Agency Tools You Need to Have in Your Tech Stack

When you’re working in an agency, there are many moving pieces to take care of. Think about it… the marketing team generates leads to pass on to the sales team. The sales team pitches to the leads and closes them as customers. The finance team takes care of invoicing and makes sure that the client pays the bills. Then the creative work starts.

The account managers get the clients to complete the brief, and the marketing/digital experts collaborate on the actual project. Throughout the entire process, the account managers liaise with the clients and make sure everyone’s happy. Phew. That’s a lot of workflows happening simultaneously, which means that a lot of things could go wrong.

To help you streamline and optimise your agency’s processes, I ’ve put together a list of 35 must-have agency tools in this article. You’ll find marketing tools, support tools, and other tools that help you with smooth workflows, creative development, and more.

Marketing and Analytics Tools

The agency business is pretty saturated, so instead of waiting for your customers to come to you, use these marketing tools for agencies to ensure you have a steady supply of prospects and leads flowing in.

Don’t forget about analytics tools, which will help you keep track of you (or your client’s!) marketing campaigns as we do in GTG Hosting, and optimise your efforts for better results.

#1: HubSpot

HubSpot is an all-in-one platform that takes care of your marketing, sales, and service needs.

To get started, I recommend trying out their free CRM system. The HubSpot CRM gives you a real-time view of your entire sales pipeline on a visual, easy-to-understand dashboard. This means that you can see how many deals your sales reps are currently working on (and gauge how many projects you might be taking on in the upcoming months).

HubSpot provides you with detailed reports, it’s quite easy for you to check out your team’s sales productivity and individual performance.

#2: Agency Analytics

Are you looking for a white label analytics tool? Try Agency Analytics, which bills itself as the “only marketing platform built for agencies”.

This platform allows agencies to monitor their clients’ marketing campaigns in one place. With Agency Analytics, you can automatically generate reports for your clients and allow clients to access a customised dashboard that’s branded with your logo. Why wouldn’t you want it in your stack of agency tools?

#3 LiveSession

Are you struggling with conversion rate optimisation? Is the newly designed landing page not delivering the results you want? Do you need more data than just the results of A/B tests?

Check how users interact with your website with LiveSession. Analyse their behaviour using this session recording app.

This qualitative analytics tool will allow you to gain in-depth insights into customer behaviour, improve the conversion rate, provide better support or debug your application.

#4: Tidio

Tidio is a live chat and chatbot tool for agencies that they can use to increase their website conversions, and generate more leads.

According to statistics, 46% of customers prefer to use live chat to contact a company (as compared to the 29% that prefer email, or 16% who prefer social media).

If your team doesn’t have enough resources to have someone man your chat 24/7, you can also use Tidio’s automated chatbots to generate replies to the simple, straightforward questions that you get from your clients.

#5: UpLead

UpLead is a lead generation platform that allows companies to find and target their ideal prospects.

For instance, say the majority of your agency’s clients are enterprise firms making over $2,000,000 in revenue each year, and these firms tend to employ more than 100 people.

With this in mind, you can search through UpLead’s database of 46M+ business contacts and filter by company revenue and size, to identify prospects that are a good fit. From there on, get your sales team to reach out to these prospects, and pitch your services to them.

#6: Messagely

Messagely is one of the most helpful customer support tools available in the marketplace.

Like Tido, Messagely also comes with a live chat feature and chatbots. This agency tool allows you to reply to your clients’ questions quickly, without making them wait.

Besides this, you can also use Messagely to acquire and qualify leads. For instance, you can configure a live chat pop-up on your website to ask your website visitors if they’re interested in learning more about your agency’s services, then trigger pre-determined questions to qualify as website visitors, and identify if they’re a high-quality lead.

#7: GetResponse

Not all of your leads will be ready to start working with your agency right away. For the ones who aren’t, that’s where GetResponse comes in.

GetResponse is an email marketing platform that allows you to create great-looking emails to engage and nurture your leads. The key is to ensure you’re top-of-mind so that they reach out to you when they’re ready to buy.

#8: Optimizely

Optimizely is an experimentation platform that allows teams to test and deploy “winning digital experiences”. If you want to generate more leads via your agency’s website, you can also use Optimizely to A/B test your site!

Say your agency is tasked with overhauling your client’s website to increase conversions. With Optimizely, you can conduct A/B tests to gauge whether green call-to-action (CTA) buttons are more effective than red ones, whether a change in messaging will appeal better to consumers, whether you should include a testimonial section on your homepage or leave it out… so much and so forth.

Social Media Tools

If your agency isn’t on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms, you’re missing out on a great way to reach out to potential clients. It’s time to rectify that with these social media tools.

