Welcome to learn more about the marketing agency tools and resources I use to run my business for digital marketers . This is a guest post on digital marketing terms. In this day and age, it is impossible for agencies (both small and large companies) to function properly without the best in class marketing tools and technology. There are so many useful and seemingly indispensable online resources that a few years ago would have cost small companies millions of dollars.
Marketing is the art and science of getting your message about a product or service in front of a potential customer at the right time to have the most positive impact on their decision. A crucial part of this process is managing data, accounts and reporting for your team or agency.
If you are a digital marketing agency, you need the best marketing tools to handle all your tasks faster and smarter. As we talk about free software, there are many free tools that can help. Unfortunately, they are not providing high quality & more with charges options. So today we will give you a look at some of these best tools and how they help you in your business.
Build an advertising campaign from scratch with our software for agencies . Manage projects from start to finish with our project management system. Do your taxes and invoicing in just a few clicks. Hire talent, handle a job request, run your events. From one account dashboard – it’s all here. Tools made for agencies by agencies.
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Once you have built your team, it is time to move on to your marketing campaign.
Design Tools
For advertising agencies this is a an obvious one, but it would be odd not to mention it. Depending on what types of advertising you are doing you’ll require different types of tool. There are plenty of tools for graphic design, video advertising, HTML5 banner design – the list goes on.
Resource Management
With dozens of different projects going on at once, sometimes you need to set back and get an overview of what is going on in your advertising agency. Resource management tools that have been tailor-made for advertising agencies can help managers see what is going on and manage where they can best use their resources.
An overview of the 10,000 Feet platform. The clean design lets you clearly see what’s going on in your projects.10,000 Feet lets you take that step back and look at what is going on within your agency. This tool allows you to take strategic decisions based on complex data and the scheduling tool can give you accurate estimations on how long projects are going to take in terms of hours. Perfect for those who love data and want to know exactly what’s happening when.
The Float platform has been designed with agencies in mind.Float is a simple resource management tool which has been build with creative and advertising agencies in mind. Float allows managers to have an overview on your teams projects and work schedules. You can even send them weekly updated schedules via email. In float it is also possible to build reports to see how teams, team members are departments are working.
Roadmap, as the name suggests, lets you forecast your projects and resources. This tool is easy to use and feels familiar as you can view all portfolios in a simple calendar view.
Project Management & Collaboration Tools
Agency tools for collaboration and project management are vital for all parts of your team. We all know that if you aren’t nailing project management you could lose that lucrative contract.
Basecamp is an incredibly popular project management tool which is versatile and make collaborative work within teams manageable.
Teamwork is an alternative to Basecamp allowing advertising agencies to manage projects and work collaboratively.Another project management tool you could consider is Basecamp. This platform allows teams to become more transparent to clients with the unique feature: The Risk Register where you can post “risks” and assign it a priority.
Projectplace is a project management tool which includes a lot of features that not seen in other project management tools including issue management, project templates, online meetings, and resource management, as well as reports and analytics. One great feature in particular is that Projectplace lets you detect when resources have been overbooked and you may experience stoppage in your creative team’s workflow.
Marketing Agency Tools #1: Workflow Automation
As a marketing agency, you’re going to use a large variety of business and productivity apps. Every client is going to have a different marketing stack, and you’ll need a way to easily integrate many of them.
Additionally, the need to adopt marketing automation for agencies is growing, fast.
Zapier is an awesome tool for marketing agencies because you can create automated workflows across tools in your mar-tech stack. In fact, Zapier is compatible with thousands of tools, and you can easily chain commands together with an “If X happens, do Y” structure.
For example, the MobileMonkey Zapier integration allows you to easily send information that’s stored to customer profiles in MobileMonkey to other applications.
