Originally launched in 1999, the Hot Banana CMS is an award-winning content management tool designed with the small to medium sized enterprise in mind. It places a strong focus on content optimization and online marketing, but also has a broad range of basic content management capabilities, which helps it appeal to customers with varying needs. Hot Banana is integrated with Lyris’ suite of marketing products, most notably EmailLabs, its flagship email marketing solution. This CMS aims to satisfy three key demands: content management, website optimization and marketing automation. If power and ease of use is something that matters for your project, then Hot Banana certainly warrants a closer look.
Website Optimization
Optimization is a key element of Hot Banana, proven by the fact that it contributes numerous resources to tracking site and campaign performance. Its SEO tools play a key role in content creation and keyword analysis through a comprehensive editing interface and reports. Some of the other optimization tools include affiliate tracking, metadata management, automatic Google Sitemap submission and updates, automated tagging and instant SEO-friendly output. Analyzing your components for optimization is as simple as clicking and entering keywords into the appropriate field. Hot Banana is one piece of software that allows you to enjoy CMS usability the way it was meant to be.
Marketing Automation
In the Hot Banana environment, marketing automation and optimization go hand in hand. The software provides a robust web form builder that streamlines the creation of forms and management of captured data. It also integrates with SalesForce and other popular CRM platforms as well as EmailLabs, which enables form data to be automatically migrated to customer databases. In addition, Hot Banana aims to ensure marketing optimization with a press release manager, blog administration, and event and survey management tools. While EmailLabs provides an open framework for integrating with other email marketing managers, Hot Banana has a nice set of default email marketing functions in its own right.
Content Management
A clean and well organized interface makes content creation a breeze with Hot Banana. The software packs a nice selection of templates with options ranging from standard web pages and landing pages to multi-column email layouts. From there, your page can be created using the WYSIWYG editor, which offers tools for HTML view toggling and keyword analysis directly from your browser. Advanced metadata can be inserted via a separate table while all of your content items can be scheduled for publishing dates of your choosing. Though Hot Banana has a user-friendly interface to work with, it actually conceals many hidden treasures beneath all the open-space, making you dig a little deeper to perform certain actions.
Conclusion
Hot Banana is geared toward small and medium sized organizations whom for marketing, branding and ease of use are essential. The major downside to the platform is that its based on Cold Fusion, which automatically makes it a turn off for developers not familiar with the language. Disadvantages aside, this Banana offers enough out of the box functionality to greatly benefit small teams and businesses with a strong internal focus.
