Marketing News & Articles

Hot Banana (news, site) from Lyris signs up a bunch of resellers to improve its presence in the CMS market.

We were impressed with Hot Banana when we reviewed it last year, rating it very highly in website optimization and multi-lingual support. We recommended it to "those who run small and medium size organizations, for whom marketing and branding is a priority, and for whom ease of use is important."

Buoyed by that success, the company has spent the time garnering new partners left, right and center. Among those signing up to join in the party are Foxhollow Technologies, Xtent and Tzero Technologies. Each has a raft of clients who will be moved over to Hot Banana, to take advantage of the flexibility provided by the web content management system.

The announcement was made at ad:tech Chicago, where brand performance and digital marketing are hot topics.

Box.net (news, site) is gunning for SharePoint users in a big way, holding up a mirror to all of the product's foibles and failings. But for all the marketing mayhem they are putting out, there's still a little recognition that SharePoint is a viable option -- in some instances.

With all the talk of new solutions, new technologies and new versions of technologies, it would be hard to imagine that a considerable number of companies are still having problems with the basics of digital asset management (DAM).

That would appear to be one of the primary conclusions of a new report released by the Aberdeen Group (news, site) for Widen, a provider of web-based digital asset management applications. The report says that only half of Best-in-Class organizations (53%) indicated they currently have searchable access to content.

At the beginning of this month, SDL Tridion (news, site) announced the release of Tridion 2009 -- its Unified Online Marketing Suite -- enabling people in marketing to create entire campaigns at, almost, the touch of a button.

Now comes the news that they have partnered to integrate Q-go's Natural Language Search (NLS) engine with SDL’s web content management system. In effect what Q-go’s NLS aims to do is provide dramatically improved search results for website visitors, while Tridion 2009 offers enhanced customer management.

Combined this could be a lethal dose for competitors.

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.

It hasn’t been an easy year for anyone in the Content Management industry, so it really wasn't too much of a shock that earlier this month it was announced that Vignette (news, site) was being taken over by Open Text (news, site) and that they had a year-on-year first quarter drop off in revenue of 24.2% to US$ 33.9m.

Everyone’s feeling the pain and Vignette’s Q1 results were just a continuation of a trend that saw their total 2008 revenues drop-off by 11.6% over 2007.

But its not how you behave in the good times that marks you out as a market leader, its how you respond to difficulties and Vignette appears to be tackling the current economic downturn head-on.

Anyone working in marketing will know that while your customers won’t love you for offering poor service, your competitors definitely will. Perhaps with that in mind, SaaS web content management solutions provider CrownPeak (news, site) has really been pushing the customer service side of their business over the past year with at least one notable success.

The success this time comes as a finalist – for the second year running – in the Best Customer Service Department category of the American Business Awards 2009 (the ‘Stevies”). The awards ceremony next month will be the culmination of a judging process that began in March and only finished recently.

For more than a decade, sales strategists have been advising businesses to take their marketing online. Forward-looking companies have heeded this message.

However, many businesses still prefer traditional media such as TV, radio and newsprint. So while typical consumers might spend 25% of their media time surfing the Web, these companies might only be investing 5% or so of their marketing budgets on websites and other online promotions.

One reason Google has been so successful is that it has shown a genuine respect for its customers.

How do you get online visitors to take interest in your products or services? Write about things they care about.

Most would say that’s brain-dead obvious. Yet, it seems 90% of websites miss the mark completely.

The problem: self-absorbed web content. The cause: self-absorbed copywriters and business owners.

To engage prospects and turn them into customers, you need to appeal to the visitor’s self-interest -- not yours.

If a customer cannot complete their top tasks quickly and easily on your website, why would they trust you to help them with other tasks?

Gartner analyst Adam Sarner has new research that states that 50% of all Social Media campaigns will fail. Didn’t we hear something similar to this before when a study by Deloitte informed us that social networking was a waste of money? What is the real story here — are marketing departments trying to fit social media into a traditional marketing bucket or is social media marketing just a lot of hype?

The Internet thrives in information-rich societies. Traditional communications and marketing thrive in information-poor ones.

Headlines can be extremely effective tools to engage your online visitors and entice them to gather more information about your products, services and business.

The new media revolution is alive and well. Whether it be news aggregation or marketing your company’s message effectively, the quest for conquering the ways of Web 2.0 are constant. However, there’s no shortage of help to aide you in your efforts.

On Wednesday, August 28 at 1 p.m. EST, Aquent presents a webcast called The New Media Revolution: Tips for Marketers Coping With a World Where Messages Don’t Matter. Featuring award-winning writer and content marketing consultant specializing in technology and new media, Paul Gillin, the web cast aims to “sort out the chaos in new media.”