Online Marketing News & Articles

Alterian (news, site) has just bought Techrigy, a social media and analytics software developer, which only goes to show that if companies don’t have all the tools they need, it's a smart idea to buy a company that does have the tools instead of starting from scratch in-house.

In Alterian's, a provider of integrated marketing solutions, case, the unspecified sum of money involved in the deal will probably have put quite a dent in their £ 6.1 million (US$ 10.1m) pre-tax profits from the last financial year.

But both seem happy. It was a meeting of minds rather than a boardroom bloodbath they say, with the deal adding interesting new elements to the Alterian package as well as signaling a shift away from mass marketing to marketing targeted at individuals.

Traditional marketing and communication is about getting people to do things. Web marketing and communication is about helping people do things.

While some organizations are leveraging their Web Content Management (Web CMS) investments to create powerful, customer-centric web experiences, many are just barely scratching the surface.

Face it, you can probably do more with your website. Nearly all of us can. And if now is not the time to figure out how, we don't know when is.

Learn the Top Strategies

Siteworx has brought in Forrester's CMS all-star, Stephen Powers, to get down into the content management nuts and bolts. Together they're running a webinar this coming Monday the 22nd of June at 1 PM EDT (GMT-4).

The live event will share best practices and top strategies for using your Web CMS to reduce costs, improve efficiency and ultimately help grow your business.

Here's what on tap:

• Limitations of “first generation” Web CMS solutions and the transition to a customer experience-centric approach

• The “next generation” initiatives that are pushing the limits of legacy Web CMS capabilities, such as building communities, tailoring content for site visitors, distributing content across multiple channels and interacting with other enterprise applications

• Digital Asset Management (DAM), Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Document Output Management (DOM) systems

• An analysis of Forrester’s latest research report, “The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management for External Sites, Q2 2009.”

Sound like it's up your alley? We thought so. You can register here.

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.

Here come the Marketeers! Hot on the heels of last week’s launch of SDL Tridion’s (news, site) Unified Online Marketing Suite, Moderandi, an Arizona-based web applications developer, has today launched a new marketing platform called Growth Panel.

Targeting the small-to-medium (SMB) sized business market, this SaaS solution enables marketeers and consultants create plans and manage marketing projects in the cloud.

Moderandi says that this new platform fills a gap in the market that is not being properly serviced, notably for SMBs, who have neither the cash, nor the bandwidth to develop an all-inclusive marketing campaign.

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.

When you are doing well in the market, it's possible that you could just sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor. But while you are sitting there drinking your strawberry daiquiri, the market is likely to be shifting and changes may be required.

Sitecore (news, site) understands this well. According to their VP of Product Marketing, Darren Guarnaccia, web content management has become a commodity, plateauing on functionality and UI. For customers, it has become frustrating trying to decide which Web CMS is the right one, when they all seem the same. So what do you do?

Sitecore's answer is to provide a solution to solve a specific problem. In this case, it's an Online Marketing Suite (OMS).

They may be an enterprise content management provider, but Interwoven appears to know a little bit about online marketing — particularly when it comes to optimizing it through technology. They are taking the best practices they have developed with their customers and offering a one day Transatlantic Online Marketing Optimization Summit.

 Alterian, a leader in providing marketing services and system integrations, is possibly making progress with its recent acquisition of web content management systems vendor Mediasurface. Recently, the company made strides with the integration of Dynamic Messenger with Immediacy and Morello.

Just about four weeks ago Web content management vendor NetReach released their packaged, hosted Web CMS solution for marketers. With integrated blogs, RSS, email to a friend, a form builder and more, the company’s new PressRoom Solution aimed to empower the community builders on your team.

PressRoom is a SaaS Web CMS offering built upon NetReach’s cmScribe platform. The idea — and we can see this being a blast of fresh air for some of you — is that for US$ 99 your marketing and communcations team can be up ‘n’ running, and quickly, with a set of modern online marketing tools. Additionally, with the right template massaging, this SaaS virtual bolt-on can achieve a seamless look-and-feel integration with the rest of your site.

Intrigued? Check out the following 4 minute screencast which walks through some basic operations.