Vendasta Review 2017
Cornering the Local Search Market
What is Vendasta?
Vendasta is a local marketing service company based in Canada that provides agencies with white-labeled marketing solutions for small and medium sized businesses.Their services include customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, local listings, sales pipeline management and report generation. To put it in a nutshell, they offer agencies with white label tools they can offer to customers.
Vendasta has been called a “feature rich” platform that offers a huge package of deals for agencies. Let’s take a closer look at Vendasta’s Services!
Listings Management
Vendasta’s marketing automation allows agencies to provide their customers with online listings management services.They create and update business information on 35 listing sites in addition to fixing similar information with data aggregators. They are also spread across several niche directories for SMBs such as real estate, healthcare, legal, restaurants, hospitality and automotive.
Type of Citations
(Acxiom, Factual, Infogroup and Local Neustar Localeze)
Directory
Synup Citation Score
Concierge and Digital Agency
Vendasta’s Concierge services allows agencies to manage all their client listings from a scalable dashboard of sorts. This includes integrating task creation and management, to-do’s, collaboration between departments, and other agency tasks. They also generate reports on a monthly basis to track necessary analytics that can be passed on to clients. An agency can even opt to give up their listings management to Vendasta’s in-house Digital Agency services which will be managed from under the agency’s brand. This means they will work alongside the said agency’s sales team as part of their Do-it-With-Me™ approach.
Snapshot and Email Marketing
Through Snapshot, Vendasta creates reports based listings analysis, reviews, social performance, website performance and online advertising. With these comprehensive reports, Vendasta offers an email marketing strategy as well. They have ready-made email campaigns that can be further customised with existing templates, and carry forward nurture campaigns.
Sales Pipeline Management and Lead Generation
Vendasta creates clearly defined, rich profiles of clients for digital and non-digital products which is to provide easy access for referencing from one place. This means adding the business’ information, social accounts, triggers, engagement metrics and client personas to have a streamlined process of maintaining client information. An agency’s sales team can prioritize leads with respect to the prospects engagement with the Snapshot reports, and the likelihood to convert.
Product Catalog
Vendasta’s “One Stop Digital Storefront” where agencies can handle multiple clients/vendors from an integrated setup. With the Product Catalog, agencies can highlight the products they want their customers to see. Further, each of the client’s products when added to the Product Catalog can have an additional promo page created with the product’s descriptions, images and contact information.
Vendasta Pricing
So Is Vendasta Worth Using?
That’s a good question! But let’s rephrase that question to put things into perspective. Is Vendasta an apt choice for your agency, based on their huge range of products, and how much you would have to pay them for it? If you are ‘best-case-scenario-curious’, or ‘worst-case-scenario-confused’, let’s help you weigh the pros and cons.
Why Vendasta is a Good Choice
- Variety of Services
Vendasta has a bunch of services for agencies to resell to their customers. With the 10x Platform and Marketplace, agencies and media companies have a long range of services to opt from, and further resell these services under their brand. - Online Presence
Like most facilitators providing digital marketing solutions, Vendasta’s products give your business a sound online presence. You are listed on most major directories and listing sites. - White Label Solutions
Vendasta is specific to providing a huge range of white label solutions for agencies to re-market to their customers with their own branding. They provide agencies with several white label options. - Listings Stability
With services like Yext and Moz Local, business listings are removed when the service is cancelled. This means the directories will either be missing information about a certain business, or would fall back on incorrect/incomplete/inaccurate business information that existed before the paid listing was created.But the stability of the listings remains intact with Vendasta even after the service is cancelled.
So, given all the pros to opting for Vendasta, here are some aspects of it that make you want to think twice about opting for their service.
Disadvantages of Using Vendasta
- Feature Rich Platform
How could this be a reason why you should think twice about Vendasta, you ask? Well, in a way it is the bane and boon of Vendasta. It can turn out to be overwhelming for an agency because of the plethora of services that are packaged into their plans. It might be confusing to decide what services are necessary for an agency as opposed to the quantity of the services offered as a part of their package. - API is Priced
Among other similar services in the industry, APIs are usually part of the basic package. But Vendasta charges its customers for its APIs according to their pricing plans. - SSO is Priced
The Single Sign-On (SSO) lets you login to one dashboard and internally manage all your clients using this singular login(or sign-on). Vendasta offers this as a paid feature on its higher plans and the feature is not available to the users of their basic plan. - Too Expensive for Smaller Agencies to Scale Up
If your agency needs the initial push to help your customers, Vendasta is a tough call because it is very expensive. The monthly fee along with the onboarding hee exceeds $1,000. Despite being “Feature rich”, Vendasta is expensive compared to its competitors like Yext, Birdeye or Synup. They have an additional onboarding fee which is quite the lump sum. - Limited to agencies
So, if you’re an SMB, you can’t subscribe to Vendasta.
Vendasta Alternative
Synup is a viable alternative which is cheaper, and has a flexible process. We offer similar local listing services along with an integrated dashboard that lets you manage all your listings from one place. There is no additional set-up fees, or recurring costs for APIs and SSOs. We also offer white labeled solutions for agencies.
Still not convinced that Synup is better than Vendasta? See how we’re different from them in our comparison page here!