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Is HighLevel Worth It? The Ultimate HighLevel Review for Businesses and Agencies

Whether you are a business owner, or an digital marketing agency owner, you are always looking for ways to improve your business, streamline your operations, and increase your sales.

With so many tools and platforms available, it can be challenging to figure out which ones will deliver the best results now, and in the future as you continue to grow. This is why we want to introduce you to HighLevel – the all-in-one platform designed to help you achieve your goals and take your business to the next level.

Why We Chose HighLevel As Our Foundation

Circa 2017 I started my first marketing agency working with Chiropractors running lead generation ad campaigns.

In the pre-HighLevel days we strung together Zapier, Active Campaign, Call Rail, EZTexting and more to generate great results for our clients. All-in, we were paying about $870 per month for our “software stack.”

When HighLevel first came out, I was hesitant to get started and regretfully went with a platform that is now no longer available (great choice, I know).

To say that HighLevel revolutionized our business is not an understatement. We were able to cut our software stack down to just Zapier and HighLevel, gain a much better pulse on attribution, and provide major quality of life updates for our clients. Trust me when I say that going from a spreadsheet of leads to a full-fledged CRM is a night-and-day difference…

I’m a day one OG on HighLevel and while I love the platform, it’s definitely been through some major changes over the years.

If you are reading this article right now trying to determine if HighLevel is worth it for your business or marketing agency, let me give you a bit of perspective on why we have stuck with it for years with this HighLevel review.

Is HighLevel Right For Me?

HighLevel is much more than just a platform; it’s a community of like-minded business owners who are all working together to achieve their goals. In fact, the community alone is over 28,000 members strong and the number of businesses being support on the platform is well into the millions.

With its powerful features, (moderately) intuitive interface, and exceptional community support, HighLevel gives you everything you need to succeed. Whether you’re looking ot streamline your operations, increase your sales, or save time and money, HighLevel has got you covered.

Streamlined Operations

One of the biggest benefits of HighLevel is its ability to bring together all the tools and services you need to run your business in one convenient place. With its all-in-one approach, you’ll be able to manage your entire business from one platform, eliminating the need for multiple tools and services.

Our biggest revelation when we fully switched to HighLevel was the amount of time we could save on repetitive operations by simply automating them.

With every lead we captured through advertising campaigns, every client we onboarded, and every sales call we booked we were saving massive amounts of time.

Like clockwork the automations we had set up for ourselves and for our clients ran without fail – sending reminders, updating opportunity statuses, notifying staff members and so much more.

Without exaggeration the average business owner can easily claim 3-5+ labour hours of productivity per week by setting up a few basic automations.

HighLevel has everything you need to streamline your operations, reduce administrative overhead, bring clarity to your reporting, and focus your time and resources on what really matters – growing your business.

Increased Sales

Surprisingly one of the biggest oversights for most business owners (including our clients) is not that they don’t have enough customers, it’s that they are missing opportunities with their current customers or letting them slip through the cracks.

HighLevel makes it easier than ever to communicate with your audience and customers by bringing multiple communication channels into one simple location.

After a quick setup and a few integrations you’ll be able to segment your audience, create custom campaigns, and track your results, giving you all the tools you need to drive more traffic, generate more leads, and close more deals.

Here are two extremely high-value examples of automations you can set up within 15-minutes that would pay major dividends for your business or agency:

  1. Missed Call Text Back: Automatically send a text to a caller if they hit your voicemail. You can even go so far as to send one message during business hours and another during off hours.
  2. Google Business Profile Integration: When you integrate your Google Business Profile with HighLevel you can opt-in to the messaging beta where users of Google Maps can quickly message you questions or reach out to you. This also replaces your default phone number with one that tracks automatically inside of HighLevel

In our marketing agency, one of the most useful features in sales for our clients is the Reporting  section that shows us where our customers are coming from and what campaigns we should focus our budget on.

If you are serious about growing your bottom-line and finding major efficiencies in your sales processes, HighLevel is a powerful tool that can accommodate both large and small sales teams.

Time and Money Savings

Nothing in your business will be more powerful and effective in saving time than setting up automations.

