There are plenty of tasks to complete for digital marketing and SEO agencies on a daily basis. Even though it is impossible to add more hours to the day, the right tools can help you and your team meet challenges, reach goals, and save money, time, and energy.
In a recent survey, we asked marketing agencies about the routine tasks they would like to automate. Here is what they said:
There are many applications and software options for marketing agencies, and depending on the options you choose, they can address nearly every aspect of marketing and business. With so many tools, it is important to pick those that will work best for your agency and help you reach your goals. According to our survey, 40% of agencies say they need reporting and analytics tools most.
Below is a list of powerful tools across various categories — from lead generation to reporting to everything in between. Agencies that took part in our survey mentioned these tools among their favorite productivity software, which helps them stay on track and thrive.
To make it easier for you to navigate this list, we grouped the tools by the task they help to complete.
1. Find Leads Faster and Smarter: Lead Generation
Lead Generation is the process of collecting information about potential clients, so you can contact them and nurture them through the buying process to turn those leads into loyal customers. This task remains one of the top priorities for agencies, and this task is also one of the biggest challenges they face.
Oppty generates leads based on the robust data from SEMrush’s databases for your digital marketing agency and helps you turn them into clients. The tool is extremely easy to use and allows you to find leads that are in real need of your marketing assistance.
The leads collected in your report will be qualified and filtered by SEMrush data analysis, which can save you a lot of time. In the tool, you can view the companies from various industries that spend money on SEO and PPC and are likely to be interested in your marketing agency’s services. You can gather, in just a few clicks, a great number of new business leads with the company’s digital marketing budget, location, and phone number.
If you want to convert more of your website visitors into leads, Drift Live Chat could help.
Drift chatbots can automatically qualify leads on your website. It runs on your website 24/7, asks your qualification questions, and creates leads in your CRM. After a lead is qualified, a virtual assistant identifies which sales representative they should speak with and then automatically books a meeting for your sales team.
A Drift chatbot is integrated with knowledge base tools like Zendesk, HelpDocs, and others. If your site visitor has a support question, this tool can check your documentation and provide immediate answers to people. Another bonus, using its Bot Builder you can create a personal assistant for your site within minutes.
2. Create Killer Pitches: Proposal Software
Being able to deliver a clear, short, and sharp message about your marketing agency is extremely important. You need to convince your potential clients of your excellent work and the benefits of working with you. One of the key elements of that process is pitching. A perfect pitch should be well prepared, right on point, eye-catching, and memorable.
Proposify can help you create beautiful and effective proposals faster and easier, and automate repetitive tasks. It allows you to select ready-made proposals from a range of templates or customize proposals, save them in one place to synchronize your work with the whole team and get faster sign-off with electronic signatures. Proposify has integrations with HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Asana, Slack, Trello, and other popular tools.
Bidsketch is another proposal software that lets you build professional-looking client proposals, get them signed faster with online signatures, and track them with web-based analytics and instant notifications, knowing when clients open your proposals.
Better Proposals is an extremely simple proposal tool that offers an intuitive interface.
You can use nearly 80 proposal templates, import your agency’s logo, insert your colors, add images, and implement videos into your proposals. The tool allows you to digitally sign documents online and monitor when your clients read your proposals.
Another useful feature is live chat integrations, which enable you to effectively communicate with your potential customers and answer their questions promptly. You can integrate it with tools like Zapier, Salesforce, Nimble, and Pipedrive, to name just a few.
3. Optimize Your Research Routine: Content Research and Ideation
Having to regularly come up with new ideas for blog posts and articles is a bit of a challenge, and can be one of the most time-consuming processes. But with the right SEO software for agencies at your disposal, you can generate endless content ideas, saving your time.
A range of tools powered by SEMrush data will let you streamline your research and ideation process. The Topic Research tool will generate cards of the most popular subtopics and top-shared headlines around your topic. It will also help you discover the top questions around the given topic that people ask on the Internet.
If you need to amplify your keyword research efforts, the Keyword Magic Tool is a great place to start.
Its extensive database now exceeds 18.3 billion keywords, which is the largest on the market. Simply enter a word or phrase into the search bar, and you will get a responsive table of terms that you can segment by topic.
