Every brand has a story, and today those stories are told digitally. According to the latest CMO/Deloitte survey, digital marketing spending increased by 15.8% in 2021 and it’s expected to continue to grow another 15% this year. Meanwhile, 58% of marketing budgets are now spent on digital marketing activities–an all-time high.
A major factor of this growth is the emergence of low-code and no-code marketing platforms, which allow companies to build websites and apps with little to no coding experience. Now a team led by self-described “user engagement guru” Gil Rabbi has created the world’s first editor that builds professional and custom engagement products in a completely visual canvas with no coding. It’s called Storycards.
Storycards’ purpose is three-fold: boost user engagement, increase the time spent on a customer’s website, and create smarter segments based on user choices.
Total Freedom
Rabbi was initially hesitant to develop a non-custom platform. “I had been afraid of generic platforms because I have been developing premium and custom products all of my life,” he recalls. “The most important thing for me was that everything would be done so that our customers could create premium products rather than reproduce some template.”
At first, Rabbi doubted that a premium, no-code platform was even possible. Now Storycards is a reality and Rabbi says that his platform has exceeded his team’s expectations by allowing editors to create great interactive experiences.
Simply by dragging and dropping visual icons, users can mix and match from a variety of engagement products like Quiz, Poll and Lead Form. Best of all, users can customize behavior according to their unique needs and design according to their own brand guidelines.
“I am surprised again and again when I see what our users are creating with the help of the platform,” Rabbi says. “We’re a tool, not a template. Storycards lets you create any concept you choose and gives you the freedom to design it without limitations.”
Custom Calls to Action
Indeed, no-code platforms like Storycards have two major advantages over custom software which may lead to more, not less, creativity: cost and efficiency. While programs and apps developed for a single client are considered “premium,” they suck up huge amounts of money and worker hours.
Running analytics and making changes require thousands of dollars more and experts familiar with the existing programs. More worrisome, perhaps, the more time and money is focused on tech, the less is devoted to content.
Rabbi says that this is changing. “Thanks to the reduction of resources and money that is required to produce such custom products, budgets are shifting to content. Content editors can therefore devote more time and resources to creating more interesting, attractive, and all-inclusive products and increasing user engagement,” he says.
One technology that Rabbi is engaging to leverage creator’s productivity even more is artificial intelligence, or A.I.. That Deloitte CMO survey found that only 12% of digital marketers currently use AI, but this number is expected to more than triple in the next few years.
A.I. is a weak spot in most budgets because of both its newness and expense, yet a major advantage of A.I. is its ability to leverage worker productivity. A.I. can recognize patterns and make suggestions at critical nodes–for example, prompting content creators to change content if engagement falls below expectations.
Rabbi says that A.I. can eliminate time constraints placed on content creators while delivering actionable feedback in real-time, without more programming or training. “Storycards analytics dashboard gives all the information you need in order to understand the engagement level of your audience,” he observes. “We can tell you what’s working.”
Powerful Tools
Storycards, as its name suggests, is equally about telling a brand’s story and keeping tabs on its users. The story’s beginning and end are the introduction of the brand and closing of the sale, respectively. In the middle is engagement, which is where many users may drop out. Whether engaging with quizzes, polls or lead forms, Storycards’ goal is the same: complete the story or improve it for the next user.
“The statistics we deliver are divided by stories and by cards, so you can see the behavior of your users on each card, their choices, the completion rate of your story, and how many have sent leads,” Rabbi says. “The time-on-page for a web page is also a key indicator in selling media to your advertisers. We tell you the average time that your users spent on an embedded story and how to improve it.”
Storycards’ success has made Rabbi re-think his earlier dismissal of non-custom software development, and he expects that other skeptics will follow. “No-code is a different type of process,” he says, “But I have to be honest with myself. Our product is better for those who want to create premium products.”
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