In this first blog post I am going to discuss how open source tools, correctly brought together, can form a cost effective marketing tool kit for the 21^st century.

The ultimate goal of any marketing team is lead generation, indeed the effectiveness of any marketing campaign is measured by its return on investment. Lead generation these days is much less about cold calling in the hope that a prospect is found. Instead, the emphasis has shifted to a company's online presence i.e. their website.

So how can an organisation maximise its lead generation through the online channel? The answer, of course, is getting prospects to their website, providing the correct content to interest them and then being able to identify them for a follow up.

Getting prospects to your website can be achieved in two ways; driving them to it or catching them looking for the products and services you provide. In other words you can pro-actively let your target market know that you exist and interest them enough to click through to your website or you can ensure that anyone searching for your products and services online find your website ahead of any of your competitors. In my opinion, surely it makes sense to do both?

Providing the correct content on your website to keep customers interested became far easier with the advent of content management systems (CMS). A website with out-of-date content can not only provide inaccurate information but also paints the impression that the company it belongs to is outdated and slow to react.

In order to achieve the final piece of the puzzle, that of identifying leads and following them up, we must rely on accurate reporting about who has visited our website, how long they looked at it for and what they looked at. By using these metrics we can identify and classify warm leads ready for the sales team to take on.

Now that we know what we need to do, how can we facilitate that process in the most cost effective manner? We can of course use commercial off the shelf (COTS) products for all the areas I have outlined above. There are numerous email marketing packages and search engine optimisation (SEO) services available as well as CMS systems and website analytic packages. The problem with all of these is they are often costly to implement and maintain, particularly for small or medium enterprises (SMEs), and they leave the owner tied in to the vendor. This is where open source software can help.

There already exists open source alternatives for all the areas that I have already mentioned. These solutions can be implemented by anyone with the inclination and skills to do so but, unless you already have the skills, the learning curve and infrastructure investment required to do so may prove to be as expensive as implementing COTS products. The obvious solution to this problem is to have someone else worry about the implementation and infrastructure for you. The added value in this proposition is that, if the implementor has done their homework, then they will be able to offer you a solution that has been optimised and in which all the disparate parts work together. I am, of course, talking about open source “software as a service” (SAS).

By choosing this route, you will be left with a solution that costs very little to implement and maintain, provides an integrated online marketing tool set and therefore provides you with the maximum possible ROI.