A simple observation appeared with the emergence of new versions of CMS on the market like Joomla 2.5: with this kind of solution, it is now possible to combine all the communication tools concerning the Internet strategy of a company.
As we showed to you in our french Joomla web conference, a CMS like Joomla allows the creation of a website, but also the development of a comprehensive communication strategy manageable by employees of the company. Indeed, it is possible through the management interface created for "Usability" and not "Programming" (ie "easy to understand"), to deploy an INTERNAL global Internet strategy from your website, in order to:
- Increase visibility on the web
- Improve the brand image of the company
- Establish customer loyalty
- Interact with social networks
- Provide value-added services
Too complicated you say? Well this is where that CMS makes sense, and especially Joomla, since it offers very sophisticated tools to get a quick and efficient understanding of the points mentioned above.
Furthermore, an INTERNAL deployment brings you the following benefits:
- Better understanding of company problematics
- Better responsiveness to opportunities
- Better technology watch
- Better control of the brand image of the company
- Cost in deployment and maintenance significantly lower
On this last point the benefit is important. Indeed, whereas before calling a communication agency, a web agency, a search engine optimization (SEO) agency and a SMO (Social Media Optimization) agency seemed essential for the web marketing / Internet strategy of a company, it is now possible to bring together all the necessary tools (the same ones used by these agencies!) in a single system: a CMS like Joomla. Then it has only to set up the necessary tools for a good control of the system.
In this regard, we could worry about the training budget to allocate for employees using such a CMS system. But the reality is that only one full-time employee is required to obtain a strike force much larger than one or several external stakeholders (for the reasons cited above). And his training, even over several days, can be absorbed by the training fund available in businesses.
Some examples of extensions:
For webdesign
Of course, Joomla! :-) and extensions (depending on your project) which are sorted by categories in the JED. Many tutorials on the web can help you if necessary.
For Social Media Strategy
- A widget like Easy ShareThis allows you and your visitors to share your content on many social networks
- ObSocialSubmit allows you to autopublish content on social networks when you publish it on your Joomla site
- Facebook Slide Likebox allows you to have a social box for Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube, to connect social networks to your website
- ObRSS allows you to have great RSS feeds to submitted on many socials networks
For SEO Strategy
Many SEO extensions exist to optimize your website:
- sh404SEF to rewrite URLs, optimize TITLE and META (OpenGraph)
- SEOlinks to optimize your internal linking
- SEOGenerator to generate automatically META description and META keywords
For Webmarketing Strategy
All the extensions and tools to track your visitors and understand their behavior:
Google Analytics / JoomlaWatch
RSform! Pro for feedback from your visitors about your services / products
And of course, the essential AcyMailing extension:
- to create email content from your Joomla articles
- to send frequent newsletters
- to personalize your custom service
- to generate automatic marketing emails
In conclusion, relying on a CMS such as Joomla, assures you a free solution that is scalable and sustainable. Add to that a deployment cost of close to 0, and a solution that has already been proven on the Internet... and the question becomes: What are companies waiting for?