Bloomfire vs. Ion Interactive vs. Paperflite

Ad testing:

• PTS: needed to bring a new senior marketing team member up to speed on how we got to our current TV campaign
• Solution: Series featuring consumer insights, why specific spokesperson, agency brief, the entire creative process - scrips, animatics, rough cuts, feedback, and testing at each step. Including the actual creative from each step.
• Total time to build: 1 hour

Concept testing:

• PTS: things get lost, findable but version control
• Solution: everything in one placeConcepts, testing, IHUTs, verbatims, videos with transcripts. Reduces the possibility of missing something, helps with any builds (reuse), but gives us a the chance to dig deeper. Example: search on terms like "indulgent", or "crispy" or "share" much faster
• Total time to build: 1 hour

Incentivized

If you want to choose a quick start template and fill in the fields with your content, Ion will be fantastic for you. We've done this with whitepapers and quizzes and it's been great and extremely easy to use. If you have an exact idea of what you want, and a background in web development, you may get frustrated. Ion has some quirks that make it tricky to fully customize - everyone once in a while I really just want to go into the HTML and make some changes, but can't. If you are looking to reuse a piece of content for specific targeting (industry or account-specific), Ion is great. The dynamic substitutions are great and very helpful.

Incentivized

The sales team uses constantly all the sharing features. We share Collections and share individual assets as well to our distributors. They consume our catalogs, price guides, delivery timeline schedules, and much more. For every content, I know the granular level of consumption that is occurring. I no longer have to make any guesses based on content. I am able to schedule follow-ups based on real time content.

• Quickly reach out to whatever employee segment you want to reach by posting a topic and it will send a notification to everyone in that group with a link to the posting.
• Bloomfire saves all of the previous posts so in your free time you can go to the site, and explore the various range of topics others have posted. The information on there will only be as good as the person posting it, but it will be people within your company and industry posting it. So it will always be helpful.
• Bloomfire is a place to be noticed by your peers. Have a great topic you want to express, my company allows all to post there as long as we keep it professional. So you can share your ideas or experiences in a safe and productive manner. But we do have some fun on there too!

Incentivized

• Quick Starts make it so easy to get started.
• Real-time updates are awesome and save a ton of wasteful process.
• The combination of user friendliness for simple things and the flexibility to do more complex things is great.
• Chat support is excellent and deeper-dive support has been super helpful.
• The ability to use these tools in the cloud or embedded has given us tactic flexibility.

Incentivized

• Paperflite simplifies storing content in a single repository, giving content structure within an organization. By creating streams you are able to segregate content based on the content structure your organization has planned out.
• Oftentimes the content created by marketing is not used by sales for lack of discoverability/finding of content. With Paperflite every asset is easily discoverable by a simple search feature. Paperflite does an in-content search as well, giving in-depth results and ensuring no asset is left unseen

• I would recommend adding a feature to combine different posts/series by job title (so in addition to the Revenue Ops category, there could be a structured walkthrough for Revenue Manager).
• Live Q+A sessions for group onboarding initiatives.
• Ability to label bookmarks by priority/job type.

Incentivized

• Ion University, while stacked with a wealth of information, is difficult to navigate from a troubleshooting perspective. The tutorial videos are all very helpful, but they are also very long. Sometimes I would want to search for how to address a particular issue I was struggling with and it would be a two-minute segment buried in a 45-minute video.
• Again, getting back the self-guidance side of things. I think a lot of the tutorials are set up in a way that makes sense to Ion, but not as much to the end user.
• I think the controls admins use when creating new users could be a bit more straightforward.

Incentivized

• Nothing to mention, at this point but sometimes it takes a little more time to add assets to a collection. Not too sure if it's the internet connection or just a glitch on the website.
• What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized? The analytics feature has helped me understand how my content is performing and make changes to it accordingly. The ability to create a personalized content experience for each of my prospects makes it even more better.

Most likely we will renew, our team needs a refresher on possible opportunities to advance our usage and learning of opportunities to move this answer to a 10, can't live without it.

Incentivized

We use it for every landing page and we plan on only doing more dynamic content creation. We dont see that option coming in-house any time ever in the future. ION has a very robust platform for us to work with that really allows us to do more for our customers in regards to having the one-to-one conversation.

Incentivized

Bloomfire is an easy-to-use platform for posting information and asking questions of my peers. It also has a user-friendly search capability. Yet like any other CMS, the secret to success rests in such items as the ability to use metadata to tag content or posts, and Bloomfire provides a wide range of options to make posting content and subsequently searching for it.

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 find it very easy to understand and use

Incentivized

Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.

I have not needed to pose questions to the support team yet, as it is a very simple piece of software to use, however, its help documents and the bot ready to answer questions let me know I am in good hands. The help center could load a little quicker, but that's my only complaint.

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

Have been very prompt in their responses. They know the product extremely well to respond precisely to the posted queries. Not just that, they are extremely proactive in providing quality suggestions and teach ways to improve the overall user experience when using the product. You give them your problem statement, and they'll come up with innovative ways to address it.

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 like Bloomfire because it is more concise with the work I do whereas Google search engine would provide broader information. It has just been so user-friendly, and easier to use [than] I could have imagined. I would use this program over any other that I have tried in the past.

Incentivized

I was not the decision maker to choose this over Uberflip, but the UI is much more appealing to me. It's incredibly easy to use, clean, and from a backend standpoint, it requires little to no tech savvy'ness. Our team has really enjoyed using it and has required no training what-so-ever.

Incentivized

With Paperflite, the analytics provided are much more insightful compared to DocSend. Paperflite's content intelligence helps understand how content is performing with each prospect. Easy accessibility with Paperflite, cause we can use it on a phone or IPAD and not just from desktop

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

• Feedback from users in being able to perform transactions for members has greatly improved.
• There has been an increase in engagement of material presented in posts by learners in training classes.
• Reps and agents say they feel confident they can easily locate information if ever there is a need on the front line.

Incentivized

• Though we have not had the service long enough to see any measurable outcomes, we've been able to create interactive web content faster than ever before
• The speed with which we can build interactive pages and re-use assets has been critical as projects we've done with Ion have made their way around and more and more internal clients have said "me too" for their own projects
• It is very pricey at $28K for the base annual subscription (dropping to $24k after the first year), so depending on your budgetary situation, that may make no sense for your team--but we had contract money set aside for a company to build us a microsite for around the amount, so we just used it for Ion instead and will now be building the microsite ourselves using it

Incentivized

• Paperflite's user experience is great and with its key features, it becomes an essential tool for teams
• Content Management: Have all our collaterals under one place for teams to discover easily
• Content Experience: The ability to create personalized experiences for prospects has helped increase engagement.
• Content Analytics : We've been able to understand the ROI our content brings.