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.
Oracle CRM is reliable and it fits well in a scenario where a company aims to grow their customer base and improve their relationship with their clients and ensure that all customer services are offered in an efficient manner. Oracle CRM is accessible from any device and this ensures easy usage of the platform and assure all staff to execute their various business processes.
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.
Several of our members were not familiar with various IT functions within CRM prior to working with it and so they were able to develop a working knowledge of IT pretty quickly afterwards.
It has a familiar feel to it as it allows users to work the data into a spreadsheet type layout with pivot tables and graphs and so it is quick to adopt.
Customization is great with a working knowledge of HTML, which isn't too hard to learn. You can really adapt CRM to any needs stylistically or content wise.
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
The ability to schedule and push out reports is missing from this system. If we want to mass deliver a report on a schedule, we must run it, export it and email it out to the group, or purchase a 3rd party system.
The ability to trigger workflow events on a schedule is missing this system. Currently, there has to be a trigger initiated by a user and we have situations where we'd like to be able to schedule a work flow routine to go out and check from specific situations and then trigger an action. We'd also like to be able to trigger workflow actions on one object based on something in another object and this capability is very limited.
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.
MS Dynamics was easy to integrate to MS Power BI. This BI and reporting aspect is a clear strong point for Microsoft. MS solutions seem easier to integrate and learn, but this depends on the IT landscape and the complexity of integrations in a respective company.
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.
This software can display in real-time when an order is submitted, received, fulfilled, and shipped out. We are able to know within the week of what new orders came in and how effective we are being from targeting specific regions of the nation.
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.
