Marketing 360 review

As a small business carrying out and managing a marketing strategy is crucial to promote your business. However, when budget is tight and you can either afford one incredibly experienced and specialized marketing professional freelancer or a small team of marketing juniors who need more training but have the foundation of skills and marketing awareness, what should you do? Turn to Marketing 360, it seems. Read on for a full Marketing 360 review.

Marketing 360 aims to solve the common small business marketing conundrum described above, by bringing everything into the same platform. This includes sales contacts, social media, the best content marketing tools, ecommerce software and much more.

As a Marketing 360 client you automatically get a Customer Success Manager who works with you to understands your business requirements and where necessary can connect you with professionals who can help with tasks such as website design and content creation.

Marketing 360 is, in theory, your own dedicated marketing department but without the higher price tag which comes with it. Having all that in one place, should also help to ensure you have a single, consistent style to your marketing activities. 

Be warned though, the challenge is in giving up control over your marketing materials. If you delegate tasks such as sales, content writing or web development to Marketing 360 you are dependant on their experts or systems meeting your expectations and timelines. 

If they do not you could have trouble extricating yourself and setting on a different course. Keep in mind as you read our Marketing 360 review, your experience with the platform is likely to vary depending on the team you have. 

Whether Marketing 360 is for you depends largely on your working style. Some will love the full suite of features and ability to quickly access talent. Others will prefer to have control over content generation themselves.  

Marketing 360 pricing

Marketing 360's pricing comes in several tiers depending on what level of service you’re looking for. 

You can get started with a free account which offers features such as CRM, payments and reputation tools. From there you can move on to paid services which start at $25 with the option of paying more for services such as content creation, website design or anything else you might use their experts for. 

While prices aren't hidden and the Sales team will speak to you freely about business costs, it's hard to pinpoint a monthly or even annual cost as you usually have with Software as a Service subscriptions. The perk of Marketing 360 is that there are plenty of free tools, but if you need additional services costs will mount up. 

Marketing 360 features

Marketing 360 gives you a veritable smorgasbord of features designed to replicate all the wonderful things you’d usually expect your marketing team to do. 

They come divided into handy sections such as such as:

✔ Marketing

✔ Email Marketing

✔ Content Marketing

✔ Websites

✔ Ecommerce 

✔ Social media

✔ CRM

✔ Payments

✔ Scheduling 

✔ Reputation and review management 

✔ Listings management

✔ Form creation 

One of our favourite features is in Reputation, which empowers your business to monitor how your brand is performing on the main review sites. This tells you where sales can be ramped up successfully, plus areas for product improvement and innovation. IT also helps you respond to reviews in a quickly and timely manner. 

The Marketing 360 dashboard provides an overview of your content marketing activity, allows you to track keywords and track where your traffic is coming from. If you upgrade your content or access any other services, you can access one of their specialists who’ll manage this entire process for you.   

On top of that you can also use them for a range of services such as content creation, branding, videos and much more. It’s a bewildering range of services which means you’re fully covered but might run the risk of information overload if you're not sure what your marketing strategy requires to begin with.

Marketing 360 interface 

One of the big selling points of Marketing 360 is the sheer number of things it lets you do. With that, though, comes the question of how you make it accessible and understandable.  

For the most part, they manage to overcome this with a clean, clear interface which allows for easy navigation. The dashboard has your company name with a list of available applications. If they’re in light grey links, you probably don’t have them included in your plan. 

Each app has contact information for the professional at Marketing 360 who will be best placed to help you out. This will be the person who is most familiar with your needs and should be able to provide help when you need it. 

The interface has a huge amount of information, and some users have complained that there’s more here than they could ever hope to use. However once you get used to it, navigating your way around the site is relatively straightforward. 

Marketing 360 support  

Marketing 360's platform has a lot of information and advice in the form of guides and videos to help you. If you browse the features, you’ll get a very short introduction to each one. There are other, longer and more detailed guides, like the platform overview video above, available as you get deeper into the product via their YouTube channel. 

They have a knowledge centre and a blog providing more granular information about using the product and an online help hub divided into key categories such as payments, scheduling, or creatives. You can either browse by category or use the search tab.

If you need help from their team, customer support is available by phone or email. Note that support is only available Monday to Friday and support hours differ by the following time zones: 

Marketing 360 support hours by time zone:

Mountain: 7am-4pm

Eastern: 9am-6pm

Central: 8am-5pm

Pacific: 6am-3pm

Marketing 360 competition

Marketing 360 exists in a tightly packed market. There is a host of platforms out there claiming to offer much the same service as Marketing 360. Some of the biggest include: 

✔ HubSpot CRM and marketing: A powerful app which automates all your marketing and CRM activities and helps you find new business. 

✔ MailChimp: A platform focused on email marketing campaigns. You can plan and create email marketing strategies, view metrics and schedule automated emails.

✔ Monday.com: One of the more well-known platforms on the market, this is more geared to workflow and managing collaboration between multidisciplinary teams. 

Each of these have their own strengths. Marketing 360’s advantage is that it offers a complete solution all in one package. 

Marketing 360 final verdict

Marketing 360 bills itself as giving you ‘your own dream team behind the scenes’. In other words, it gives you a complete marketing team with all the expertise on tap that a larger corporation might have. For the most part they succeed in achieving this. 

The good

Thanks to its user-friendly software tools and a talented team of professionals on hand to assist you with SMB activities, the Marketing 360 platform will reduce your search for a marketing team significantly. The platform is specifically designed for small business owners who need to scale back to save costs. 

The larger idea behind the platform is having all your marketing information in one place, so you can gain deeper insights, see what’s really working and tailor your activity accordingly. Marketing 360 has dedicated Marketing Success Managers to help you with this, alongside a customizable CRM, ecommerce manager, form builder, email and SMS manager, and online business review monitor. We also like that it has many marketing programs devoted to helping your business including a content marketing and SEO program, multi-channel advertising program, and a social media management program.

The questionable

The downside is that you are dependant on their experts. If you’re using regular freelancers, you control who you use, and can assess their competence. With this, there’s an element of luck. You have to hope they can provide a service which meets your requirements and trust that you'll work well with the professionals provided. 

Of course the pro that comes with Marketing 360 is managing your marketing is quicker, easier, and in theory at least, cheaper. However, there have been complaints on some online reviews about over-zealous sales tactics and businesses and entrepreneurs will still want to retain control over their own marketing activities. If you can firmly say no and are happy to outsource control however, Marketing 360 may be right for your business.