Makesbridge vs. Spokal

Makesbridge is great for email marketing and Salesforce integration. It is great for a startup or large company. Support is terrific. You can't go wrong with the service.

For current Wordpress users Spokal is outstanding and highly recommended. For clients who don't already have a Wordpress blog it's a bit tricky as I need to first sell the benefits of using Wordpress in order to get them on board, but in all honestly I would recommend Wordpress anyway, it just slows the process down having to design and install Wordpress before we can get started.

• Makesbridge had the highest reviews in customer service on the Salesforce app exchange. This was the major reason that I chose them. Some of the implementation was over my head, but this was not a problem since they were always available to help with any issues that came up.
• The team has even taken suggestions and implemented them quickly when I voiced a need for a particular Salesforce integration. Makesbridge has been a fantastic addition to my company.

• Content calendar - the ability to visually see blog posts in draft and scheduled to publish over the coming weeks and months was a key benefit. Tracking this in spreadsheets is too hard. we can even post blogs as topic idea, pre draft, draft and final and schedule in advance so we can visualise the messages we want to communicate. Creation of tweets and Linkedin posts is done for you automatically. Simply drag the blog post to the time slot, day, week or month. This is a lot quicker than Hootsuite
• Additional tweets can be composed and also dragged to the calendar, plus the feedly link allows curation of tweet content. This just scales up our creation and curation process.
• Easy simple overview dashboard - showing key website stats, new visitors, new twitter followers. New blog posts. Social enagement per blog post, linkedin shares etc. simple lead scoring based on pages visited etc. Simple realtime SEO analysis on the blog post builder
• twitter builder. very simple autopilot of increasing your twitter following using key words (it easy has a simple key word tool) to find relevant people to 'like' and hence follow
• Dynamic, responsive team. I have asked a few questions about futures and always received a prompt helpful reply. Chris and his team are clearly commited to developing a great product.
• Once linked to your wordpress site I really like the fact I can log into a dashboard on the web and on my ipad and manage my content delivery and monitor visititors and interaction. I use and know hubspot and the biggest issue for me is the learning curve. Anyone can learn and use Spokal. It provides and integrates a number of tools I currently use today at a far lower cost. It does need to integrate into a third party email provider but frankly the integration is simple. A lot of effort has gone into the design for non techies

• I would like for users to be able to see campaigns and templates created by other non-admin users. I'd like the option as the sysadmin to select which parts of the application should be open to all users, and which I'd like to gate. (Permissions, if you will).
• Configuration of training materials. The content is great, I just have had difficulty locating the specific article that would be most relevant to the situation. I'd love step-by-step guides for campaign creation, etc.

• I personally would love to see more direct integrations into CRM and more powerful Marketing Automation tools, but the current Zapier integration is a general approach and works in most cases very well.

Great product, exceptional support. I'm going to be honest and say that I was apprehensive that the Makesbridge team was actually as wonderful as the app exchange reviews claim...How often does that actually happen?! But now, I can honestly say that the glowing reviews are spot-on, and my only concern is that they do not do justice in describing the product, support and service Makesbridge provides.

Spokal delivers everything I need to serve my clients in one place. It's so easy to use and their customer service is always available and responsive, there's no need for me to look elsewhere.

I'm not an IT guru. The layout and workflows make sense, and I appreciate not having to involve a developer for every change I'd like to make.

Spokal takes away some of the complexity and noise that Wordpress has. Offering a separate login and dashboard to allow a user to create blog posts, check on backlinks, see ranking keywords, social engagement and tracks visitors/ contacts. Spokal provides a lot of functionality that would typically require the purchase of several products e.g. Hootsuite, SEO Moz, SEO pressor, Hubspot. What I really like is the content calendar. I simply drag and drop of my blog posts into my calendar to post to twitter, linkedin and facebook. This is an easy way to repost evergreen content and build my following on twitter. The twitter builder is constantly looking for relevant profiles and conversations based on my defined criteria. The tool automatically likes the twitter user which drives traffic to my sight and actually helps me find followers and potential influencers. This product is ideal for people new to internet marketing or small business owners who don't want to be overwhelmed by the effort to learn, manage and run several tools or wordpress plugins. I have been with Spokal since the start and I continue to be impressed by the support and raft of new functionality being added.

Their tech support staff is the BEST I have worked with!

Best tech support in the software industry.

While their phone/chat support is outstanding, I wish there was more documentation and how-to information available online. There are many features that I have not used because I don't understand how to use them as well as I should

They worked with Bluehost to make sure our blog connected properly. This was done without anyone from Strategic Revolution asking for this help.

Makesbridge was easier to use and has a much better help desk. We were originally impressed with sales and then the technical side. At one point we handled e-mails with an internal program, what a headache, especially the list management.

I haven't really tried other products at this point. I would say I tried to cobble together a bunch of options to make the right inbound marketing "tool suite". Nothing quite worked well enough. Again, Spokal serves as a very cost-effective option. Particularly relative to Hubspot.

• Good customer service and allows us to use our leads without much restriction.
• Price still considered quite high for a very small business like us.

• It's still early for us, but we can definitively say that we've cut our content creation / curation time down by about 40% while INCREASING the volume of quality relevant content that our audience expects.