Top Tier Tools and apps your Agency must Have
The top priority for any thriving marketing agency is to ensure a top-quality service is given to its clients.
Just take a moment to let that sink in… the marketing team generates the content and then passes the ball to the sales team. Then they pitch the leads and close new customers. The finance team takes care of the invoicing and makes sure the client pays the bills.
Focus on content marketing is vital for any business because most brands have an online presence.
The creative work starts. The account managers get the clients to complete the brief and the marketing/digital experts work together on the forthcoming project. Throughout the whole process, the account managers deal with clients so that everyone is on the same page and satisfied.
People tend to forget that without a proper strategy for content marketing, they won’t achieve their goals.
Starting up a business may be exciting but nurturing and seeing it grow accordingly, well that´s a whole different story, which is where hiring a marketing agency comes into place.
Digital marketing agencies specialize in the digital medium and must focus on fast and sustainable growth. Eventualities may occur, so it’s smart to be in various domains such as social media, project management, SEO, graphic design, and client serving. They’ll learn to deal with other team members, clients, and external parties.
That´s a lot of workflows happening simultaneously. Things can get messy on the daily basis around agencies, so we must ask ourselves if there is something that can help us optimize our work and make it easier. Does something like this exist? Yes, it does.
In this article, we’ll talk about agency tools that range from different domains and apply smoothly and can surely ease the entire process.
About the apps…
Agencies are busted so try to reach out for yourself to clients, don´t wait for them to come to you, by using these tools you ensure you have a steady supply of prospects and leads flowing in.
Let´s not forget to mention analytics tools, which will help you in tracking you and your client and see the details of your marketing campaigns, and obtain the best results you can.
So let’s start with five of the most used marketing tools in the industry, shall we?
1. Hubspot
Hubspot is a marketing, sales, and service platform that helps agencies and other businesses alike, in attracting visitors, converting leads, and closing and retaining customers. It does its magic through a single source of truth, intuitive UX, and a unified codebase. Hubspot equips companies to better manage marketing, sales, service, and operations efforts.
Try out their free CRM system. It gives you a real-time view of your entire sales pipeline on a visual, and easy-to-understand dashboard. This would mean that you can see how many deals your sales reps are currently working on, as a project management tool, is perfect.
Moreover, Hubspot provides a detailed report and sees how your team is performing on the matter of productivity and individual performance as well as seeing how sales are going.
2. Clearscope
This is the SEO content writing tool that you’ll want to use.
Clearcope helps content teams of all sizes drive organic traffic. Given a target keyword, Clearscope analyzes top-performing organic content to make actionable recommendations on relevant terms, word count, readability, word count, content type, and similar headers. It does the upfront research for blogging and compiles it into a single report.
When building an inbound marketing strategy or promoting your website through content marketing, having a tool like clearscope is essential to juice your marketing efforts and increase conversion rates.
As a management software, it makes project management for your content workflow a simpler process. By using Clearscope to do upfront research in SEO planning and building high-level marketing strategies, you save your time revising content on the back-end.
Clearscope changes the way content is written. In the same way, Grammarly enables users to input content into editing software and make suggestions on grammar, spelling, and format, Clearscope has its own editing software feature for SEO. Clearscope looks the same but it allows you to input the same quality and quantity of keywords the other top-ranking articles include.
It informs you of the proper headers to use and makes it easy to check off all the right SEO steps needed to place on the first page of Google search results.
3. Semrush
SEMrush is software that helps agencies and other businesses alike run digital marketing strategies, like SEO campaigns. This all-in-one digital marketing campaigns program helps you run SEO, pay-per-click (PPC), social media, and content marketing campaigns. For this page, we’ll focus on using SEMrush for SEO.
With this SEO tool, you can identify trends that occur within your industry niche. It audits your on-page SEO and helps you improve your pages. This allows you to understand your page better and optimize it for SEO for better lead generation.
In addition, SEMrush helps you identify valuable keywords for your campaign. You’ll learn what keywords your competition Is using and how they rank in the search engine. It gives you an abundance of insight as to how to stack up the competition.
This software is designed for people who need assistance with digital marketing. If you have limited experience or knowledge, SEMrush makes it easy for you to understand and use SEO.
4. Freepik
“Graphic resources for everyone” you’ll see that when entering the website.
Freepik is a source for free vectors, PSDs, icons, and photos. The platforms upload over 80.000 exclusive free resources every month, designed by Freepik team or the community of graphic designers and vector artists contributors.
Freepik has categorized all assets into 4 main categories: Vectors, PSD files, Icons, and Stock Photos. You will also find many subcategories that will help you narrow your search. Some of the most popular categories of graphic resources are Background, logos, Business cards, infographics, banners, Patterns, Brochures, Frames, Flyers, and more.
When uploaded, all resources are tagged with relevant tags, so this is another convenient option to make specific searches.
Freepik allows you to use all free resources for personal and commercial projects. However, when you use free resources, you must give credit to the author by using the line “ designed by freepik” to the author’s name. Attribution isn’t required if you are a premium user. Having in mind that if you are downloading third-party content you need to abide by the author’s licenses for use.
