We all know that leading and managing a digital marketing agency can be a challenge. There are just too many different elements to deal with, from human resources to creative concepts to approval processes and more.
Fortunately, there are now various different tools powered by advanced technologies that can help digital marketing agencies with their various tasks, from tracking customer requirements and deadlines, providing a centralized collaboration hub, creative suites based on cloud, etc.
So, for a modern digital marketing agency, arguably the key to success is choosing and using the right software and tools to optimize (and ideally automate) as many aspects of the business as possible.
With the right tools in place, you can instead focus on other areas that can further contribute to your client satisfaction and ultimately grow your creative agency as a business.
Here, we’ll discuss five must-have tools and techniques for running your digital marketing agency so that you can stay focused on your main goal: meeting your client’s needs.
1. All-in-one agency management suite: point of function
The success of an agency is closely linked to the efficiency with which it can manage the needs and expectations of its clients. This is why CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is very important for any agency.
The thing about CRM is that the bigger your agency and the more clients you manage, the more challenges you will encounter. This is why having a robust CRM software designed specifically for agencies like Function Point is important, where you will have important features such as:
- A centralized hub for different types of content and projects for different clients
- Invoice and billing management, monitoring of billing status
- Track and manage communications with different customers in a single dashboard
- A centralized hub for everyone in your branch to display all information relating to a client, including the various projects belonging to a client
With Function Point, you can easily create a personalized CRM and project management hub for your entire agency. With this, everyone on your team can easily view and manage customer information, track deadlines and requirements, track billable hours, and more.
Function Point will also serve as a centralized collaboration platform for your team so they can easily track each other’s progress, share files, and leave comments.
In short, we have everything relating to each project in a centralized hub.
Function Point will also allow us to more efficiently manage our resources and plan for future workloads with various planning and forecasting tools for real-time visibility at all times.
2. Automation and integration: Zapier
Even with all-in-one agency management software like Function Point as the basis, your agency will likely still use various other software solutions that are disconnected from each other.
You’ll need a way to integrate these different tools together to maximize productivity, and that’s where Zapier comes in.
You can think of Zapier as a “bridge” between different tools and software solutions that currently support over 3,000 popular apps. What’s great about Zapier for digital marketing agencies is also how easily you can create automated workflows across different tools.
For example, you probably use solutions like MailChimp for email marketing, and you can program Zapier to automatically send all leads captured by MailChimp to your CRM (Function Point) software.
As you can imagine, this will save you a considerable amount of time. Another common application is to allow Zapier to upload an attachment from a registered customer’s email address to Google Drive and automatically share it with affected team members while updating your software. project management.
Zapier, in a nutshell, will help you automate repetitive tasks so that you can focus on the tasks that matter most.
3. SEO suite: SEMRush
While there are various other top SEO tools out there, we recommend SEMRush for what it offers: a great balance of price, features, and ease of use.
You can literally use SEMRush for anything related to content marketing and SEO, which is often the majority of the work for most digital marketing agencies. You will get features like:
- Arguably the best keyword research tools for SEO
- On-page SEO verification tools
- Website audit tools
- Link Profile Analysis
- PPC generator and keyword tool
- Organic traffic information for your website
SEMRush will obviously help perform SEO optimizations for your client’s website and digital assets, but you can also use it to optimize your agency’s online presence, perform competitive analysis, and even gain insight into potential clients that can help you present them.
4. Social media management: Hootsuite
Similar to SEMRush, we choose Hootsuite over various other social media management tools because of its overall value.
Hootsuite is very versatile, giving you a combination of social listening, social media management, and powerful social analysis tools all in one place. So you can use Hootsuite to manage all of your customers’ social media campaigns as well as your own social media posts.
Hootsuite also offers a very powerful analytics tool that can help you analyze the performance of each social media post, improve the ROI of social media ads, and optimize each customer’s social media campaign. . Hootsuite also acts as a collaboration tool for your social media team.
Also, a great feature for agencies is the way you can easily customize reports by choosing from over 200 metrics to fit the needs of the client.
Hootsuite supports all major social media channels: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
5. Email Marketing: SendGrid
Of course, every digital marketing agency should have a comprehensive email marketing tool, and here we recommend SendGrid.
SendGrid is a very feature-rich email marketing solution that is also easy to use for beginners. You’ll get a drag-and-drop email generator, but if you want more customization, you can also use a coding-based email generator or a combination of the two methods.
In addition, you will benefit from very powerful email performance analytics, which will make it easy for you to analyze which emails perform best and which ones can be improved.
SendGrid offers a free forever plan that is actually usable for many digital marketing agencies, but there are also premium plans that will meet your needs as you grow your (or your client’s) email list.
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