Interview: How an effective campaign can deliver value for lead generation and brand awareness

Ventana New Media is the innovation leader of content-driven search engine optimization (SEO) and participant marketing. The company’s patent-pending New Media Engine (NME) is a powerful, integrated platform that simultaneously increases brand authority, improves search engine rankings, lead generation and rapid community building. Ventana New Media gives enterprises a strategic message delivery solution that distributes content across hundreds or thousands of new media sites harnessing the myriad of social networks, news communities, blogs, microsites and audio/video distributors. This allows organizations to rapidly expand corporate presence and increase awareness among prospects, customers and partners for long-term success and business value. In the following interview, Joe Austin of Ventana New Media discusses 1:1 with San Madan, on how an effective campaign can deliver value in key areas such as lead generation, brand awareness, and content-driven SEO. San Madan: Tell us about your business and the work you do. What exactly do you do on a daily basis? Joe Austin: Ventana New Media is the innovation leader of content-driven SEO and participant marketing. The company’s patent-pending New Media Engine (NME) is a powerful, integrated platform that simultaneously increases brand authority, improves organic keyword search, increases web-based lead generation and drives viral community building. Ventana New Media gives enterprises a strategic message delivery platform that distributes content across hundreds or thousands of new media sites harnessing the myriad of social networks, news communities, social journalism sites, blogs, social content syndicators and rich media distributors. This allows organizations to rapidly expand corporate presence and increase awareness among prospects, customers and partners for long-term success and business value. San Madan: What are some favorite projects you've completed and why? Joe Austin: Some of our favorite projects are establishing category leadership/success for our clients in rapid fashion. Much of our focus is on emerging markets in both the public and private sector and putting a client and a ground-breaking solution on the map and into the lead is what drives us.  How we do this is a blend of domain expertise and a leading-edge proprietary “Participant Marketing Platform” that enables clients to harness channels in new media that provide business value for greater awareness and brand identity. The solution integrates content distribution across the six channels and automates what has traditionally been a tedious and time consuming manual task, while optimizing content distribution for optimal Internet placement.  Users of Ventana New Media have vastly greater control over message and audience targeting and significantly improve corporate branding, product/service awareness, Website traffic and community building. The communities accessed and built through the Ventana’s participant marketing platform can also be harnessed as a valuable lead generation tool.  As viral content is pushed through this system it delivers impressive results that greatly expand corporate presence and increase awareness among prospects, customers, partners and others.
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About Joe Austin Joe Austin co-founded Ventana New Media in 2010 and currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer. With more than 17 years experience in business-to-business communications, he has remained focused on helping organizations expand brand awareness and marketshare and spearheads Ventana New Media in furthering these efforts. In 2008, Austin pioneered the Ventana New Media Engine, a patent pending SEO-powered publishing solution that structures the unstructured world of new media to drive business value.
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San Madan: What are some of the challenges you have faced in your line of work? What core-competencies have benefited you the most? Joe Austin: Over three years ago a client told us that traditional PR was dead. Print publications were folding, advertising dollars were declining and conferences were taking a huge hit – all impacting how a company delivered its message and maintained a competitive market position. While this was an overstatement, it was clear that advancement in communications was needed. Ventana took our customers comment as a challenge set out to create a proactive approach to the problem that would unify communications, social media marketing and organic search marketing for rapid, sustainable results.  Hence the Ventana New Media Engine was born. Ventana New Media is a patent-pending solution that gives enterprises a strategic message delivery platform that distributes content across hundreds or thousands of new media sites harnessing a framework of high business value new media sites in just a few clicks. This allows organizations to rapidly expand corporate presence, increase brand awareness, leadership position among prospects, customers and partners for long-term success and business value. An effective new media campaign integrates content publishing to support multiple initiatives, including SEO, complementing other initiatives that vendors may have in place, including a Web-ad layer, Google AdWords, and on-site SEO services where you have optimized the content within your website through landing pages, site tagging, search-friendly coding and site mapping.  An effective campaign will deliver value in three key areas, lead generation, brand awareness, and content-driven SEO. Lead Generation Increased lead generation will result directly from backlinked integrated content and through the community building that establishes loyal followers. When performed well, these activities will draw top prospects to your site for additional information where they can be requested to register for additional content, information or even a product download. Brand Awareness Brand awareness can be slightly more difficult to measure. Increased brand awareness will result from the active placement of your content across the Internet which then amplifies your corporate solution visibility to strengthen your brand visibility and awareness. Content-Driven SEO Content-driven SEO has a direct impact on your SERP. As your content is published, the number of backlinks will increase in number and variety on high-credibility sites. This dramatically improves your keyword searchability and results in dynamically higher SERPs. Results Tracking To track the results of your new media campaign, it is important to evaluate a number of moving data sets. Tracking your results in a number of categories over time will help you to refine your new media strategy and evaluate which channels are delivering the most impact for your message. San Madan: When does external PR versus internal PR work better? How can external and internal PR work together effectively? Joe Austin: Internal and external PR should be a seamless process that maps and leverages internal and external resources for maximum value.  