6 Business Marketing Tools Guaranteed to Boost Agency Performance
Are you struggling to find the right business marketing tools that are designed with agency owners in mind?
The tools in your toolkit are critical to your success as an agency. You have to be able to deliver results, collaborate with your team and clients, and not lose all your profits in software fees.
We’ve talked to agency owners and rounded up some of their most-used and highly-recommended tools that they say they can’t run their business without. Which ones will you implement in your agency?
6 Performance-Boosting Business Marketing Tools for Agencies
As an agency, your relationship with tools is different from an average user. Some tools will be utilized purely inside your agency to help you deliver the agreed-upon work for your clients or for your own use. Other tools will be shared with a client — and their ability to use them will become a deciding factor in your implementation.
Each of these 6 tools was hand-selected based on their ability to be easily utilized by an agency internally or with client collaboration.
1. Ahrefs: Data & Analytics
What is it?
Ahrefs is a data and analytics tool that focuses on helping you improve search engine ranking for your content assets on your websites and your client’s websites. It provides a suite of tools that help you with SEO tasks such as uncovering ranking keyword search positions, performing keyword research, and even analyzing competitors.
How Does It Help Boost Agency Performance?
Most marketing agencies today are producing a lot of content and promising results in the form of increased traffic and leads. Living up to that promise involves a lot of research and reviewing the numbers. You could use a disparate collection of free and paid tools that each specialize in various parts of your SEO research plan, or you could invest in what world-renowned SEO expert Viola Eva calls the “swiss army knife of SEO tools.”
“Ahrefs has been a must-have in my toolkit for many years. I find the interface very easy to use and not cluttered even though the tool has many features. It allows me to keep and store historic data on my clients and potential clients plus their competitors which is infinitely useful for the job I need to do and saves manual admin.
It's also got its own metric for scoring the quality of sites and allows me to see links coming in and dropping off every day which helps with ensuring the health of my clients’ website. The content gap analysis and rank trackers ensure that Ahrefs is a great all-rounder to have in your toolkit and can provide far reaching benefits for multiple areas of an agency.”
— Lauren H, Digital PR, SEO Outreach, and Influencer Manager (source)
2. MAXG: AI-Powered Marketing Recommendations
What is it?
MAXG is an AI-Powered marketing recommendation engine — which is a fancy way of saying that he’s a robot that’s designed to sift through your marketing metrics and analytics data and help you decide what you need to do for your clients to get better results. MAXG is programmed with the decades of insights that fuel HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency, Square 2 Marketing. He’s designed to help agencies save time and deliver results.
How Does It Help Boost Agency Performance?
As an agency, you know that not all numbers are created equal and there are a LOT of numbers to look at when you’re trying to uncover meaningful insights for your clients. MAXG gives you back the most important asset that you have — your time.
With more time to do work and less time figuring out what work to do, your agency is going to perform better.
MAXG gives you the power to expand engagements, boost your sales processes, and improve monthly planning. Their enhanced support has got your back if you need help creating custom insights.
“MAXG changes the game for agencies. The insights and recommendations are exactly what a busy agency needs to help drive better results for clients.”
— Perry Nalevka, CEO of Penguin Strategies
3. ClickUp: Project Management
What is it?
ClickUp is designed to be “one app to replace them all” and was built with agency owners in mind. It offers a suite of tools designed to help you do more than manage tasks — including docs, reminders, goals, calendars, and a task inbox. It’s fully customizable to your needs and they are adding new features every month.
How Does It Help Boost Agency Performance?
ClickUp makes it simple to create projects and add tasks all from within one platform. As an agency, the top performance-enhancing benefits are:
- Templates for each level of work that can be customized and easily reused to ensure that repeated tasks are always following the same guidelines and requirements.
- Built-in estimations and time tracking that allows you to work in actual time or story points or a combination of the two so that you can track profitability.
- Integrated docs and the ability to embed things like Google Slides, Docs, or Sheets into each level of ClickUp — spaces, folders, lists, and tasks. This means that you can create a Space for each Client and then keep everything you need to know in one place.
