With the ever changing online marketing landscape and the numerous tools that exist, it can be difficult to find the best tools for your agency. From client management platforms to content creation, we analyzed the top tools that agencies use, and selected 10 which we feel are some of the best digital marketing agency tools you can integrate on your own platform.
Here, we categorize then tools and suggested the best according to experts.
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.
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.
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.
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 Analytics & Social Media Reporting Tool
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.
Social Media Analytics & Management Tool
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
Competitor Keyword Research Tool
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.
Social Media Management Tool
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.
Team and task management – Asana.
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.
Bonus Info
Marketing calendar management – CoSchedule.
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.
Analytics and agency reporting – Whatagraph.
Results. It’s all clients ultimately 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 good 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.
Designing, prototyping, collaboration & handoff – Mockplus
Looking to design + collaborate with your team on a website or mobile application? How about collaborating remotely, and making adaptations according to your market research results? All you need is Mockplus.
Mockplus is a web-based collaboration & handoff tool for product design teams and enterprises. The software works unanimously with popular design tools including Adobe Xd, Photoshop, Sketch, Figma, and Axure.
Users can export designs to Mockplus for collaborating with team members: comment on designs, make custom specifications for pages, components or layers, add interactions for designs and make them live, control versions, and ultimately hand off designs to developers with assets & ready-to-use CSS code snippets.
Without importing designs from other tools, Mockplus also offers a built-in online interactive prototyping tool, which allows users to use a simple drag-and-drop feature to build a functional web or mobile app prototypes in minutes.
Building Chatbots – MobileMonkey.
Chatbots are automated conversational robots programmed to respond to messages inside web apps & mobile applications. They’re mostly used to help businesses manage customer support tickets & inquiries.
However, the use-cases for chatbots don’t end there. Juniper Research estimated that chatbots will save businesses up to $8 Billion USD annually by 2022. This statistic comes as no surprise to those who use chatbot software.
Chatbots are the first line of support for customer management teams, instead of customers waiting hours to get simple issues resolved, chatbots provide instant support during emergencies or outside business hours.
Chatbots can process refunds, cancellations, answer repetitive questions, navigate and entertain visitors, collect customer feedback, send promotional emails, updates, alerts, and notifications. Artificial intelligence through conversational marketing is able to personalize recommendations, analyze user behavior, collect emails, drip marketing campaigns, generate leads, and onboard customers.
MobileMonkey provides a variety of free/paid chatbot tools & support automation options for all types of individuals & marketing professionals.
Customer Feedback – Usersnap
Have you ever wanted to receive direct feedback from your customers whilst they’re using your website or application but never had the tools to do so? If so, Usersnap is the best option for customer feedback.
Whilst most agencies are stuck with surveys for gathering feedback, Usersnap provides an entire stack of tools for customers to communicate with product managers, designers, software developers, and CS managers. Some include feedback buttons & menus, visual tickets, qualitative & quantitative surveys triggered by on-page events, in-app forms, public boards, drawings, screen recording, and live chat. Users can easily communicate in-app or on-site about crucial errors & report bugs in real-time visually through all of these methods.
Usersnap’s pricing is very reasonable, as the Basic plan starts at $19/month (or $9/month for annual plans) with 2 team members per project & unlimited reporters (reporters are the people who send feedback). Usersnap’s calling card is an easy-to-use and easy-to-install tool that gets you off the ground quickly, collecting customer feedback to grow your business. The best part: Usersnap offers a 2-weeks free trial for all signups, so you can try before you buy.
Create powerful business content together – Xtensio
Xtensio is a strategy and communications platform where anyone can easily create, manage, share, and present professional business collateral.
Teams collaborate on documents, presentations, proposals, reports, sales sheets, and other strategic exercises in real-time. Start with a template or create your own. The editor works like a web builder, so it’s easy to add images, videos, tables, and other interactive modules. Drag and drop, resize, change backgrounds, and specify colors and fonts to match your brand.
The best part is that the deliverables created on Xtensio are living documents (folios). Share the public link with colleagues and clients, so everyone is always up-to-date, without the email attachments.
Present a digital slideshow or export a PDF/PNG. All your work is organized on a private, branded team dashboard so you can keep the work flowing from anywhere.
Building landing pages fast – Unbounce.
Landing pages are a proven way to increase conversions dramatically. Increase conversions, and you increase revenue. Increase revenue and your clients will be getting the results they were hoping for when they hired you.
And here’s the thing: Many marketers (and agencies) don’t use nearly enough landing pages because they can be hard to build and hard to manage. Landing pages are just outside their comfort zone to use… which is exactly where your agency comes in!
With a little expertise and the right tool, you can easily step in and be the hero who increases your clients’ conversion rates – and their revenue. While you’re at it, you can increase your agency’s revenue, too. More than half of agencies surveyed by WordStream said they charge extra for creating landing pages than for any other add-on service.
There are dozens of landing page tools available, of course. Still, Unbounce is recognized across the marketing world for being the go-to tool for developing, testing, and managing landing pages. Getting proficient with it is a fabulous way to provide a high-value service to your clients for minimal cost and time. Your clients will get better results. You’ll have a profitable new income stream – it’s a win-win for everyone.
User testing – Userbrain.
Remember that fateful Peloton ad from the 2019 holiday ad season? That’s an example of what can happen when you launch campaigns inside an echo chamber without getting feedback from your audience.
To make sure you never spin out as Peloton did, get actual opinions of your actual ads, product, or website before you launch. That’s what Userbrain (or its competitor, UserTesting) can do. It makes user testing a snap.
It won’t break your budget, either. The cost for Userbrain is $29 per user test for a one-time test. They recommend testing with 5-8 participants. So for $145 to $232, you’re buying yourself an awful lot of marketing insurance.
Designing and prototyping UX – Adobe XD.
So your client wants a new website… and you want to show them how awesome it could be… but you don’t want to invest days of work to show them.
Adobe XD is a widely-used wireframe tool that can build functional, gorgeous websites and apps. Those wireframes can then be shared, and they’ll work on both desktops and mobile devices. Your clients and agency teammates will be able to leave comments and feedback from anywhere.
Conclusion
When deciding which marketing tools to use in your agency, you need to consider what’s available. Marketing is an ever-evolving industry and the range of tools available continues to change.