Here are just some of the more popular “Zaps” for MobileMonkey users:
- Add all new leads to your CRM, such as Salesforce
- Send SMS messages or Slack notifications to new contacts
- Subscribe new MobileMonkey contacts to MailChimp
- Register MobileMonkey contacts to Zoom Webinars
One of the main selling points of Zapier for marketing agencies is that this automation allow you to combine multiple actions and apps together in a single Zap. So, let’s say a client sends you an email with an attachment. Using Zapier, you can store it on your Google Drive, share it with your team, and update your project management board without needing to do anything.
Zapier will save your agency lots of time by automating repetitive tasks and please your clients when you’re able to work with their tech stack.
Marketing Agency Tools #2: Live Web Chat Software
The best live chat software allows you to proactively engage with customers and prospects in order to grow revenue, generate leads, and offer real-time support across multiple channels.
Studies have shown that live chat software:
- Boosts website engagement rates by 3X
- Increases conversions on websites by 45%
- Makes consumers 63% more likely to return to a website
Most web chat software is only available to use on a company’s website. However, with OmniChat™ technology by MobileMonkey, you can engage with customers across multiple channels, whether that’s a website, SMS text messages, or other messaging apps.
There are a lot of web chat examples for marketing agencies to choose from, such as:
- Qualify and generate leads
- Build a sales chatbot
- Get more reviews
- Run a Facebook giveaway
- Send bulk text messages and Facebook Messenger chat blasts
The ability to use live web chat on different marketing channels, all from one unified inbox, can be a game-changer for your marketing agency.
Marketing Agency Tools #3: Project Management Software
Teamwork is a flexible work management software that gives marketing agencies the tools they need to deliver exceptional projects for their clients.
As an agency, you’re not only managing your own work, you’re also managing your clients’ work. With Teamwork’s “Workload” solution, you can get a complete picture of your team’s capacity and manage it more effectively.
This makes it easier for marketing agencies to respond to changes quickly and keep their team on track.
Additionally, Teamwork allows you to build custom workflows and gives agencies one central place to visualize team projects and tasks, deadlines, and workloads.
Lastly, client communication is facilitated by teamwork, as you can add clients as collaborators. By doing so, clients can leave comments, review assets, view the progress of projects, and eliminate many back and forth email threads.
Marketing Agency Tools #4: SEO Management Software
SEMrush is one of the best SEO tools to make your clients visible online.
Agency teams use SEMrush to help clients master content marketing, improve SEO across their websites, create PPC campaigns, and manage their social media presence.
Some of the most popular tools to create a plan for your clients consist of:
- Website audit
- Social media tracker
- Backlink audit
- Ad builder
- Keyword position tracking
- On-page SEO checker
- PPC keyword tool
- Organic traffic insights
So, if you think about it, not only can you use SEMrush for SEO optimization with your clients, you can also use SEMrush to find prospects and land new business.
By gaining insights into potential clients, the better you’ll be able to pitch them. Use SEMrush to:
- Analyze potential clients and their online visibility
- Get insights into their online performance, marketing strategy, and budgets
- Understand their niche and target audience
- Locate gaps in their marketing strategy to offer a personalized action plan
Marketing Agency Tools #5: Marketing Analytics & Social Media Reporting
Whatagraph is a marketing analytics & social media reporting tool for companies, teams, and marketing experts to visually monitor campaign performance.
This tool enables professionals to automatically pull information from digital marketing channels and turn analytical data into visually appealing reports & dashboards.
Whatagraph enables marketing professionals to monitor numbers in real-time and share automated performance reports with important clients & colleagues.
Its main benefits include:
- Pre-made templates
- Automatic report delivery (keeps clients informed by automatically sending updated reports)
- Custom API (import custom data from any source to reports).
- Custom branding (colors, logos, etc).
- Dedicated account managers (personal onboarding).
- Integrations with all major social media networks & analytical platforms.
Marketing Agency Tools #6: Social Media Analytics & Management
Iconosquare is one of the leading analytics and management platforms used by agencies and social media marketers.
Agencies use Iconosquare to help their clients manage their social media accounts. (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are available).
Some of the best features for agencies on Iconosquare are:
- In-depth analytics to understand their clients’ audience for increased account growth and engagement.