It is important to be an extension of marketing and internal PR and for external PR to add strategic value outside of the traditional approach of press releases, editorial, etc. A good external agency brings a solid network to the table of analyst, press, investor, executive, recruitment, channel partners, social media and advertorial contacts to be able to jump-start a wide variety of programs not thought of in the past with traditional PR approaches. External PR needs to continue to innovate and expand services to map to the changing world of how communications is produced, distributed and integrated at a large scale for client success. San Madan: What are some of the benefits small and medium businesses can get from external PR? Joe Austin: SMBs get a natural extension to ramp marketing and PR. Many times external PR is the front line for organizations that don’t have the budget or bandwidth to staff and support these programs. Organizations that partner with a PR agency need to ensure they pick an agency that understands the needs and requirements of SMBs and provide the same attention and mindshare as a large enterprise customer. The agency must be domain experts, bring strong relationships to the table and state of the art programs that deliver rapid results on all fronts without breaking the bank. San Madan: How does a company handle a mistake that will be seen publicly? And are crisis communications best handled by external PR? Joe Austin: Yes, this should be handled by External PR and addressed immediately via a proactive, risk assessment strategy. It is important to ALWAYS consider what can go wrong before things hit the fan, so that when/if an event happens you can address it quickly and minimize any negative impact. Some issues that are complicating crisis communication today is the world of social media where folks are blogging, tweeting and have a presence on Facebook, etc. It is important from both an internal and external process that this process is managed and controlled for message consistency and accuracy to avoid any negative implications. One way to address this issue is through an automated, integrated New Media strategy that controls ALL approved communications channels and distributes these messages from a central platform/hub to reduce message dilution, inaccuracies and risk.
San Madan: Does the rapid social media growth further strengthen the role of external PR in providing effective results?  Joe Austin: Absolutely, an external agency must be on the front lines of defining how social media is leveraged and harnessed for strategic advantage. It’s not enough to simple have a SEO layer without a strategic content management layer that address the four pillars of  Company Brand/Validation, Sales/Marketing, PR, and Social Community Building to establish leadership position and build new market opportunities. The Internet is exploding with new opportunities for social interaction and brand engagement. In fact, according to Forrester interactive marketing in the U.S. will near $55 billion and represent 21% of all marketing spend by 2014. Social media spending alone will increase to over $3 billion by 2014 with a compound annual growth rate of 34%. While no traditional marketing category can touch the power of the Internet, the Web is also the most complex and dynamically evolving marketing medium available. As validated by these significant market growth numbers, there is a rapid influx of competitors clamoring for visibility on the Web. Standing out in a crowd has never been more necessary. To best optimize the power of marketing through the Web, companies must understand how to leverage the multiple channels of social interaction and the way in which content flows across the Web for competitive advantage. Only those companies that can efficiently harness every channel -- including the myriad of social networks, news communities, blogs, microsites, and audio/video distributors – will obtain the greatest business value from their online marketing programs. There are six new media channels that most impact your Search Engine Result Positions (SERPs). By virally distributing corporate content through these six channels, you can simultaneously improve organic search engine optimization, keyword searchability, Web-based lead generation and rapid community building for the long-term success of your corporate and product brand.
San Madan: What contributions do you feel your work offers to society as a whole? Joe Austin: Ventana and our integrated PR and New Media services offer clients and their customers and partners the opportunity to reach a broader audience with their message, value proposition and how their solutions are changing the world in positive ways. Only those companies that can efficiently harness and integrate all aspects of social media will be able to communicate why what they do matters and what does it mean to the global market as a whole.
Company: Ventana Group Head Office Address: 6310 Cottage Lane The Plains, VA 20198 U.S.A. Founded in: 2010 CEO: Joe Austin Public or Private: Private Investors: Self Funded Number of Employees: 20 Products and Services: New Media Engine Company’s Goals: Providing enterprises with a strategic message delivery solution that distributes content across hundreds or thousands of new media sites harnessing the myriad of social networks, news communities, blogs, microsites and audio/video distributors Awards Won:Social Media Campaign of the Year (by a PR agency or In-House); Case Study - Queplix Rapidly Escalates Internet Visibility Through Content-Driven SEO using Social Media; Ventana PR - Top Tech Communicator – 2007, 2008 & 2009

New Windows to Social Media Marketing

Originally published by Mike Thompson, eContent Magazine

Sometimes, trying to get the attention of web users can feel like an exercise in futility. The easier it gets to create a website, the harder it is to actually draw in visitors and customers. Ventana New Media has come up with something it feels can help solve this.

