The basis of this offering is the Market2Lead product that Oracle acquired in 2010. It has now been fully integrated with Oracle's On Demand CRM product and is a full-featured marketing automation product with features from lead management and nurturing, to measuring marketing ROI.
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Spokal
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Spokal is an inbound marketing platform for small businesses and freelancers. It offers a drag & drop content editor and social media sharing calendar, as well as real-time SEO analysis, keyword research, rank tracking, lead scoring, and lead nurturing.
I think it is well suited for organizations which are large with a lot of users so as to be able to minimize the cost of operations. Also, the organization which interacts mostly with customers can use Oracle CRM on demand.
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.
Application customization is a key strength. We can create custom home page experiences for each type of user, customize object layouts to change dynamically depending on object type, and create an embedded sales process unique to our organization that helps facilitate the user through the process by specifying required fields dependent on what stage of the process they are in. The ability to customize goes directly to the success of user adoption - the fact that we can customize layouts and processes to support our internal business processes helps users make the most of the system.
Robust Reporting. The reporting and data warehouse capabilities are excellent. We have thousands of custom reports delivered in a number of ways - on home pages, on dashboards, on demand through the reporting menu, and on custom web tabs. These reports range from simple lists to complex multi-object analyses.
Ability to get data in and get data out. CRMOD makes it very easy to import data into any object. This is helpful for importing lists or making mass changes. Exporting data is equally easy, both from an administrator standpoint and for the user. Users can display a list or do a custom advanced search and then easily export the data to Excel without any admin help. They can also export from any report, which is helpful when sales data needs to be combined with other financial data in a larger analysis.
The system's workflow capabilities allow us to improve field validation, send important notifications, and enforce business process requirements.
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
A scripting mechanism is needed to customize the data entry forms. As any data driven system, Oracle CRM on demand is as reliable as its data is. Having sales people entering and maintaining the data you have to make sure they are doing that and not cutting corners. One way to do that is to enforce the business requirements in the entry forms.
User interface / user experience definitely can and should be improved.
It needs a way to send automatic reports on a schedule via email.
Support: as usual the Oracle support tends to be tedious and lengthy.
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.
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.
Compared to other competitors I find it very easy to use and learn .It has been helpful in our organisation and we have been able to manage our projects and operations well without interference.
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.
Oracle app is more available on different mobile devices, Microsoft Dynamics has only Windows and Android but Oracle has both web-based, Mac, IOS. Social CRM feature is another one that Microsoft Dynamics doesn't provide. On the other hand, Microsoft Dynamics provides offline line access. Also, Oracle integrations fit our needs better. Also Ticketing system support is better.
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.
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.
