Marketing technology – Vuture tackles social media verification, dynamic content and extranets made easy

Amazingly, it’s over three years since I went to see start up company for marketing technology Vuture http://kimtasso.com/marketing-communications-technology-for-professional-firms so I popped along to their offices on the SouthBank to catch up.

Client base

From such a recent start, they have done well. Whilst Tikit has 26 of the top UK law firms and Concep (see http://kimtasso.com/partners-running-e-shot-campaigns-and-an-app-for-events-new-products-from-concep) has 13, Vuture has 23 and is confident that it will be in the top spot by next March.

Legal clients include: Bond Pearse, Bristows, Clyde & Co, DAC Beachcroft, Fladgate Fielder, Freshfields, Herbert Smith, Kennedys, LG, Penningtons, Taylor Wessing. InterAction has been promoting Vuture to its client base in the United States too, so we can expect this list to grow.

Property clients include: Capita Simmons, CBRE, Cushman Wakefield, Knight Frank and Savills. They are unable to disclose the name of their large accountancy client.

Entry level prices are similar to other systems – around £500 pcm. The biggest client has 2,000 users across 160 countries and sends 20m emails a year.

System overview

From the dashboard there are options to manage:

• web sites – microsites, intranets, alumni sites or a full CMS for your main site
• emails – using data from a CRM
• print – brochures, seminar invitations, newsletters, modifiable templates
• surveys – which look like they come from your firm rather than SurveyMonkey, integrate with your CRM (Vuture is CRM agnostic and can work with most systems) and translate into different languages including Chinese
• social media – where you can manage the firm’s, a department’s or individuals’ accounts for Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook and which allows for all posts to be verified before they are posted for those firms who need a high level of central control while learning.

What’s also nice is the same user interface throughout the system, even though the applications are quite different.

Dynamic content management

The feature that they are most keen to highlight allows dynamic content. So, for example, if a recipient has previously selected particular sessions at a seminar or shown interest in a specific topic, follow up reminder emails and event documentation are automatically tailored to that delegate with the relevant information drawn from the master template. This also means that sector specific communications – such as newsletters – are also straightforward. That’s pretty neat.

Extranets and secure areas

This technology is even more powerful when used for secure micro-sites. It makes it easy to allow different content to be automatically available for different types of user. The example I was shown was driven by InterAction and enabled alumni users to have their own user name and password with access controlled by manual verification and different levels of information depending on whether or not they were in general counsel roles. This could easily be extended to integrate with a firm’s key client programme.

Email metrics

The monitoring module is as you would expect, showing standard information on the number of emails opened, read, clicked and forwarded, but I particularly liked the doughnut diagrams that illustrate the information.

The dashboard facility was slick too – showing top level statistics across all platforms (web, email, social media) and a click-on facility to drill down into the detail.

Like Google Analytics, you can see what content or emails are most popular at different days of the week and times of the day so that you can really hone your campaigns.

Coming soon

By January, the system will also be able to cope with payment systems for those who wish to charge for events or access to certain publications or areas of web sites.

I also asked about a system that supports holding all the different information for tender and pitches – variable biographies, case studies, project summaries, expertise lists, sector client lists etc – and takes some of the pain out of assembling these documents. They have the technology and have done so for an insurance company and are currently seeking a “test” professional services client to develop a template solution.

And building on the analytics and metrics piece, they are also developing predictive analysis – so you can tell in advance (based on your historical campaigns and perhaps even the campaigns of other firms) the best images to use and the best time to mail. Advance campaign optimisation – soon we’ll all be out of a job!

Further details from: http://www.vuturegroup.com/home/home.aspx