#9: Buffer

Do you know that 74% of people with a high-income are actively using Facebook? It’s an absolute must for agencies to be active on Facebook or other social media platforms.

That’s where Buffer comes in.

In short, Buffer is a social media management platform that allows you to plan and publish your content to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, from a single dashboard. Buffer also comes with a social media calendar so you can have a quick overview of all the posts you’ve got lined up, and identify and fill in any gaps.

It is one tool that you will find in every list of social media agency tools because it’s features are essential for social media marketing agencies.

#10: Promo Republic

The Promo Republic is another great social media marketing tool without which our list of agency tools might have been incomplete.

Like Buffer, you can use the Promo Republic to plan, manage and schedule your social media posts. For agencies, Promo Republic also offers a white label product, so you can get your social media management software that your clients can log into, branded with your agency’s logo.

#11: Planable

Next up, we have Planable, a tool that helps you polish your social media posts to perfection before you publish them.

With Planable, you can preview your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts within a single interface, and tweak them till you’re satisfied. Team members can leave comments directly and tag other team members to collaborate, making the vetting process smooth and fast.

SEO Tools for Agencies

For instance,Company A decides that they want to engage a digital agency to help them plan and execute an upcoming campaign. To find an agency to work with, they’d probably search for “best agencies in {location}” on Google, look at a few options, and narrow it down from there.

The moral of the story? SEO is important, so use these SEO tools to improve your agency’s online presence!

#11: Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the most well-known tools in the SEO space. This tool allows you to uncover your competitor’s keywords, and grow your website’s search traffic.

By using Ahrefs to fine-tune your SEO strategy, you can get more visibility and bring in more organic traffic to your website. If you offer SEO services to your clients, you can also use Ahrefs to perform a competitive analysis for them, and come up with an action plan for them to outrank their competitors.

#12: SEMrush

Just like Ahrefs, SEMrush is another highly-regarded SEO tool. This tool allows you to identify a specific website or company’s best-performing keywords so that you can fine-tune your agency’s keyword strategy.

Besides, if you run paid campaigns (such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads) for your agency, you can also use SEMrush to research ad keywords and creatives, and benchmark your PPC costs.

#13: RocketLink

With RocketLink, you can grow your audience by adding retargeting pixels, CTAs, and custom domains to any links. Stop sending visitors away to other websites by sharing external links online – keep in touch with them whenever they go.

To increase CTR you can customize domains and the links’ thumbnails – modify URL’s preview title, description, image and personalize links on social media to attract more users. You can also use RcketLink as a URL shortener, even with added UTM tags.

Messaging Tools

Messaging tools aren’t just about, well, messaging – they do so much more than that. With these tools, you can video call your team members, share files easily, and more, making it easier for you to collaborate on your projects.

#17: Troop Messenger

Troop Messenger is a business communication platform that offers all the standard communication features, including instant messaging, video calling, file sharing, desktop sharing, and more.

If you’re collaborating with team members (or freelancers) working from across the globe, Troop’s video calling and desktop sharing features will come in handy. You can also add other vendors or customers to be part of your organization so that they can communicate with you more effectively.

#18: Slack

Regardless of whether you’re working remotely or not, Slack is perhaps the most well-known team messaging tool available, and that’s for good reason. The tool allows you to set up multiple channels for team members to discuss specific projects or topics, making it easier for everyone to collaborate.

You can also share your channels with external partners and clients to streamline communication processes within the organisation.

#19: Chanty

Chanty is an AI-powered team chat app that helps teams communicate and collaborate better.

The app comes with several cool features: you can share and view YouTube, Coub, GIF and social media content within the app, pin important messages and updates, and send code snippets to your team. Chanty also allows you to turn any message into a task to keep track of your deliverables better.

#20: Zapier

If you use a ton of different agency tools and apps, and you’re spending too much time exporting/importing data and toggling between your apps, here’s Zapier to the rescue.

In a nutshell, Zapier helps to connect your apps and automate workflows, so that you can do more with less. For instance, once you’ve connected your email marketing platform (eg Mailchimp, ConvertKit, SendInBlue) to your Dropbox account, you can set up a rule to automatically copy and add attachments you receive via email to your Dropbox.

Scheduling Tools

Traditionally, scheduling meetings is a huge pain. Thankfully, these scheduling tools will do all the heavy lifting for you, and minimise the unnecessary back and forth.

#21: Calendly

If it takes five emails to schedule a single meeting with your client, you’re doing it wrong. Instead, use Calendly to set up your meetings with zero fuss.

How does this work? Just indicate your availability, then send a Calendly link to your client so that they can book a meeting with you. You can also integrate Calendly with Google, Outlook, Office 365 or iCloud calendar so that it automatically syncs and takes note of your existing appointments.

Are they any solutions you would add to the list? Send them in using the comments section below.