Hot Banana For Agencies, is a unique technology based on Hot Banana's existing Active Marketing Web Content Management Suite.  Hot Banana is the first Web Content Management solution to offer such a technology dedicated entirely to the needs of agencies, and this announcement follows several other industry firsts by Hot Banana, such as the first SEO friendly Web Content Management solution, the first to include built-in email marketing, the first to integrate Web analytics using WebTrends 7 in 2004, and the first to integrate with a press release distribution service, PRWeb.

 Hot Banana For Agencies includes many powerful data transfer, personalization, testing and measurement features including; Hot Banana's Form Builder (optionally linked to SalesForce.com's CRM); a Landing Page Manager with built-in A/B testing; Micro Marketing Site Manager for mini Web sites of up to 10 Web pages; integrated WebTrends 7 Web analytics; and optional, custom email software integration to 'close-the-loop' on email marketing campaigns (from vendors such as ExactTarget), which can now be measured from end-to-end.

Many agencies are finding that their own in-house custom development technology and services are unable to keep up with the fast-changing Web publishing industry best practices, and that too much technical know-how is needed to publish Web pages. Hot Banana For Agencies is a powerful technology designed to help solve that problem, requiring minimal IT supervision and hence can be implemented by any type of agency, at all levels of technological capability.

Many Clients - One Solution
Hot Banana's marketing agency solution provides one simple interface through which the agency can manage dozens of clients and hundreds of Landing Pages and Micro Marketing Sites. Much of Hot Banana's core Active Marketing Web Content Management functionality is available to the agencies' non-technical users, which means that there's a considerable amount of tried and tested CMS functionality behind this product. Each client can have its own branding, design templates, database access, Web analytics, subscription lists, campaigns, custom forms, reports, and more.
More sophisticated agencies will be able to leverage Hot Banana Forms which can be added to any Web page for acquiring and converting leads, and for transferring and storing essential information to a database or CRM where it can be analyzed and segmented. Web analytics, email and SEO tools can also be easily added, if required.

Hot Banana For Agencies offers a simple, repeatable and scalable Web publishing process, based upon best practices from Web Content Management. By using Hot Banana For Agencies, Landing Pages and Micro Marketing Sites can have unrestricted custom creative added, and the pages can be published fast, efficiently, cost effectively and consistently. An agency would also be able reuse Landing Pages again and again, reducing their existing Landing Page cost model and setting up archives of reusable templates or pages for future projects.

In support of Hot Banana For Agencies, Hot Banana will provide an optional grey-labelled version of the software, training and ongoing education. If the agency sees a fit, they can also become an official Hot Banana Channel Partner, which enables them to resell the software or build full Web sites, Intranets and Extranets for their clients using Hot Banana's complete Active Marketing Web Content Management Suite.

"Today's agencies survive on their ability to quickly and successfully deploy a wide variety of eMarketing campaigns for a broad range of clients, all at the same time," says Krista Lariviere, President and CEO, Hot Banana Software Inc. "These campaigns can be for Search Engine Marketing such as Google Adwords, email marketing, banner ads, online surveys, new product launches, competitions, promotions and numerous offline promotions.  All these campaigns should have a custom Landing Page and some may need custom Micro Marketing Sites, but an easy technology to do this doesn't readily exist today. Our research has shown that agencies use a variety of means to create Landing Pages and Micro Marketing Sites.  The majority of the methods are low technology solutions, unable to properly leverage sophisticated tools, such as measurement, data capture, forms, surveys, A/B testing, reporting and Web analytics. As a result, we've seen many agencies struggle over the need to quickly publish simple one-off promotional Web pages."

"Many marketing agencies use either a low-end, ISP Landing Page template solution with oddly named domains," added Krista. "Or, they use custom developed code and expensive developer resources for each page. Hot Banana provides a low cost, scalable, repeatable technology solution for marketing agencies to create professional, results-orientated Landing Pages and Micro Marketing Sites."

Hot Banana For Agencies is available On Demand (Software as a Service - SaaS), from $475 per month.  A licensed version of Hot Banana For Agencies is available on request.

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