- A regular release cycle of new features and they pay attention to feature requests. As an agency, no tool is ever perfect for everyone. Sometimes you just need new features if you’re going to make it work. ClickUp uses Canny to collect and vote on feedback and many users report seeing requests implemented within weeks or months of requesting them.
“Finally found ONE solution rather than trying to integrate 5… As a marketing agency, we tried Asana, we tried Teamwork, we tried Zoho projects, they all were good at a few things but then fell down overall. ClickUp was able to be the best of all worlds (especially with 2.0 coming out soon!!) and allowed us to not have to try to integrate another platform to make up for lost features.”
— Chad F, CEO (source)
4. Slack: Collaboration
What is it?
Slack is a group conversation manager that makes it effortless to communicate with your team or clients and keep the conversations organized so you can refer to them later.
How Does It Help Boost Agency Performance?
Many agencies work with distributed people — sometimes it’s a remote workforce, other times you’re working with clients that aren’t local to your area. Either way, communication is a challenge. You have to deal with multiple time zones and different schedules.
Slack saves you time by giving you somewhere you can organize communication by topic and bring in the people that need to stay up-to-date on what’s happening.
You can create channels to keep your messages, tools, and files organized in a way that makes the most sense for you, your team, and your clients. You can organize by individual team members and clients, projects, or even groups of staff that work in the same department. How you customize your communication is up to you.
“Slack really is as awesome as people say it is. What I appreciate most about Slack is one, how easy it is to use, and two, how easy it is to get organized. I work for a marketing agency and juggle dozens of clients. Staying organized is a huge challenge. You can make a channel for each client, each project, or for certain departments. This streamlines communications and keeps all communications about a certain project or client, for example, all in one place.”
— Drew Belle E, Content Director (source)
5. Usersnap
https://usersnap.com/use-cases/digital-agency
What is it?
Usersnap is designed for web agencies that want to get their projects approved faster by their customers. Every website or web-based application can use their feedback widget to make it easy to collect feedback.
How Does It Help Boost Agency Performance?
Client approvals are the bane of every marketing agency everywhere. You work hard to get something done on time and submit it to the client, only to find yourself waiting… and waiting… and waiting for the client to get feedback over to you.
Websites are particularly hectic since you can’t just pop them into a Google Doc for fast collaborative editing. Clients give you archaic instructions and leave you trying to figure out what text, on what page, that they wanted to be changed.
Usersnap reports back some stats automatically when a client leaves feedback — such as browser and window size — so that you don’t have to guess what computer they were at this time. It also makes it easy for clients to leave feedback directly on the pages so you don’t have to chase down the location of a particular section that you need to edit.
“The integration with our core project management system makes this a great tool for our company. We use it for customer support, letting our clients send us screenshots and requests without ever having to log in to our main support portal. Clients like the seamless ease of creating screenshots this way.”
— Deb C, CEO (source)
6. EZ Texting
What is it?
EZ Texting is the #1 SMS Text Message Marketing software. It allows you to gather phone numbers for contacts and then send SMS messages to your list or to segments of your list. It also features automated capabilities so that you can automate messages based on user triggers.
How Does It Help Boost Agency Performance?
Agencies have to continually look for new strategies to help their clients get results. You have to be innovative and offer things that set you apart. Often-overlooked tactics like SMS marketing can be a game-changer for your agency when you can offer something your competitors can’t.
EZ Texting provides you with the tools you need to create marketing campaigns that will have subscribers engaging with your clients’ companies. You can create drip campaigns, send out reminders or important announcements, allow them to RSVP to events, and even hire new employees through text messaging with our software.
“Using EZ Texting lets me connect with the right person at the right time. The tracking tool is awesome, making it clear that people review texts way faster than email!”
— Patrick Lewis, Sales Representative from Axia Home Loans
Create an Account
Creating an account with EZ Texting only takes a few minutes. Our free trial lets you test out all the features so you can boost your marketing efforts and grow your customer base.
Start the free trial now and send your first 100 messages for free.
Photo: Adobe Stock/InsideCreativeHouse
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