Tridion, Like Sitecore and Interwoven, Now Offer an Online Marketing Suite

If marketers are finding it difficult at the moment to decide what Web CMS they should be using, then the launch of SDL Tridion’s (news, site) Unified Online Marketing Suite is going to make things that little bit more difficult.

In the past six weeks alone SDL Tridion 2009 and two other marketing suites have entered the market: Sitecore (news, site) and Interwoven (news, site). All three focus on providing solutions that will penetrate customers’ markets where no other solution has gone before.

Star Trek reference’s aside, this is serious business especially considering over 80% of the world’s data is unstructured, coming in the form of social media, blogs, twitter posts, instant messaging, e-mails, documents, videos and rich media.

SDL Tridion's 2009 web content management system aims to tackle this problem with features that enables marketers to create and initiate fully integrated campaigns incorporating customer management with multi-channel marketing and web content management.

Client-Defined Goals

Announcing the launch of Tridion 2009, Jan Jaap Kolleman, CEO of SDL Tridion, said the focus of this launch would be to provide a solution that covers specific, client-defined business goals, such as increased sales conversion rates.

The SDL Tridion 2009 Interface

Even the design of the solution is geared towards this. Accessed through a single interface, Tridion 2009 automates the processes involved in creating multi-channel, multi-lingual campaigns.

Web content is classified, categorized and tagged in such a way that visitors can access relevant content through an intuitive navigation system, while visitor tracking and segmenting enables the solution to personalize that content.

SDL Tridion 2009 Intuitive Navigation System

Both anonymous and registered visitors are profiled to ensure everyone visiting a client site receives only content that is relevant to their search.

Enhanced Marketing Tools

Specifically, Tridion 2009 offers tools for audience management, email marketing, integration with offline channels and improved customer interaction.

Amongst the enhanced functions are:

• Taxonomies: Users can create hierarchical taxonomy trees that reflect the structure of the content online and the relationships between the content elements.
• Multilingual Emails: Ability to send e-mails in multiple languages simultaneously with a single click with local and corporate marketers able to send emails to targeted mailing lists using the same translation process that is used for web content.
• Audience Management: Email integration with the audience management system to eliminate the time-consuming process of importing and exporting date between separate marketing tools.
• Audience Manager: Website visitor information is stored and kept in one place enabling clients deliver personalized emails and communications using that information. It is also possible to manage visitor profiles across different countries.
• Response rates: Response rates such as click-through, are monitored and this data is automatically used to update the customer intelligence module for future communications.
• Communication Statistics: Go beyond most third-party tools and tracking systems by providing content authors with information about the popularity of individual pieces of content.

Outbound email integrated with Audience Manager

SDL Tridion's eXtension Framework, an open application interface and community, allows companies to quickly and easily extend the core marketing platform with building blocks from a wide range of sources such as SDL Tridion employees, partners, customers and the open source community.

All latest versions of supported platforms such as Microsoft, Oracle or HP are available with SDL Tridion 2009. Additionally, support for the latest Java and Microsoft .NET technology components are also available with the release.

Autonomy Focuses On Meaning Extraction

As to how it compares to other marketing suites is very difficult to say. The other products that have been launched recently have much the same focus of improving ability of clients to extract and use information about their clients for marketing purposes.

In April this year, Autonomy’s IDOL’s ability to understand the meaning behind all forms of information was combined with Interwoven’s solution for optimizing online business performance to bring us Meaning Based Marketing.

With this, Autonomy Interwoven is able to extract meaning from all forms of text, rich media, video and audio. The information is then plugged into over 500 functions that help marketers improve the experience for their customers.

Autonomy Interwoven said that hundreds of new capabilities were included providing an order of magnitude increase in the amount and types of information that can be leveraged, as well as the ability to interpret the meaning and act on that information.

Sitecore’s New OMS

This week, Sitecore also unveiled its new online marketing solution. It brought together web analytics, marketing automation and web content management into a single comprehensive solution called the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite (OMS).

Sitecore OMS
 

The Online Marketing Suite will help customers market and sell products and services by creating strong, actionable value at the persona and/or segment level. Providing Web analytics out-of-the-box, without coding, content editors can profile their content upon creation, establishing the relevancy for segmentation analysis and the delivery of targeted content.

OMS automatically develops profiles on site visitors based on browsing behavior, geographical IP identification and data collected through forms and survey submissions.

It can also measure online advertising campaign effectiveness and increases the agility of the campaign with immediate correlation between campaign initiatives and specific website goals.

Where Is The ROI?

While all these Web CMS are designed to carry out the task of content and asset management, this new generation of suites have also been designed to do much more.

Increasing conversion rates, building customer intimacy, managing persuasive customer experiences and reaching out to customers via multiple touch points such as web, email, print, RSS and mobile, feature prominently on most marketing agendas.

As Sitecore's VP of Product Marketing, Darren Guarnaccia pointed out, web content management has become very much a commodity. The need to offer point solutions based on WCM technology is critical for differentiation and survival.

Are all three of these online marketing suites offering identical capabilities and services? No. But which one you choose, clearly depends on what exactly you are trying to achieve.

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