The First Step In a Dream...

“I loved the product so much, I bought the company!”

Remember that famous tagline from Remington? (Watch the ad here.)

I can relate. For the last few years, I’ve been one of a group of researchers engaged in a project with Sun Labs, SAP Labs, and four different universities including the Hasso Plattner Institute, the University of Victoria, and the Centre for Digital Media, seeking a better way to create dynamic, interactive online content.

The result is our new company, engageLively.

The team loved the research project we used ourselves so much, that we built a company to bring the product to the world.

Today, we are taking the first step in that dream. The engageLively interactive content platform was released today. If you’re curious, we invite you to go to https://engagelively.com/ to set up a free account, and start exploring and creating.

The power of interactivity.

The world of content is noisy, crowded, and yet critical to any business operating in the fields of marketing, publishing, or education. As more industries move to an online model, the seminal question is how best to keep people engaged, keep them reading, and deliver our messages with clarity.

Interactive content, unlike static content, turns a passive viewer into an engaged customer. Whether through assessments, calculators, simulations or interactive infographics, interactive content empowers customers to explore the capabilities of your offerings in a manner that engages and captivates their attention while educating them.

DemandMetric found that 96% of study participants believe that content interactivity impacts buyers’ decisions as they go through their journey. They go on to say:

Today, marketers have to do more than simply produce content. The content produced has to stand out from the crowd. Top performing companies are doing an effective job of using content to differentiate from their competitors and to help educate buyers.

source for interactive content statistics

For marketers, click-through and conversion rates for dynamic, interactive content are an order of magnitude higher than comparable rates for static content. And, not only does interactive content engage and convert better, it provides much deeper insight into the mind of your customers and reveals detailed signals of their intent and areas of interest.

No wonder some say “interactive content is king.”

What holds us back from unleashing the power of interactive content?

Despite the power of interactive content, it is still rarely used. “Rich media”, including all dynamic, interactive content, is only 21% of displayed content today (source).

Why?

In response to a survey conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, the top reasons given by marketers for not producing interactive content were either a lack of time, money or knowledge about how to do it.

Using today’s tools, the creation of interactive content is equivalent to building a web application and requires extensive support from web developers with expertise in JavaScript, CSS, HTML5 and other technologies.

This leaves many time-strapped agencies, content professionals, and development teams to forego interactive content and default to video (cheap and easy, but not as compelling) or the most basic functionality like spreadsheets (cheap and easy, but without any ability to measure.)

The future of interactive content is here.

What if your content designers and web developers could unleash their creativity within a simple, drag-and-drop environment? One that produces interactive content as easily as you build PowerPoint presentations today?

That’s exactly what we have built at engageLively.

We’ve built a drag-and-drop interface that allows teams to create dynamic, interactive content. The key is that we’ve combined graphical components with visual programming, to make it easy to create results like these:

Some early users like the Heinz Marketing team have featured our powerful calculators front and center on their homepage. Click through below to experience it live.

For all of the revolutionary capabilities of the engageLively platform, it is built on standard, easily deployed and used technologies: HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, etc.

The tool and each content asset is hosted at https://engagelively.com/ and can be created within the web browser. No software downloads, no servers to install, no preparation: just head over and start building content.

What will you create?

We are excited by the technology; but easily the most exciting thing about a platform like this is the amazing things that people do with it.

We built this for you, and for the awesome things that you will create with it.

On behalf of the whole team, thanks for giving this new tool a try, and sending me your feedback at [email protected].

Let’s amaze the world together!