit content in the WYSIWYG or use the html view to make sure everything looks exactly how you prefer. Another cool thing is that the CMP auto-embeds live links of social updates (like Youtube, Twitter, Instagram) for more dynamic blog posts.

Incentivized

• I love that ion interactive autosaves. So many of these platforms leave me terrified of disconnection or closing my laptop.
• This WYSIWYG actually works. I've yet to have a translation or code glitch.
• Fast load times are a huge bonus, as well as mobile-optimized display.

Incentivized

• In my opinion, there are too many notifications, making it difficult to manage and figure out which ones are necessary and which ones are not.
• I feel workflows are over engineered.
• For medium-sized organizations, the tool is overly complicated and requires a significant investment to optimize it.

Incentivized

• no revert option/revision history if you make a bad mistake
• some simple styles that should be just there for you have to be made through custom CSS
• some of their template options have some pretty bad designs and are not usable beyond a basic functionality level/have to be completely reskinned

Incentivized

Because unless I find something better to replace it with, we're probably going to renew our contract. Ideally, Ion interactive can update Liveball so it's easier to use, more functionality that includes forms and javascript options currently not in place

As a Content Operations Manager, I find the customizable task views and calendar views to be most helpful in the Plan Module. This allows me to have visibility into each team's overdue tasks, and determine where my time is best allocated to help in content production. The Library is a easy to access and highly used function as well for sharing assets across teams

Incentivized

Usability is straightforward, with extensive documentation and tutorials provided to ensure landing pages are built to specifications and can be optimized for performance. Built-in platform funnels give insight into customer dropoff, success/failures, and conversions (at a glance). Setting up a landing page can be done quickly and easily, with numerous integrations (CRMs like SalesForce, for instance) supported

Incentivized

I have not experienced any prolonged outages. From time to time there will be errors but nothing that significantly slows down production

Incentivized

Optimizely Content Marketing Platform's performance is generally good. Nothing that has impacted production. Page load speed doesn't typically lag longer than a few seconds. Reports take some time but not any longer than we're used to with other platforms. We have not experienced lag when integrating with other platforms

Incentivized

Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.

The NewsCred team is very responsive and helpful with any technical issues.

Incentivized

The ION support team is amazing. There has not been a single issue they they could not solve for me. If there is a feature or request that they do not have, they have even, on occasion, created custom scripts for our team. *Update 6/5/17 - ION has continued to delight on multiple occasions. I appreciate their attention to detail and ability to solve whatever issue I have. After 3+ years of use and support, ION still has my full endorsement.

Incentivized

Training was clear and concise. It was intuitive and helped me understand how to navigate the platform. Options to dive in on each action or skip to learn about areas of regular use. Resource links available to when I had additional questions or needed more training in a specific area. Overall, the training allowed me to use the platform without interruption

Incentivized

They offer a great amount of online training, videos, articles, etc. There is usually an answer available if you run into an issue. I would recommend taking advantage of the online training they offer. I wish I would have done it sooner.

Incentivized

There were a lot of things we learned about the tool once we really got in and got our hands dirty. Being hands-on was essential for our team to be able to utilize ION in the most effective manner.

Incentivized

I use mainly Microsoft Dynamics, CRM, customer insights, journeys for marketing, email automation or marketing automation. I use Seismic. We're looking to launch an events platform, which I'm not using yet, but that will be a tool that I will want to integrate with the other systems I'm using. Customer Insights Journeys is probably the biggest other tool that I use that I'm trying to be an SME in.

Incentivized

I haven't had a lot of experience with templated CMS systems and was not involved in the original selection, though I was part of the renewal discussions. Most of the templates I've used have been html and created in house on an as-needed bases

Incentivized

Optimizely is generally a reliable platform for A/B testing and digital experience management. It's helpful for it's stability, flexibility, and comprehensive features, which is helpful when managing an enterprise website

Incentivized

Separate client portfolios enable scalability, however, some elements are still grouped for all accounts so it's difficult to scale for an ad agency with multiple clients. Would prefer totally separate sections of the platform for all clients with each element housed separately.

Incentivized

• It certainly has helped. I think there is guardrails in how you use CMP, what you are putting in. It needs to be the right way of how you want to work, otherwise you're going to create a mess within CMP. So creating that framework outside and implementing it into the system I think is quite important. Again, that's our way of working, but I think it has helped us.

Incentivized

• So far the impact has been positive, but as we are new to the platform that opinion is based on relatively few interactive assets.
• There hasn't been any negative reactions or impact from Ion as of yet, but as I said before it's still early for us in terms of usage (less than a year).
• We do really appreciate the level of complexity and customization available in the platform.

Incentivized