Where is the integration between content management and web analytics applications?

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One of the problems which Marketing for Mavens tries to solve is that most sites use some kind of content management system and a separate web analytics application and neither of them talk to one another.

Every day your content management system pushes out the same content to the same people and it doesn't know whether that person has visited your site in the past or what they were looking for. Instead, web marketers are left looking at reports on a monthly basis and then trying to configure the site content accordingly. This response is far too slow and you're reacting to the masses and not individual visitors.

Marketing for Mavens helps to solve this problem by tagging you're visitors based on the web pages they view. It then knows each visitors interests and can push the appropriate promotions and content to them in real time based on these interests. Now your site can be personalized to your visitors without them having to register for your site. This is important as you can now target your content and messages to only the visitors interested in seeing it. If you are interested in seeing how Marketing for Mavens can help you to manage your web content and promotions and deliver them to targeted visitors, please check our our short demo video and join or beta program.

Build Dynamic Web Content Without Costly Upgrades to Your Site

Building a site with dynamic content can greatly improve the user experience. It keeps your content fresh and it ensures that the right information is delivered to the right person when they want it.

When it comes to moving from a static to a dynamic web site there are several approaches that you can take...everything from an open source content management systems to very expensive enterprise systems to hand coding your own solution. Any of these solutions, depending on the size of your site, company, and budget, could take several months to a year to accomplish. I've gone down each of these paths in a corporate environment and can confirm that there are no short cuts.

As an alternative, I've been building Marketing for Mavens, a micro-content management system that allows you to add JavaScript code to your existing web pages (html, php, asp, etc.) giving you control over the parts or sections of a page where you want to display dynamic content.

The advantage to this is that Marketing for Mavens can assist you in the distribution of your content and promotions. It tracks your visitors similar to how any web analytics system collects visitor information. This information is then used to distribute your content based on the previous pages the person visited. In addition to this, anyone in your company can be setup with an account to update and control your dynamic content and web site promotions.

If your interested in trying out Marketing for Mavens on your site, please visit sign up for the beta coming at the end of the month.

Simplified Web Content Posting for Marketing Team

Business Problem: Updating and tracking promotions on corporate web site

Cause: Need for HTML experts to publish and manage corporate site promotions

Audience: Marketing Programs Team

Solution:
This is an issue I've faced many times as a web developer. Often, the marketing programs team needs to post updated promotions to the home page for events, webcasts, product news, etc. These updates are generally simple but would be better managed by the team running the programs. In this instance, a web developer isn't adding any value, and could potentially delay the roll-out of an important campaign.

This is one of the reasons why I've been developing Marketing for Mavens. My goal is to simplify this process and put the power into the hands of those who need to own and maintain the content. The application should be simple enough that people in programs marketing can update and test their web promotions and publish them live. Reporting is done in real time to see how well a promotion is running. If necessary, quick changes can be made and rolled out based on site analysis.

In this scenario, Marketing for Mavens, works as a micro content management system. It's designed to sit between your content management system and web analytics system to quickly deploy web promotions and respond to your web feedback in real time. It's a low cost way to solve a frustrating business problem.

If you're interested in learning more, please feel free to view our new video demo or sign up to be part of our upcoming beta program.

Our Target Audience: Marketing Mavens

Often I'm asked who Marketing for Mavens' target audience is. Although there are many people in any size company that can benefit from this application, it is the marketing mavens, the people who thirsts for information and have a strong desire to use this information to connect with people, who have inspired us to build this product.

Most people use web analytics software to tell them what is going on with their site and a separate content management system or file system to deliver the content. What this application does is bridge the gap between these two systems. Marketing for Mavens only collects the information you need to make decisions on customizing content for your visitors. In turn, you use this information to create custom content and promotions and deliver it to each individual based on their past behavior on your web site. This ensure that the right content and promotions get the people who are most interested. Our focus is on providing an application that help you to deliver better results and a higher level of user satisfaction on your web site.

Marketing for Mavens - Now running on our hosting server

Just a quick update to let you know that I have the application up and running at our hosting service. I'll be integrating it into marketingformavens.com so you can begin to see how it works from a "citizen" perspective. This should be ready in a few days. I'll keep you posted.

Quick Update

I decided on Friday to throw out the old user account system and start over. This is probably going to take me the rest of the week to complete. In the end, this will be a much better system which will allow you to have multiple people access the same account. You'll also be able to assign roles to each individual will allow access to different areas of the application.

This needed to be done at some point and it is much easier to address it now. The goal of Marketing for Mavens is to make it simple enough for non-html experts to update your web content. However, we recognize that this won't be the case in the beta release but there will still be a lot of valuable information you'll want to share. This can be done by assigning roles and limiting who can add content to the site.

Development Ahead of Schedule

I'm very happy with how things have been coming together with the coding for Marketing for Mavens. I may even be a little ahead of my personal schedule but we'll see if that keeps up. Soon it will be moved out of the testing environment and I'll have it up and running on a site so you can get a "citizen" view of how the application works. I'm really looking forward to getting to this milestone as will give me a better perspective on how things are progressing.

Content Management Meets Web Analytics

Right now, our home page doesn't go into a lot of detail on the features provided by Marketing for Mavens, so I'd like to explain it in more detail. You can imagine Marketing for Mavens as the link between serving content and analyzing web traffic. Most companies do both but they tend to be used in a linear fashion and neither integrates well enough to make business decisions on-the-fly. Your typical setup looks something like this:

Content Management -> Web Site -> Web Analytics -> Analyze Data -> Make Content Changes

What Marketing for Mavens does is store promotions/content that you setup and track web analytics information. Then, based on how a person interacts with your web site, it distributes the most appropriate content or promotion to them. It looks more like this:

Marketing for Mavens <-> Web Site

As a person reads through your web content, we're learning more about this person and what they want. The close interaction between your web site and Marketing for Mavens ensures that you don't need to take the time to analyze the data before you can respond to the needs of your citizens (citizens = visitors; I prefer to use citizens as it gives a much better level of respect to the people who take the time to come to your site). Best of all, this is customized to each person meaning you no longer need to try to be all things to all people.

Some of the key features:

• Customize messages/promotions based on your site's visitor history.
• Analyze individual citizens so you can determine who is most interested in your products and services.
• Tag and assign points to your web site URL's to determine areas of interested and the level of interest.