Spokal - actually making Marketing Automation fun
Updated June 16, 2015
Spokal - actually making Marketing Automation fun
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Essentials
Overall Satisfaction with Spokal
I am currently evaluating software to accelerate our content marketing strategy. For us Marketing automation software must meet these criteria: Ease of use, short learning curve and pay as you grow fees.
- 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
- Currently the number of tweets available to select from the feedly connection is set at 10. I understand this in the dev path. This needs a scrollable area to select more. Would be great to view feedly within the dashboard rather then as a separate tab in my browser.
- Would be good to drag the curated content from feedly directly into a blog and not just as a tweet. Then provide value add commentary and curation.
- zapier integration
- still evaluating the product so still too early to say. However the learning curve for marketing staff is going to be a lot less than the hubspots of the world
Know and like Hubspot. Its solid but may be cost prohibitive for some firms. It also has bit of a learning curve and 3rd party skills are not cheap if you need help from external agencies. Looked at Orbtr - this is an excellent product, also wordpress based. Looked at Leadius. A swedish company that has a very solid looking platform leaning more towards the hubspots but somewhat more affordable.