- Easy reporting – easily report the performance to your clients thanks to branded PDF reports at the click of a button.
- Multi profile management – report and analyze the social media performance of multiple social media profiles and content for your clients from one dashboard.
- Automatic scheduler – save time by setting and forgetting your content in advance.
- Scheduler collaboration – facilitate collaboration with your clients or your team by sharing your scheduler calendar with external approvers.
Other useful features for agencies on Iconosquare:
- Competitor analysis
- Conversations
- Hashtag tracking
- Industry benchmark
Marketing Agency Tools #7: Competitor Keyword Research
SpyFu is the best tool available for competitor keyword research.
And each of your current or prospective marketing agency clients are going to get excited when you tell them you can steal traffic and leads from their competitors.
With SpyFu you can search for any domain and see every place they’ve shown up on Google, every keyword they’ve bought on Adwords, every organic rank, and every ad variation in the last 13 years.
SpyFu has step-by-step guides on how to:
- Find the keywords most important to your client’s market
- Increase your clients’ ranking for specific keywords
- Plan a content marketing campaign
- Research your client’s competitors marketing strategies
- Start a new AdWords campaign
Additionally, with SpyFu’s AdWords Advisor tool, if you analyze your client’s website, you can analyze all of their competitors’ AdWords bidding history and recommend the most profitable keywords your clients aren’t yet targeting.
SpyFu makes it easy to delight marketing agency clients because you can walk into a room and present hard data that shows how you’re going to help them beat out their competitors.
Marketing Agency Tools #8: Social Media Management
Being able to prove your agency’s social media ROI to your clients can be powerful. AgoraPulse provides the tools you need to do just that.
AgoraPulse has publishing modal’s built-in UTM parameters to show your agency’s impact on conversions and revenue. This allows you to spot and eliminate spam and negative comments on your ads to encourage more positive engagement and ROI on your client’s ad spend.
For marketing agencies, anything you can do to save time is paramount to your success. AgoraPulse makes it easy to export reports with key metrics and analysis on engagement and growth to present to clients.
Furthermore, it never hurts to impress clients. So, add your logo to the PowerPoint decks generated by AgoraPulse and your clients will think you built it from scratch.
AgoraPulse also has tools to allow collaboration between marketing agencies and their clients. For example, with a shared calendar, clients can review, accept, reject, and give feedback on your scheduled social media content. Each shared calendar gives you unlimited calendar users and unlimited profiles.
Marketing Agency Tools #9: Facebook Messenger Marketing
MobileMonkey supports chat marketing on Facebook Messenger and is a real marketing automation weapon to pitch your clients.
Using an omnichannel chatbot like MobileMonkey, you can use the same dialogue as you do on your client’s website across multiple web chat apps. This makes it easy to get tons of Messenger contacts and their data using Facebook post autoresponders.
A little-known Facebook Messenger hack is that when someone replies to one of your Facebook Page’s posts, you get permission to send them an opt-in message.
If the recipient engages with the message, you gain access to keep sending them messages, and you’ll capture their contact information in the process.
The simplest way to do this is to ask an engaging question with buttons for leads to click. This is one of the most effective ways to collect free leads, nurture, and qualify them for your clients.
For example, a proactive live chat message like the following on Facebook Messenger can be very effective.
There are even more powerful ways you can use Facebook Messenger marketing for clients as well. One of them is through paid engagement.
And the main product for generating new leads through Facebook Messenger chat is click-to-Messenger ads.
It’s a news feed ad format that instead of sending traffic to a website, sends the traffic to an engaging Messenger chat session.
As soon as they send your business a message, they become a contact and you capture their contact information.
Furthermore, you can use click-to-Messenger ads to drive people into messaging sessions that:
- Invite people to take surveys
- Make a purchase
- Register for an event
And this is more efficient than website traffic because it’s much easier to have all this work done in messaging than it is in a browser.