The company launched Ventana New Media Engine (NME) on August 30, 2011, a product that delivers content-driven search engine-optimized communications using what Ventana describes as "powerful tools for rapidly building corporate and product brand identity and increasing lead generation for long-term business success."

According to Forrester Research, by 2014 interactive marketing in the United States will approach $55 billion. Social media spending alone will be more than $3 billion, up from $716 million in 2009. Not only does this mean getting noticed will be more important, it also means it will be more competitive.

"We started the New Media Engine to fill a gap between social media marketing and search marketing initiatives," says Joe Austin, president and co-founder of Ventana New Media. "Many social media networks are classified as high-quality sites in the eyes of search engines. When [SEO] content is consistently published on those sites [it] can serve to provide brand empowerment."

There were several tasks Ventana wanted to accomplish with the NME, including: decreasing a company's marketing costs while improving brand position; improving its organic keyword search rankings to drive web-based lead generation; building social networking communities to engage the market; and implementing what Austin called "social media marketing without the risk."

This "risk" occurs, Austin says, when companies encourage employees to blog and contribute to social media discussions. He says the employees then become "representatives" of the company, and the content that goes online doesn't go through proper review at the company. "Depending on what their employees say, the company could wind up in trouble because of inaccurate or unauthorized information being released to the internet." Austin says.

The process looks something like this: after companies supply digital content-press releases, blogs, videos, etc.-to Ventana, it is then coded with backlinks and keywords and processed through NME. (While the idea of keywords is nothing new, Ventana analyzes different words and their strengths, and then tells the customer "what keyword is most appropriate for them," Austin says.) The content starts to publish on a framework of about 80 new media sites-including blogs, social networks, etc.-within six hours, and, shortly thereafter, these sites are crawled by search engines. The content then begins to appear in keyword searches. At the same time, the company's corporate URL sees a spike in searchability, due to the increase in URL "authority." Prospective customers then click on backlinks, or the corporate URL, which takes them to the corporate site. Austin stresses the NME is ideal for mid-level companies that already have a lot of content on their sites that just, for various reasons, is going largely unnoticed. "Anyone with existing content is a perfect candidate for this," he says. "It allows you to rejuvenate, reactivate and breathe new life into content that's [already there]."

While NME wasn't publicly available until this week, a beta version has been tested by select companies in recent months. One of the users of the beta version was Metalogix, a provider of content lifecycle management solutions. "We have achieved solid results with this program across five continents accessing significantly more issue-focused media outlets than traditional SEO engines," says Metalogix CEO Steven Murphy. "This has allowed Metalogix to reduce our Google Adword spend by 80% and move our rankings to the top spot on search engine pages in our key market segments."

Another tester, the data integration and data management company Queplix, says that, in the span of three months, it ranked above its competitors in targeted keyword search and web presence. The NME "played an important role in unseating our competitors in strategic areas of web marketing," says Michael Zuckerman, CMO of Queplix. "This provided a substantial return on our marketing investment in a short period of time."

With the beta version of the program a success, Ventana is now ready to offer NME to the public. Austin says his sales and customer service teams are ready to go.

"We are ready to rock and roll," he says.

Pricing for the service starts at $5,000 a month.

Ventana New Media: A Sales Lead Engine for MSPs?

Originally published by Nicholas Mukhar | MSPmentor

Ventana New Media, a marketing, branding and lead generation solution provider, has officially released the Ventana New Media Engine. The big question: Can Ventana help VARs and MSPs to generate more sales leads?

"We've been in stealth for a bit over two years now because we saw new media aspects in the market and were trying to figure out how to integrate those new aspects into the Engine," said CEO Sabrina Sanchez. "A few years ago we saw that marketing is changing and there are now different channels of where your voice is heard. So we found it important to develop a strategy comprised of three different aspects."

Those three different aspects -- content and conversation; how to control conversation; and how to make sure people are hearing the conversation -- are the three pillars on which the Ventana New Media Engine are based. The Engine is designed to deliver search engine optimized (SEO) to help companies build brand identity and acquire clients. It seeks to leverage existing or new corporate content to accelerate dialogue between customers, prospects and constituents. How? With controlled and consistent social networking, accelerated keyword SEO, professional viral content creation, and targeted community building.

