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As a marketing agency, clients expect you to have the biggest and best tools available at all times. Whether you’re a full-blown agency with hundreds of employees or a freelance agency working from your living room, clients still expect the same high-quality experience. Therefore, you need to know the tools dominating the marketing world in 2021.
In this guide, you’re going to see some of the must-have digital marketing tools for agencies of all sizes. These should help you gain a competitive edge, provide a positive customer experience, obtain great customer reviews, and offer a better ROI for consumers (while also earning clients and yourself more profit!).
Firstly, we want to start with an automation platform designed to help those distributing promotional material to consumers. As a marketing agency, you should know that generic, one-size-fits-all marketing content no longer works. Instead, we need to provide consumers with personalized content that resonates.
With ActiveCampaign, you can organize all clients into groups, which makes tailoring content easier than ever. Group clients together, add tags for each, and send targeted messages for better marketing results.
Businesses have a hard time managing several social media accounts and agencies have an even harder time managing these social media accounts for numerous clients. With just five clients, you could be in charge of more than 20 channels. Therefore, you need a tool to handle this demand. Otherwise, you’ll be flooding in a sea of passwords, posts, likes, comments, and more.
Sprout Social is designed to bring all your social media efforts into one place. One of the most useful features offered is the content calendar. Trusted by large brands like Purdue University, UNICEF, and Subaru, this is a great way to manage the social presence of your many clients - you can even learn about an audience through the analytics section.
What keywords are currently performing on Google? For many years, digital marketing agencies have been stuck in time using manual methods to identify keywords. Now, Sitechecker makes this easier with simple searches. Type the URL of your competitors and learn the keywords that make their websites tick. The Keyword Rank Checker system means that you can keep an eye on up to 100 keywords as performance changes day-to-day.
We also recommend playing around with the On-Page Checker, Site Monitoring, Traffic Checker, and Backlink Tracker tools.
We said that it’s difficult managing social media accounts, and this includes the paid advertising side of things. Just think - you have lots of clients, each with several social media accounts, each with several ad campaigns, each with multiple individual ads. If you try to do everything manually, you’ll struggle to find time to sleep.
In fact, managing accounts is one of the biggest barriers to growth for digital marketing and advertising agencies. Without automation, every day is overrun with simple, menial tasks, which means you tell yourself that you don’t have time for more clients. In reality, what you need is optimization automation…something that Trapica provides.
Using machine learning and artificial intelligence models, Trapica automatically optimizes various aspects of social media ad campaigns. For example, this includes bidding, targeting, creatives, and A/B testing. While Trapica continually optimizes ad campaigns, you have more time to focus on other tasks. Once you get to grips with the tool, it could even open the door for more clients and business growth.
Do you ever look at graphics online and wonder how you could ever compete? This is a weakness for many agencies, and freelancers think they have to outsource to expensive specialists to keep clients happy. In reality, you just need a simple tool like Canva.
Canva has a clean interface and allows people with little experience in graphic design to create amazing (and effective) graphics with just a few clicks. Everything takes place on the Canva website and is done through a drag-and-drop system that you will be able to learn in just a few seconds. Whether you’re seeking something fun, inspiring, professional, or funny, Canva has everything you need. You no longer need to cringe when clients request graphics as part of your service.
If you want to get involved in email marketing this year, MailChimp is one of the best places to start (and this has been the case for many years!). Using a simple interface, small agencies can take advantage of the free plans on offer. With this tool, you’ll bring all audience data into one place before then segmenting, performing multivariate testing, and communicating with customers effectively.
How do you keep on top of all content produced for a single business, let alone multiple businesses? We recommend CoSchedule as a partner. All content is centralized, and all projects are controlled from this one location. Over time, you’ll find it much easier to manage all clients while meeting the important deadlines for each. As well as automation, CoSchedule offers customizable workflows which ensures a smooth operation for the whole workforce.
Teams often work best when information is freely and clearly available, and the visual features on offer from CoSchedule shine in this regard. Everybody works from the same multi-functional calendar and everybody pulls in the same direction.
Few things have as much control over digital marketing strategies as money, and this is especially important with clients. The second a client feels as though you aren’t using funds effectively, they’ll pull from the contract and stop working with you. Thankfully, we have tools like Costlocker that provide insights into expenditure, profitability, cost-saving, and other economic concerns.
While individual businesses use it to manage expenses, it also adds value for agencies managing several projects at once. We like many features including detailed reports, budgets, and predictive analysis. All in all, this is a great way to not only understand the financial aspect yourself but also pass on critical information to clients.
As a digital marketing agency, you’ll know the importance of a website for a business. As well as the website itself, we rely on landing pages to continue the success generated by social ads. Unbounce has earned lots of praise for its ability to build, adjust, and publish landing pages. Even if you have little experience in this area, Unbounce is like Canva in that you shouldn’t have a problem creating new landing pages (and landing pages that work, at that!).
If you really don’t like web design, start with one of the templates and go from there. Even if you detest this sort of thing, try to make some tweaks so that it matches the personality and character of the brand. The last thing you want is for your landing page to look like millions of others out there.
We’re going to assume that you know all about Google Analytics and talk about an alternative instead. If you’re bored of Google Analytics or just want something different, many agencies have used Kissmetrics to boost conversions and overall digital performance.
Once installed, the idea is for the tool to monitor visitors as they pass through the conversion journey. By doing this, you learn about the various stages of the funnel as well as the things going well alongside potential problems. Suddenly, you’re improving the various stages of the funnel to better accommodate prospective consumers. Fewer people fall out of the funnel and your clients enjoy an increase in revenue and sales.
This suggestion works both ways because you can use Zendesk to communicate with clients and also suggest the tool for clients to communicate with their own customers. If you’re having trouble staying on top of client conversations, Zendesk brings all channels under one roof. Instantly, you see calls, chats, social media messages, and emails in the same space. You don’t need to log into all the different accounts and your clients aren’t left waiting for a response.
Finally, another way to compile valuable data for your clients is by using a tool like MadKudu. This is a solution that helps your own agency as well as clients themselves. You’ll glean information regarding your clients and learn how to prioritize those most likely to convert - meanwhile, you’re no longer wasting time with people unlikely to convert. You can also implement this solution as part of your marketing approach with clients and they also save resources.
Using artificial intelligence and data, Madkudu provides the insights that businesses have been seeking since the dawn of humankind - the insights that inform us of whether somebody is likely to convert or not. With this, you help clients to make more intelligent decisions, and return on investment increases yet again.
Look into these 12 must-have digital marketing tools and watch as your agency grows in this hyper-competitive market. Good luck!
