Marketing automation to replace your marketing automatons
October 10, 2016
Marketing automation to replace your marketing automatons
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with SharpSpring
We primarily deploy SharpSpring as the marketing automation backbone to support our client services in content marketing. We consult, implement, train and manage content marketing campaigns for our clients on the SharpSpring platform. We also use SharpSpring for our own marketing automation. The main business problem we solve with SharpSpring is being able to provide a reliable and robust marketing automation feature set for our clients without breaking the bank. Content needs marketing automation and marketing automation needs content. The fatal flaw with most of the other marketing automation players is that they cost so much that the marketers have no budget leftover to make meaningful content. As a result, the marketing suffers and the application sits there gathering dust. With SharpSpring's disruptive affordability, you can address more resources to making high-quality content marketing materials and, as a result, actually put your marketing technology to work.
- Primarily, it positively changes the equation for your marketing spend. Price performance is by far the best feature of SharpSpring.
- If you know marketing automation, especially if you learned on another platform, you will find the user experience inside of SharpSpring to be pleasantly well designed. The information architecture and interaction design has been thought out and intelligently implemented. The ease of use is a plus not only for the admin, but for client/employee training.
- Adding to the cost effectiveness, SharpSpring has a serviceable CRM that can replace seats in more expensive softwares, especially for less sophisticated CRM operations. In my experience, far too many businesses waste money in SFDC because they don't know any better. Time to ween off the teat of ol' SaaSy?
- I just touted the strengths of SharpSpring CRM over SFDC for many instances, but of course some companies can not manage that kind of change. In this case, SharpSpring does offer an SFDC integration, and I wish it was better. I am told that SharpSpring is working on upgrading this integration and I hope they get there soon. But if you're one such company stuck in an SFDC instance, do the high-level cost-benefit analysis. How many quarters will it take to justify the migration to a more sensible system?
- In general, we'd like to see more native third party integrations for SharpSpring. Specifically, we're looking for a segment.io integration.
- As an agency partner providing content marketing services on top of the marketing automation backbone, SharpSpring enables us to offer a robust marketing automation solution to our clients at a fraction of the cost of the other players. This means much more content can be produced for our clients, keeping our creatives busy and keeping our customers happy.
SharpSpring is the cost performance leader -- not by a mile, by light years. The same reliable marketing automation feature set you get anywhere else for a fraction of the cost. It is the definition of a marketing technology no-brainer. Other systems do have additional modules and features, but in 5 years of marketing I have never found a use case that justified the rube-goldbergesque contortions marketing teams put themselves through in order to make these bells and whistles chime. Marketing automation is straightforward, learn it and understand it at an intellectual level, then find the tool that allows you to deploy your strategy. SharpSpring is, by far, the right choice for us.