Note that if you plan to mass sell your designs, the resources provided by Freepik cannot be the main elements. Use them as backgrounds or secondary elements. Graphics downloaded on free pick cannot be trademarked, as well.
5. Google analytics
As a web analytic app, it is important because it can help you to make your business grow. It will provide you with visitor data so you can identify what they’re doing on your website. There are many web analytic tools you can use to collect website data, the most popular and free version that websites can use is google analytics.
It allows you to track and understand your customer’s behavior, user experience, online content, device functionality, and much more. Google analytics allows you the information needed to help you shape the success strategy of your business, discovering things you probably never knew about visitors to your site.
Whether you have an eCommerce site or an informative site, you want to understand the behavior of your visitors to deliver better results.
Below are some of the reasons why google analytics is the preferred web analytic tool used by Pro Web marketing and why automation set up in every website designed is needed.
As one of the benefits that bring using this software, we can highlight the reduction in time required to put the data into documents or spreadsheets.
Although setting up with clients to receive a monthly email report as the email marketing strategy, you can access reports any time you want, allowing you to implement strategies for the better performance of your website.
Social Media
As we’ve been saying, it’s impossible for digital marketing agencies to function without a range of dedicated tools and apps
These days, there’s a huge range of analytics and management tools available and because of this, every agency has to conduct extensive research in order to find the right tool for the various activities they need to facilitate. Takes time and effort and you might be mission out on the new tools which have been released since settling on your chosen option, which could end up putting you a step behind the rest of the field.
Social media marketing is responsible for increasing brand awareness, providing customer service, boosting sales, and conducting market research.
The listed tools will help in each respect – here are some key apps worth considering
1. Awario
It is primarily a social media listening tool that enables you to monitor all the major media platforms, news, forums, blogs, and the wider web for mentions of your client´s brands, so be on the lookout if you are by any chance an agency owner, you shouldn´t miss on this one, it can really boost your customer relationship in every aspect.
Awario Enterprise plan allows you to create up to 50 alerts, and collect a lot of mentions, including both real-time and historical ones. This will ensure you’re aware of the present state of your client’s online presence at any point in time.
To ensure you get a relevant mention only, Awario has a boolean search option that lets you tweak each query, and decide for yourself how the tool will be searching for your keywords. Awario can display mention growth and reach over time, provide sentiment analysis, perform competitive analysis, and find social media influencers as well.
This social media management tool l also enables users to invite multiple team members with different access permissions, which makes it perfect for agencies. It also lets users create while labeling pdf reports and export data.
As for pricing, enterprise at $299 per month and a free trial are available, and no credit card is required.
2. Sprout social
It is a multi-client social media management tool that covers publishing, social media monitoring, messaging, engagement, analytics, and reporting.
You can monitor and engage with messages from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin, and also monitor and engage with comments on all of your owned profiles. For Facebook and Instagram, you can also track the activity on your paid posts.
You can view, manage, schedule, and publish social media posts across multiple profiles. For Facebook and Instagram, you can also track the activity on your paid posts.
You can view, manage, schedule, and publish social media posts across multiple profiles, networks, and campaign tags. You can also edit images and text with the built-in editor. Sprout social even has patented send time optimization technology, which ensures that your posts are published at optimal engagement periods.
Sprout analytics spots trends for each niche you work with, and can highlight influencers, track social media campaign performance, analyze sentiment behind brand mentions, and track engagement, impressions, and follower growth across files. All of these metrics are included in pdf reports.
Sprout social can also be integrated with google analytics to make it easier for you to understand how social channels drive traffic to your site.
As for pricing, it has an advanced plan for $249 per user per month and a 30-day free trial is available.
Google Sheets & Data studio
Google data studio is a great, free data visualization tool that allows you to create interactive dashboards and beautiful customized reporting.
Data Studio let us visualize data from many sources. Using Google sheets to do reports works well enough. It’s easier to manage permissions this way and besides, it’s also easier to get google analytics data into Data studio than sheets.
You can see your data, interact with it, and then chart it. Sheets give you the power of Data Studio without the bother of managing databases. Anyone can do it.
The key to using Google sheets with Data Studio is formatting. A sheet is worth a thousand words.
As for the benefits of using Data Studio, we want to point out the following:
- It’s a free tool – is free and accessible to everyone
- Dashboard with customizable reports.
- Contemporary and interactively connected data visualizations.
- Automated reports with real-time data manually formatting reports and exporting data can become very time-consuming Google data studio helps you to have automated routine reports in lesser time.
- Dashboards that you can share.
- Google Data Studio Exports – the moment you finish your report you can export it as an email, Google Sheet, Excel, or PDF.
- Connect to multiple data
- Filter tool.
- Fields for calculation
- Drill-Down Capabilities – Google Data Studio empowers you to drill down into your data all within a single element.
Conclusion
It’s really challenging for agencies to create a tech stack that automates tasks and also helps clients reach their ambitions. All of the above-mentioned tools have been tried and tested and hundreds of both small businesses and large enterprises and agencies have seen their benefits, so keep them in mind, don’t wanna say “I told you so”!
