ActiveDEMAND is an integrated marketing automation platform that is designed to bring together online marketing tools into a single application. This platform focuses on helping both novice and expert marketers set up, manage and execute campaigns with a focus on measuring business results such as conversions and leads.
$3
Per Phone Number/mth
CoSchedule Marketing Suite
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
CoSchedule provides a content calendar, content optimization, and contentmarketing products, with users among 50,000 marketers worldwide, helping them organize their work, deliver projects on time, and prove marketing team value.
When choosing a marketing automation system, it is important to think of what exactly you want it to do. I think no matter what you are hoping to get out of a marketing automation platform, you can achieve it with ActiveDEMAND. It can be used for simple/basic marketing email sending and campaign execution or it can be used to develop a microsite, create sales and marketing kiosks, run multi-step campaigns, host protected assets or whatever you want to do with it. You can easily choose (or ignore) the modules and features to be as creative as you choose to be.
CoSchedule is great for businesses or agencies who need an overview of all their marketing efforts, and who want to establish collaboration between multiple departments. The calendar view is one of the best we've worked with and makes it easy to see exactly what's happening. There is some slight clunkiness when it comes to admin-related tasks, and a few things aren't easy to find, but there's great support.
Reporting - Though the reporting is extensive and very very good... I sometimes miss a simplified view of email opens/clicks/link clicks etc.
Don't get me wrong, you can get to this data in ActiveDEMAND relatively easily, the default views through the campaign dashboard are just quite detailed (which some people would probably prefer) and I just don't think that we need that level of reporting on first glance. That being said, I do love the option to drill down and uncover the complex detailed data when i do want it (ActiveDEMAND is very good at this).
One element of reporting that I would also like would be an event registrant report showing all registered people (this part exists) and their responses on the registration form they completed to register for the event. (These things would be dietary restrictions, industry, customized responses to other event related questions).
I also wish the reports autorefreshed more frequently.
ICS Files - Right now there are work arounds for loading an ICS file (Calendar meeting invite file) that can be accessed in campaign assets. I just wish this was more native to the tool.
Archive Filing - Now, first of all, it is so amazing that ActiveDEMAND even has an archiving feature... I LOVE this. One small downside, however, is that the archiving cannot be organized using a folder structure or anything. I would like to be able to group my live events together, then group my webinars together etc.
The import Google Doc to WordPress functionality never worked successfully or reliably for me. So I just manually copy and paste Google Docs to the WordPress editor instead.
The social sharing counter was not that helpful, because it only counted Facebook and Google+. Who uses Google+ anymore? Plus, now they don't even show the social counter in the monthly calendar view. so you can't see the numbers without doing some extra digging.
In the monthly calendar view, some titles get cut off if they don't wrap cleanly in the day's box. So I would make it look cleaner instead of having words broken up by a hyphen.
I didn't have to use their official support, but I can say that they put out a lot of content online to help users. Their YouTube page has quite an array of tutorial videos explaining how things work and how to get the most out of their tools. If you're struggling, before picking up a phone or blasting off an email, try searching for your problem on YouTube or their forums.
Vertical Response wasn't a full marketing platform at the time when we used it, but it was clunky and the tech support wasn't easy to use. I like the one-on-one response we get from ActiveDemand and really being on a first name basis with the folks there
CoSchedule provides collaborative planning of projects. The calendar view is very well designed. Meetings and tasks can be scheduled and tracked easily. Whatever is being done, no matter how big the task/project is, it gives a bird-eye view of everything. Additionally, it also integrated very well with WordPress. Their customer service team is also very helpful.
Probably too early to tell for certain but it is definitely value priced right now. Fully developed content management platforms are running in $15-$20k per year range and more. You can get into a CoSchedule solution for $
Team has found it easy to sign on and review tasks so this is a big time saver. More could be done to enable Guests easier access to content they need to review
It's way faster that other scheduling apps we have tried. The fact that it runs on a cloud based app or inside your Wordpress app is a real plus. Auto save feature also means you don't have to remember to save your content.
