In a vast sea of marketing automation (MA) platforms, it’s hard to pick the right tool – let alone fully understand what you’re even getting from your tool. And let’s be honest, every tool has email marketing and at the right paid level some type of automation, so what else should you be looking for when evaluating MA platforms? While our team is platform agnostic and works in powerful tools like HubSpot, Pardot, and Marketing Cloud, this blog post will dig into a few key features SharpSpring has to offer and why we feel they are valuable!
1. Support your inbound marketing strategy
The number one reason marketers look into a tool like this is to help nurture leads. Some of the marketing automation tools available focus heavily on automating your email nurture process, which is great in helping you optimize efficiency and results. But, if you’re utilizing an inbound strategy, you still need a way to generate those leads you want to nurture. SharpSpring offers tools to aid in lead generation – from attraction to lead capture.
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- Social publishing and monitoring tools to attract your audience
- Blog hosting for your educational content
- Landing page creation for your more technical, gated content
- Form creation for lead capture
It’s beneficial to have these tools and your marketing email platform in the same system, because it provides deeper insights and more opportunities for personalization and segmentation.
2. Enhance your sales process with a CRM
If you’re not using a CRM, you’ll find that SharpSpring can help you take that next step in one tool. In addition to organization and access to valuable insights, using a CRM in a MA platform affords you the opportunity to enhance your sales process. These are a few of my favorite tools in SharpSpring that can help.
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- Lead scoring. As you learn more about what makes a prospect qualified, you can begin to build a lead scoring system in SharpSpring. This score can be based on demographics as well as behavior and engagement with your marketing messages. A fully robust lead scoring process can help your sales team know who to spend time on and when they are ready to become a customer.
- Deal Tracking. It’s not just your contacts in SharpSpring when you’re using the CRM. You have the opportunity to build on report on deal pipelines in SharpSpring.
- Sales Optimizer. Sales Optimizer is a tool released in late 2019 which gives your sales team access to opportunity workflows, activity feeds, task reporting, and much more. This robust tool can really operate as the backbone of your sales team’s productivity if implemented properly.
3. Integrate your current processes
SharpSpring is not built as a silo. If you already have a CRM with a kick-butt sales process, you can easily integrate your two technologies.
Pro Tip: If you’re used to “speaking” Salesforce, the tool’s features will seem very intuitive.
- Objects (leads, accounts, and opportunities) are modeled in a very similar fashion to Salesforce’s.
- While many other marketing automation platforms use campaigns to organize and track metrics on assets, SharpSpring campaigns are contact based.
4. Prove ROI and report valuable metrics
As modern marketers, we are required more than ever to track and prove ROI on marketing programs. SharpSpring’s analytics tool can help you prove the success of your campaigns and even help you understand how the technology is helping you improve ROI. Here are the few areas you can easily report on:
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- Traffic sources. This will help you understand the exact channels bringing your contacts/prospects and eventually customers to your site. Is social helping to drive traffic? Has organic traffic increased since you implemented your content strategy?
- Website & landing page performance. See how long a visitor stays on your site, how many pages they viewed, and the specific pages that brought them to you. This part of the tool helps you understand how your site and content is performing.
- Cost per lead. As we mentioned earlier, campaigns are on a contact level, so this aspect of the tool helps you understand the efforts that helped to convert prospects to customers. Since you can tie campaign budgets and spend in SharpSpring, you can get a detailed report highlighting the average cost per lead for all campaigns or specific initiatives.
5. Price
This is likely the first concern for most small to medium businesses considering a marketing automation tool. The price of the SharpSpring platform is moderately lower than some other top tools on the market, especially considering what tools are offered. Additionally, partnering with a certified agency partner, like Launch Team, gives you access to even better pricing structures. The best part? Because you’re still using a powerful tool, you’re not sacrificing quality or functionality, and you’re getting the continued support of a qualified agency.
Surely, there are features we haven’t mentioned here. However, these are a few areas that we find worth investigating when evaluating marketing automation technology.
What are are your next steps?
Now that you got the scoop on SharpSpring, we’d love to help you take the next steps in your technology research. Take the path that makes the most sense for you!
- Are you ready to see the tool in action? Schedule a demo.
- Still confused on the right tool for your company’s needs? Request a free 30 minute technology consultation.
- Want to keep researching on your own? Check out these resources:
About Launch Team, Inc.
We are a multi-dimensional, highly focused marketing firm that has helped companies in technical and engineering-driven industries succeed. We've been doing this for over 30 years, increasing and improving our offerings along the way. Our team's backgrounds include optics, chemistry, biology paired with a core business and marketing focus. This allows our team a unique understanding of your business, the decision makers you work with, and the engineers who will evaluate your solution.
