12 Must-Have Online Marketing Agency Tools in 2020
Without the right tools in your agency toolbox, you’ll be quickly outpaced by your competitors and easily buried in client work that’s always falling behind.
As a marketing agency, you have one responsibility to your customers — to deliver on the promises you make.
You might promise leads, customers, traffic, awareness, or even just a list of to do’s that get completed on time and on budget. Whatever the expectation, you have to meet it, and the right tools can help.
But how do you find the right tools?
You could test run dozens of options to see if they get the desired results, or you could get recommendations from top marketing experts to help you narrow in on the most impactful tools to start with.
The good news? We’ve already done the legwork for you and rounded up some of the best tools to help your agency thrive.
12 Online Marketing Agency Tools that You Should Consider in 2020
The following hand-selected tools represent the creme-de-la-creme of the crop and are chosen based on recommendations from top agencies around the world.
1. HubSpot Marketing
https://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing
How Does It Help You?
HubSpot Marketing is an inbound marketing software that gives you access to all the tools you need to create killer campaigns for your clients. It eliminates the need to have separate tools for websites, social publishing, social monitoring, CRM, drip campaigns, automation, and more. You can have one connected suite of tools that give you the full picture of what’s working and what isn’t so that you can drive results for your customers.
“Since implementing HubSpot’s software and inbound marketing methodology, we have grown organic traffic by 450%, and our inbound lead-to-customer conversion rate continues to increase.”
— Kristy Sharrow, Director of Marketing at LevelEleven
2. MaxG
How Does It Help You?
Don’t let yourself drown in data. MAXG gives you access to intelligent insights and customized recommendations for marketing strategies via AI — artificial intelligence.
You can ditch the dashboards of data and let MAXG sift through and analyze data from a variety of sources, including HubSpot and Google Analytics. MAXG was programmed with knowledge gained from years of experience at HubSpot’s first-ever Diamond Agency Partner, Square 2 Marketing. He knows how to read between the graph line and make intelligent recommendations on what to do next.
“MAXG frees me to do more. Even for someone well-versed in analytics, data is a problem. There’s too much of it and not enough time to analyze it all and complete everything else on my schedule. With MAXG, I can spend more time on high-ROI tasks while still making data a priority.”
— Luke Summerfield from HubSpot
3. Ahrefs
How Does It Help You?
Ahrefs is the swiss army knife of SEO tools that every serious marketer should have in their toolbelt for their own efforts and for their clients.
Ahrefs allows you to monitor a niche, grow search traffic, and research competitors with their organic search report, keywords explorer, backlink data, content explorer, rank tracker, and alerts.
You can get the insights you need to determine if your efforts are working and make changes to improve performance.
“At Outspoken Media, we rely on Ahrefs daily to help us achieve great results for our clients. What makes Ahrefs invaluable to us is its intuitive design, reliable data, and innovative features. Ahrefs is a must-have tool for serious digital marketers and SEOs.”
— Rhea Drysdale, CEO at Outspoken Media
4. BrowserStack
How Does It Help You?
There’s nothing worse than launching a new website or landing page for a client only to find out a week or two later that it doesn’t work correctly on mobile devices or specific browsers. Your clients panic and are worried that their customers got a bad experience because you messed up.
BrowserStack lets you test your website assets to ensure that they perform as expected on every device and every browser.
“Legal discovery platform Logikcull reduces test time by 73% with BrowserStack Automate.”
— Hyunoo Park, Full Stack Engineer with Logikcull
5. ClickUp
https://clickup.com/blog/digital-marketing-agency-project-management-software-quest/
How Does It Help You?
Most companies struggle to manage their workload and deliverables for their own company — but agencies have that struggle times every client they have.
Each client has their own stack of work that you need to complete by specific deadlines and to high standards. On top of that, each team member is likely working on multiple clients at a time. You have to try to manage all of that and keep everyone on track by providing the information that’s needed to get the work done.
ClickUp helps you keep track of everything in one intuitive system.
“If ClickUp were a person, we would be best friends. One of the biggest reasons we love ClickUp is the limitless ability to sort, filter, and group. We have a constantly evolving list of clients, and each client has a large list of projects with tasks a mile long. ClickUp allows you to sort by client, project, tasks, subtasks, assignee, due date, and status.”
