Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing vs. Sprout Social

Having used both Salesforce and Microsoft Marketing, the integration is much tighter and the automation and workflow is much tighter using PowerAutomate. Reporting on tasks is better in Salesforce, but the ability to fully and quickly integrate into the Microsoft Azure stack is well worth the hassle of quickly generating reports.

Incentivized

IMO it's best for an organization that has a lot of different people working on social media. They could be in different departments or just different members of the same team responsible for different types of posts (corporate, e-commerce, branding, etc.). I don't think it's as vital for a one-person team working solely within the Meta platform, for instance, especially if they're less concerned with detailed analytics.

Incentivized

• Builds dynamic audiences using real-time CRM and behavioral data without manual list maintenance.
• Triggers communications based on actions such as purchase, visit date, or post-visit timing.
• Manages high-volume transactional and lifecycle emails with consistent governance and compliance.

Incentivized

• For each account, customize posts for each platform, and schedule them to go live simultaneously.
• Employee Advocacy via Sprout Social has integrated AI assistance for captions. Usually I would generate one suggested caption for employees to use/stem from when re-sharing to their socials. But now, EA message ideas display in random orders to better promote the full range of content.
• Sprout Social has made the option to gamify the sharing concept quite easily with Employee Advocacy. Using the Leaderboard feature, employees can earn points in Employee Advocacy. Customized point values ensure you know how to climb the Leaderboard and start some friendly competition.

Incentivized

• Currently marketing is more contact centric, should add the flexibility of doing segmentation as well as customer journey on leads without associating with contact
• Pricing is based on number of contact, even if you are not marketing all of them.
• Cannot reuse the existing marketing lists created in CRM for marketing as seamlessly as in ClickDimensions, even though both uses the same Dataverse

Incentivized

• Social media platforms don't always play nice with Sprout so it will always be a challenge to get all integrations to work properly.
• Sprout Social is a growing organization and they are acquiring new technologies, which can be good. However, they often spend time in meetings upselling new services. I like to learn about enhancements and opportunities but prefer to focus on my investments first.

Incentivized

I wouldn't even think of renewing our use of Marketing 365. It's worthless

I like Sprout for our needs and I like that it is easy to use. We want something better than HootSuite but don't need a high-level fancy program. The only think I don't like is customer service (except for chat).

Incentivized

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing is extremely usable in order to manage all of my organization's customer information across the organization. Further we use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing to manage all of our marketing campaigns from beginning to end. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing makes my organization more able to run a professional marketing strategy.

Incentivized

Sprout Social's ease of use and navigation throughout the technology are relatively easy to figure out and teach. We also had a representative thoroughly walk us through the features and functionality to set us up for success in using the platform. I didn’t give it a ten because there were times when the navigation didn’t make sense, but once you figured out the quirks, it didn’t cause any trouble.

Incentivized

Uptime was OK, but given the fact that we are in Europe, there were some specific problems: They tended to take the system down for maintenance during the night in the US, which was during our workday. This was definitely problematic and hard to explain to our clients.

It is quick to post, however you have to refresh the page every time you add a new scheduled item.

Like all Microsoft corporation products, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing comes with the extremely high-quality customer support that Microsoft corporation has become well known for. Whether it is the availability of twenty-four/seven customer support or the highly-trained, very friendly customer support personnel, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing has the support you are looking for.

Incentivized

Sprout Social's customer support is extremely responsive. They're also always looking for suggestions on how they can make the product better and will actually take your ideas to their team to see if they're worth implementing. I've never had an issue that couldn't be resolved by them in a timely manner.

Incentivized

Their training is good, but the promotion of it is even better. I don't need or have the time for training, but I was always happy to know it was there. They did a great job sending updates out and making me aware when there was a new feature that I may want training for. As for the training I never used it, so I can't comment on that

Make sure you do it all the way. Do not break it into phases. Pour yourself a coffee, start it in the morning and you'll be done before you finish that coffee.

While the cost was significantly more than other vendors we looked at, the tools are similar to our previous tool so conversion would be (somewhat) easy. We chose it because it directly integrates with Microsoft Dynamics CRM - which we integrated at the same time.

Incentivized

We are constantly exploring our options and looking for the most cutting-edge products that suit our needs as a business. Sprout ticked the boxes for what we needed when it was time for a change. Both are powerful tools, and you can only see by doing.

Incentivized

• It took a few months to get things in order and I believe I could’ve gotten started sooner, but I had to learn about it first

Incentivized

• One positive impact has been a huge time saver for our team. Where we once had multiple systems and delays from producing content to approval to publishing, now everything is seamless.
• Another positive impact is streamlining the onboarding process for new team members. Sprout Social is user-friendly and intuitive, making it easy to study even for someone completely new to social media.
• One negative impact has been the time it takes to wade through irrelevant social listening posts. The filtering is not effective enough to eliminate the noise.

Incentivized