SharpSpring is a worthy alternative to using multiple marketing sytems
February 10, 2017
SharpSpring is a worthy alternative to using multiple marketing sytems
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with SharpSpring
At PlanStartGrow, we primarily use SharpSpring to deliver marketing services to small businesses focused on creating automated marketing solutions. This means they get the marketing results they need and want, without doing the work themselves, and everything happens automatically using their current marketing budget. Plus, our Almost Free Marketing pays for itself—guaranteed—and our unique 3-step approach ensures success.
The marketing solutions we provide involve increasing profitable revenue, creating more customers, generating qualified sales leads, facilitating active social media, publishing interesting blog articles, and increasing website traffic.
Our work often includes providing a SharpSpring license to our clients for collaborative use when requested. In any event, we always create and manage individual, dedicated SharpSpring accounts within our agency for each client rather than sharing SharpSpring account across multiple clients.
The marketing solutions we provide involve increasing profitable revenue, creating more customers, generating qualified sales leads, facilitating active social media, publishing interesting blog articles, and increasing website traffic.
Our work often includes providing a SharpSpring license to our clients for collaborative use when requested. In any event, we always create and manage individual, dedicated SharpSpring accounts within our agency for each client rather than sharing SharpSpring account across multiple clients.
- SharpSpring is well suited to match the needs, wants, and expectations of small businesses.
- SharpSpring is, essentially, a "most-in-one" marketing system that is fast to learn and easy to use.
- SharpSpring offers ample functionality sufficient to consolidate multiple individual marketing systems.
- While SharpSpring (the company) seems very interested in reminding everyone “SharpSpring is literally 1/10th to 1/20th the cost of other platforms”, SharpSpring’s top benefit is facilitating more sophisticated marketing for businesses and agencies.
- SharpSpring (the company) is a small business and this translates into occasional “discomfort”.
- Tactical examples include things like limited telephone support hours, random system performance issues, and occasional buggy launches. While marketing agencies can effectively mitigate these types of issues, clients may have experiences that introduce account management friction if they choose to be collaborating users (i.e. have direct logins for their SharpSpring account).
- Strategically, SharpSpring has been slow to market to businesses and this means almost no one knows SharpSpring. This is strange in an environment where competitors like HubSpot seem focused on flooding the market with advertising, promotion, education, and more. The impact is SharpSpring is usually perceived to be the “cheap” alternative to something else the client is researching, evaluating, negotiating, or buying.
- With SharpSpring, we have discovered and corrected marketing budget waste of $480,000 at a single client.
- Consolidating multiple and disparate marketing systems into a single SharpSpring instance allows clients to experience a natively unified solution that is faster to learn and easier to use than any other multi-system alternative, and acheive positive ROI by reducing marketing administration workloads alone!
- A business or agency without SharpSpring might require Constant Contact for email marketing, SalesForce for customer relationship management (CRM), Act-On for marketing automation, FormStack for online forms, WordPress for blogs, Unbounce for landing pages, and Google for analytics. Or they can choose SharpSpring.
Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM Feature Ratings
Using SharpSpring
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Features are organized to match use cases so most projects and tasks can be completed without leaving a section or screen.
- The numerous help videos are very effective -- almost like an on-demand screen sharing session -- and are an excellent complement to the many help articles.
- If you have ever used any popular marketing system, whether CRM or email marketing, you will find the SharpSpring user interface intuitive and simple to use.
- Integrating with the SharpSpring API is challenging, but this seems inherent nature of using APIs.
- Some screens don't "remember" previous visits so you might find yourself repeating your past actions when configuring reports, for example.
Yes, but I don't use it