You can discover questions that contain your seed keyword, using the question-only filter, and perform a detailed analysis of collected keywords to pick the best ones. Once you choose the right keywords, you can add them to the Keyword Manager. The manager will provide a deeper analysis of up to 1,000 keywords and allows you to refresh important metrics in real-time — this includes top competitors and the number of SERP features that appear in search results for a given keyword.
The tool is perfect for exploring niche topics, finding semantically related long-tail keywords, and building a comprehensive list of search terms.
As a digital marketing agency, your goal is to stay on top of things. That is why you may want to try Alltop, which is basically a news aggregator. Alltop aggregates the top news, social platforms and other information in real-time, and lets you find out what is happening around a topic from trusted sources.
You can search for a specific topic, browse through the list for ideas, or view a particular blog. Find an infinite number of ideas related to a given topic and new resources you haven’t been aware of before.
4. Always Stay in Touch with Your Team: Online Collaboration Tools
Communication plays a vital role in any business, which is why team collaboration tools are on the rise. They help your team be more productive and save time by eliminating excessive email clutter. From project management to communication, there are various options the market offers.
Chat tools like Slack help you easily communicate with your team, offering instant messaging, the ability to create channels, file transfers, numerous bots, simple message search, and integrations with dozens of tools.
As for project management, Trello is a perfect place for monitoring projects and assigning tasks. This easy-to-use web-based tool, helps teams manage their projects that are organized in cards. You can write tasks on the cards, move them around across the board, create checklists, and share files with your colleagues.
Another well-known work management platform is Asana. The tool gives you an overview of all projects currently going on in your agency. You can assign tasks to other users, keep track of deadlines, and view who is assigned to a particular task.
HubSpot offers its own simple productivity tool that allows you to manage all the work you do in HubSpot. It means you can plan, build, and launch all your marketing projects in one place — within HubSpot’s software.
5. Be Transparent About Your Results: Reporting
Reporting is a key tool in the decision-making process. The data in reports help you build your product and marketing strategy, develop future forecasts, and plan your budget. Powerful tools make it possible to automate and streamline the reporting process and provide you with features to present data in an aesthetically pleasing way.
For the reasons outlined above, it is no wonder that Google Data Studio is growing in popularity day by day. This data visualization tool makes data look more readable, presentable, and effective, and thus helps you deliver important metrics to your clients in a way they will understand.
Data Studio’s built-in and partner connectors allow you to connect to a wide variety of data and add different data sources to your dashboard. You can turn raw numbers and stats into visually appealing stories and easily share them with your customers. The good news is you can add SEMrush data from Domain Analytics and Position Tracking into your reports in Google Data Studio.
If you want to build elegant PDF reports with all the SEMrush data gathered in one place, the My Reports tool is the perfect match.
You can create reports from scratch or choose a pre-existing template from a wide template collection and then share it with your team or customers. By simply using drag-and-drop widgets, you can add any data generated within SEMrush to your PDF.
There is no longer a need for manual reporting since the My Reports tool allows you to schedule automatic email delivery. Reports can be sent out on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. If you have a Business Level subscription, you can personalize your report, using white labeling, to make it look more branded and professional.
If you want to automate your tedious, yet still important, tasks, you will find Zapier extremely useful.
It is an automation tool that connects apps and services you use every day. You can easily connect two or more applications to automate regular tasks. The tool integrates with more than 1,500 apps, including Google Sheets, Google Analytics, MySQL, and many more. There is no longer a need for big daily exports, importing data, and manual actions.
Zapier allows you to speed up the reporting process by removing unnecessary, repetitive work. Instead of manually building reports and updating data, you can automate the process and send your data between the apps you use with your clients or your team.
Summary
Even though most of the tools offer paid plans, they are worth the investment, because they help you save time, automate manual tasks, and optimize your daily marketing routine. You definitely don’t need every single tool available on the market. Choose the tool for your agency with your key tasks and main goals in mind, and you can find your perfect match.
This list of digital tools for agencies isn’t exhaustive. Tell us about the tools that you found helpful in your digital marketing efforts.