Jep Castelein's blog post about, "Web Content Management for Lead Generation", is right on target. As the co-founder of Hot Banana Software, I can say that our entire Web content management strategy as a company was not only to make our clients lives easier with simple Web site management tools, but also to help our clients become Internet Marketing experts. We are able to do that by making complex marketing tactics very simple to set up, manage and report.

The Web site is at the heart of lead generation. As stated by Castelein, visitors arrive at your Web site via many channels including: email marketing, search engines, pay-per-click advertising, social media , as well as offline media such as direct mail, print, TV and radio, and don't forget good old fashioned word of mouth. The conversion happens on the Web page or landing page, and you must have compelling content and a proven design layout. Better yet - with a Web CMS you can easily track behavior and make incremental improvements to your pages.

Interwoven is a strong enterprise Web CMS vendor, and it wasn’t a surprise that it was picked up in the market place. Hot Banana was acquired by Lyris Inc. in August of 2006 based on the belief that in order to provide value as an internet marketing vendor, you must provide more than one tool. For example, you can’t survive solely as a content management vendor - at Hot Banana we recognized this in 2004, and we were the first Web CMS to automate Web analytics data tagging on our pages with WebTrends, and we partnered with ExactTarget at the time with a landing page Web form integration.

Lyris also acquired ClickTracks Web Analytics in August 2006. By that time Lyris had assembled EmailLabs, EmailAdvisor, Hot Banana, ClickTracks and BidHero software products. The point of difference was that we owned the software and we could now build a very cool new product that was “fully integrated”. At that point, Lyris HQ was born, and we believe that we defined a new market segment called an “integrated marketing suite”.

Fast forward to March 2009 - many acquisitions in this industry have taken place,  and many analysts have confirmed that the market is demanding more integration with online marketing tools. To answer Castelein's question about whether Marketo or Eloqua will acquire a Web CMS vendor in the future - I say yes - if they can find a vendor that has a great API layer, a great product, great brand recognition, and the belief that they will be stronger as a larger integrated product.

I can be followed on Twitter @chrishadams or reached via LinkedIn.

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• Download free online-marketing guides, tools and webinars in the Lyris Online-Marketing Resource Center.

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