“Automations” might be a really broad term that has you scratching your head so I’ll give you a handful of ideas that would absolutely take your business to the next level if they were done consistently, without fail:

  • Requesting repeat buyers to leave you a Google review
  • Allowing potential and existing customers to schedule with you online
  • Sending appointment reminders and reducing no-show rates
  • Telling a long-time client “Happy Birthday”
  • Increasing repeat buyer frequency through automated email & sms campaigns
  • Multiplying customer lifetime value with upsells and cross-sells in funnels
  • Creating a “red-carpet” onboarding experience for a new client
  • And endless other useful, time-saving applications

On the platform, automations are referred to as “workflows.”

Workflows process automatically based on any number of criteria that you set such as a contact completing a purchase, a tag being added to a contact, or even a third-party tool like Zapier dropping a contact directly into the workflow.

Within workflows a contact sequentially goes through each action. An action could be something as simple as sending a text message or email, or something as useful as reporting a conversion to Facebook via the Conversion API.

Don’t underestimate how robust and powerful workflows can be to your business. From improving your tracking and analytics to creating a better customer journey, workflows are one of the foundational features that makes HighLevel worth it.

If you take one thing away from this HighLevel review, it’s that HighLevel pays for itself in dividends with the power of automations and workflows.

Funnels, Websites and Courses

HighLevel has a comprehensive, easy-to-use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) funnel builder.

The builder is most comparable to ClickFunnels and is beginner-friendly. If you are apprehensive about building a funnel, HighLevel has well over 150 solid templates you can use as a starting point.

Funnel templates range from lead generation pages to scheduling pages to checkout pages.

The HighLevel website builder is based on the funnel builder with a couple of extra widgets that enable website-like navigation on the pages.

Load times on websites and funnels are blazing fast and we’ve even managed to get a large number of our client’s funnels ranking on Google to drive organic traffic.

Courses (“Memberships”) on the HighLevel platform most similarly resemble Kajabi.

If you, or your clients, have any intention on creating, selling or distributing a course, HighLevel is more than adequate for the vast majority of courses and programs.

Pricing

Subscriptions for HighLevel start at just $97 per month.

Unlike many other platforms that charge based on the number of contacts you upload, HighLevel allows you to have unlimited contacts.

At the $97 tier you are only allowed to create one “location” or “sub-account.” If you are not a marketing agency or intending on white-labeling and selling HighLevel as your own, the $97/month subscription might work for you.

If you have multiple lines of business (services) or locations you should spring for the $297/month subscription.

Finally, even though it’s not shown on the HighLevel website, there is a final pricing tier at $497/month called Pro. If you want to sell HighLevel as your own SaaS, enable re-billing for telephony and email usage you should opt for the $497/month subscription.

 

Is HighLevel Worth It?

Without making this HighLevel review over 20,000 words, it’s hard to fully demonstrate the usefulness and utility benefits that HighLevel has brought to our marketing agency and the businesses of our clients.

Objectively HighLevel is 100% worth the subscription costs. While you can find platforms like Active Campaign starting at a much lower monthly rate, they do not possess nearly the amount of features and tools.

HighLevel is a full-stack CRM and marketing automation platform and you should effectively be able to replace at least 3 or 4 other subscriptions when you get situated with HighLevel.

The chart below from the HighLevel website is a pretty great representation of all the tools and platforms you might be able to replace with your HighLevel subscription.

 

Ultimately, whether or not HighLevel is right for you will come down to your ability to implement and adopt.

The market has plenty of great options out there from Hubspot to Close to HighLevel. Small businesses will get a tremendous amount of value from HighLevel, but it may not be best-suited for large businesses and enterprises.

If you are curious about the power and value of HighLevel as a CRM and marketing automation platform I highly recommend you to checkout HighLevel with a 14-day trial.

 

Want to learn step-by-step how to build a profitable & passive white label SaaS in less than 4 weeks?
About Hunter Neeley

With a strong background in entrepreneurship and growth hacking, Hunter Neeley is an experienced writer and expert on business strategy, marketing, and lifestyle design. His insights and advice have helped countless entrepreneurs and professionals achieve success and fulfillment in both their personal and professional lives.

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