"The Engine began as a content publishing platform to compliment our public relations activity,"added Ventana President Joe Austin. "But we began to see that it was increasing SEO rankings for clients. So we took another work at the framework and made further updates and built the Engine into what it is today -- a framework of media sites through which users can publish information on the Internet, integrate keywords and have backlinks behind the scenes that tie one site to another."

Ventana New Media has had 10 different clients use the Ventana New Media Engine throughout its beta, including Treehouse Interactive. If you recall, Treehouse recently upgraded its partner relationship management platform in late August 2011. Ventana actually integrated the Ventana New Media Engine into the Treehouse Interactive platform.

Austin stopped short of calling the Ventana New Media engine a managed service, saying that it was "partly process and partly technology." But he did say the Engine is useful for VARs and MSPs looking to generate more leads and strengthen their brands. The Engine can also build out components for VARs and MSPs pushing into specific verticals. The Ventana New Media Engine costs $5,000 up front. After that, customer rates vary based on volume.

Meanwhile, a range of companies assist VARs and MSPs with lead generation, search engine optimization, and marketing services.  Key names include Kutenda, Robin Robins and Ulistic.

Video: Social Media Publishing

The Ventana New Media Engine demo video is available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gXqTmtYrA

The Ventana New Media Engine™ (NME) is a combination of technologies and processes that allow strategic delivery of corporate communications. It allows companies to leverage press releases, articles, blogs, audio/video podcasts for content-driven search engine optimization. This translates into expansive coverage of outbound communications for increased Internet visibility. 

With the Ventana NME, content is pushed through high credibility, high traffic and content-relevant new media sites, driven by the viral adoption of the content. This content receives visibility on the Internet's most influential social communities to promote the viral spread and awareness of information without editorial filters for direct and rapid consumption. The information is highly targeted as it is accessed based on keyword input by parties interested in the content. Users of the Ventana New Media Engine have vastly greater control over message and audience targeting to significantly improve corporate branding, product/service awareness, website traffic and community building. The communities accessed and built through the new media engine can also be harnessed as a valuable lead generation tool. As viral content is pushed through this system it delivers impressive results that greatly expand corporate presence and increase awareness among prospects, customers, partners and others. 

To learn more, visit www.ventanapr.com or contact the Ventana Group at joe.austin@ventanapr.com.

Ventana New Media Engine Powers, Connects Social Media With Content Marketing

Originally published by Marisa Peacock (@marisacp51) for CMS Wire

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Last week, we reported that interactive marketing was forecasted to grow substantially over the next five years. Almost on cue, two launches seek to capitalize on this predicted growth. Ventana, best known for its public relations, has spawned a new entity it's calling Ventana New Media. With it comes the release of the Ventana New Media Engine, designed to optimize content-driven search engine communications so organizations can build an effective brand identity, while generating leads accurately across appropriate platforms.

Connect, Accelerate Your Message

In an effort to help companies harness the value of social media, the New Media Engineis a publishing platform that connects content to six major types of networks, which could accelerate a message or visibility. The platform aims to help companies control their message in a way that adds value for both company and customer.

The Ventana New Media Engine connects multiple categories of new media sites 

How Does It Work?

Content managers can publish nearly any form of digital content via the New Media Engine and it is searched for keywords, tagged and described so it can be pushed out to the appropriate media platform. Publishing channels include:

• microsites (customized sites on social networks)
• web-feed publishers and news communities
• online audio/video and image communities
• social bookmarking and syndication sites
• social journalism sites
• targeted blogs

In aggregate, these sites become the execution component of Ventana’s social media marketing solutions for enhanced brand awareness, lead generation and search engine optimization.

While it doesn’t negate the need for active brand management, the New Media Engine does help take the guesswork out of selecting the right platforms for content distribution, while making it easier to publish content across various media.

Yet, pushing out content is just part of the integrated content distribution process. Measuring your reach is the other. The New Media Engine actively measures and monitors the number of backlinks generated and number of placements and can integrate into a CRM-managed sales funnel.

Complement Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Ventana New Media launched in secret a few months ago and has been working in private beta with a few companies, including Metalogix and Queplix. Both agree that they have seen significant results, which have helped streamline their distribution, while increasing their visibility among search results and key market segments.

While their New Media Engine is a powerful tool, it shouldn’t replace your current marketing strategy, but rather complement it by enhancing keywords, placement and content curation. That should help you find more time to monitor conversations across digital and social media platforms so you can respond immediately and appropriately to what readers are saying.  

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