This is great for remarketing campaigns as well because you’re capturing all of their Facebook contact information. What you can do is segment the leads you capture for your clients into audiences based on certain properties, and then re-engage using customized bulk messages on Facebook, SMS, and other web chat apps.
Lastly, because you receive the user’s contact information as soon as the conversation starts, the cost per lead becomes incredibly low.
There are many more Facebook chatbot marketing tactics for you to explore, such as boosting a post on Facebook or sending sponsored messages directly into users’ Messenger threads.
Marketing Agency Tools #10: Facebook Ads Manager
Performance marketing agencies can quickly be in control of managing hundreds or even thousands of ads for their clients. That’s why a tool like AdEspresso can be a particularly useful addition to your marketing agency tools.
Whether you’re a freelancer or an experienced marketing agency, AdEspresso has the right combination of Automation tools designed to save you time and generate more leads for your clients.
AdEspresso allows you to quickly create and analyze all your clients’ campaigns across three channels, all from one platform:
- Facebook ads
- Google AdWords
- Instagram ads
What’s particularly useful for performance marketing agencies is AdEspresso’s ability to simplify the onboarding of new clients using its Onboarding Requests tool. With this feature, you can have your clients provide access to their pages and ad accounts with as little friction as possible.
Additionally, if you need to add external services, you can also request access to your clients’ CRM to connect AdEspresso.
Other useful tools for agencies on AdEspresso:
- Request approval for your campaigns
- Create and send customized reports
- White label the product to the look and feel of your agency
- Team collaboration and permissions management
Digital Marketing Agency Tools
1. Whatagraph
Use this tool for data analyitcs and agency reporting.
It’s all about results that clients care about. And so, while you might be getting lots of work done, if you can’t demonstrate and document your results, your clients may still be unhappy. That’s why a good marketing agency reporting software is essential.
Whatagraph reporting software was built by marketers for agencies. Meaning it knows what your clients want to see from a marketing perspective (all the most important metrics and KPIs for all their marketing channels), but also adapts to the specific agency workflows, such as:
- managing multiple client accounts at the same time;
- managing multiple marketing channels for the same client;
- scheduling reports for automated delivery;
- easily sharing reports via email or screen,
- adding custom branding, and so on.
For most agencies, Whatagraph can save anywhere from 1 to 5 hours per week, per client.
With a wide list of integrations, Whatagraph serves all types of digital marketing agencies, from PPC advertising to social media, SEO & SEM, email marketing, and so on. The simplicity of their drag-and-drop editor and the ability to build cross-channel reports and even merge data across channels makes Whatagraph one of the best agency reporting software out there.
2. Asana
Use this tool for team and task management. Five hundred dollars says you already know Slack. But its competitor Asana also gets a lot of accolades. Many people actually prefer Asana to Slack when it comes to team, task, and project management, and so being able to work in both might help you attract or keep a valued client.
Asana even has some agency collaboration templates that might help get you up to speed. Alternatively, if you’ve already tried both Asana and Slack and found them lacking, check out FunctionFox, which has rave reviews from agency pros in Capterra’s ranking for ad agency software.
3. CoSchedule
Use this tool for marketing calendar management. So you want to manage a blog, a social media calendar, reshare posts and stay on top of your editorial calendar. For 50 clients. Oh, and you’d like it to work seamlessly in WordPress? No problem. All you need is CoSchedule.
CoSchedule will let you develop unique, branded editorial calendars for all your clients. It will also make collaboration, planning, and content approvals, and production a snap to manage. The company offers a 14-day trial, so there’s no harm in trying it.
Conclusion
The term “Agency Tool” is used a lot to describe all the details and applications that are used by digital marketing agencies, but it could apply to any type of agency or project-based business. The process of building out your agency is an ongoing one, so take this time to evaluate the tools you use and how they fit into your organization.
Being a digital marketing agency is difficult because we have to deal with multiple tools and resources. Since your time is limited you want to spend it efficiently. In order to accomplish that you need an arsenal of tools at your disposal.