— Ericka Lewis Marett, Project Manager at Adhere Creative
6. Drift
How Does It Help You?
Delivering leads to your customers is probably the #1 reason you were hired as an agency. They want to grow and you’re supposed to make that happen.
Chatbots can be a great tool to help you in the fight for attention and leads and Drift is the tool that can help you get there.
Drift is an AI-powered software that lets your clients communicate with customers through automated chats, videos, and emails. Drift’s chatbots run 24/7 to answer questions, schedule meetings, collect quality leads, and much more.
“We love how Drift has streamlined our lead creation process. We’re talking to potential customers in the sales process and saving both their and our time by automating the calendaring and support request process via Drift.”
— Ben Nettesheim, Senior Director of Digital Marketing from SalesRabbit
7. G Suite
How Does It Help You?
G Suite helps you stay organized and increase productivity by bringing a powerful suite of tools under one umbrella and making them easy to use. You can collaborate in real-time with coworkers and clients on Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides and easily share links to files instead of emailing attachments back and forth.
“The integration between Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Google Drive, and other G Suite apps was another big selling point. As a total, real-time collaboration platform, G Suite is impressive.”
— Andy White, Senior Director of Infrastructure Engineering from Salesforce
8. IntentData.io
How Does It Help You?
Effective marketing is all about reaching the right person, at the right time, with the right messages — makes sense, right? But it’s incredibly hard to do.
How do you know when the right time is? How do you find the right person? And when you do, what do you say that’s going to convince them to take the next step?
That’s where IntentData.io comes in.
They use a variety of data sources and predictive models to help you get results for you and your clients.
“Intent data, in its many varieties and versions, offers enormous potential value to rapid-growth companies.”
— HubSpot
9. PandaDoc
How Does It Help You?
As an agency, getting paid is important, but making sure you get paid for the work you agreed to do is paramount.
Contracts are a necessity to help you communicate what you’re delivering to your clients and you need a solution that’s scalable, customizable, and easy for you and clients to use.
PandaDoc lets you create visually appealing proposals, quotes, and contracts with their pre-built templates and send them for digital signatures.
“PandaDoc saves us a ton of time and money. We’ve become infinitely more productive and reduced our sales cycle by 75%.”
— Michael McCarthy, Co-Founder, and CEO of inkit
10. Techferno
How Does It Help You?
You might have dozens of clients or just a handful, but either way, you have passwords to manage. From social accounts to websites and other software tools, your clients come with a plethora of passwords that you need to keep track of.
Techferno allows you to easily request passwords from clients and manage them all in a central location. You can also use Techferno to store credit card information, secure notes, and software license information and manage who at your agency can access it.
“Built with web development, marketing agencies, and IT professionals in mind, it was designed as a B2B team password manager, but it is simple enough for any business or individual to use.”
— Angela Teeple from Techferno
11. Slack
How Does It Help You?
Slack gives you a team communication platform that is searchable and organizable. You can communicate quickly with clients and staff members both using their easy-to-learn platform.
Having a centralized communication hub can streamline conversations and avoid questions falling through the cracks.
“Our teams tell us they’re working together and solving problems much faster, because although they are spread across the globe, Slack makes it like you’re in the same room.”
— Pam Whitmore, Group Manager of IT from Intuit
12. EZ Texting
How Does It Help You?
Your customers hire you for your expertise in cutting through the noise, helping them outpace their competitors, and delivering leads. You have to find channels that you can use that have high open rates and higher conversion rates.
With text marketing, 90% of your notifications and exclusive offers are read within 3 minutes.
That kind of response rate can be a game-changer for your clients if you help them implement SMS marketing in their businesses.
“Started using this program several years back and we use it every month sometimes 2-3 times a month to send out SMS messages for our events. It's been a great tool to generate new leads whether it is online via the website, on social media by sharing the link or getting people to opt-in for text message updates. It stores data for you and I love the auto-schedule feature, just create your messages and sit back while EZ texting sends out what you want when you want. ”
How to Get Started with EZ Texting
Getting started with EZ Texting is simple.Create an account with EZ Texting and start your free trial to send your first 100 messages for free. It only takes a few minutes to get set up.
Photo: Adobe Stock/REDPIXEL
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