The responsibilities of marketing agencies are extensive. They have a multitude of different clients with unique goals. Yet, they have to ensure each marketing project shines to keep their clients satisfied and ahead of the competition. Not to mention, they have to onboard new clients, manage budgets, and keep up with the ever-evolving marketing trends.
Thankfully, marketing agency software can help reduce the workload. These tools are designed to eliminate all the challenges that marketing agencies face without compromising on quality. From automating basic tasks to boosting online visibility to producing reliable data for decision-making, they can deliver exceptional results.
However, not all marketing tools are made equal, and the option you choose can be the make-or-break of your agency. Here, we’ll discuss the 10 best software for marketing agencies. But before that, we’ll explain why you need marketing software, how to choose one, and the types of software available.
Marketing software is a set of digital tools that help marketing agencies plan, execute, manage, and analyze marketing campaigns on their client’s behalf. Whether your agency is just starting or it’s well established, these tools are necessary for the following reasons.
Technically, your agency has diverse tasks that will be handled by different teams. If these teams maintain their work separately, it would be challenging to keep track of what has been done and what is pending. Besides, this would be time-consuming and increase the chances of not meeting customer’s expectations.
Marketing agency software solves this problem by storing all your data in one place. As such, you can manage your clients, schedule and monitor your work, prepare budgets, and allocate resources wisely.
For you to excel in marketing, you have to be flexible and able to change your strategies with trends. Data comes in handy in this case, as you can analyze it and get helpful insights. Most, if not all, marketing software collects and stores data that your agency can rely on for informed decision-making.
For instance, analyzing customer data can help you know their age group, the kind of content they like, and the social media platforms they use. Moreover, this data will help you divide resources and get your return on investment (ROI) sooner. Better still, operational data will highlight areas that need improvement.
Externally, getting data about the overall industry aids in knowing your competitors' strengths and weaknesses.
Most marketing tasks are repetitive and waste time that could be used for more productive activities. By using marketing agency software, you can automate a good portion of the work like publishing content on different platforms. Furthermore, this will reduce manual labor needed in your organization, cutting down on expenses.
Generating leads for clients is one of the marketing agencies’ roles and you’ll have to use different social platforms to increase your market reach. With so many social platforms ideal for marketing, it can be daunting to move from one to the other for all your clients.
Fortunately, some marketing agency software brings all social platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and more, under one roof. This way, it’s easy to conduct campaigns and pull performance and analytics directly from a single tool.
Over the past decade, marketing technology has experienced exponential growth. As a result, you’ll find different types of tools, each optimizing a specific area of marketing. Collectively, these tools are called MarTech.
Let’s break down the types of agency marketing software to make your choice less daunting.
While some of these tools are stand-alone packages, some combine several features. Below, we’ll review the 10 best agency marketing software worthy of your consideration.
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Bonsai is an all-in-one marketing tool and a lifesaver for agencies seeking to manage all their marketing needs from a central place. Whether you’re looking for a social media, public relations, or brand marketing solution, Bonsai will make your workflow efficient.
Below are Bonsai’s key marketing features.
Clear communication with your clients is paramount. For an agency, back-and-forth messaging with multiple clients on different tools can derail productivity. Bonsai resolves this issue by having a client portal to have all your clients on one platform. This way, you can get projects approved faster and update your clients about your progress with ease.
The goal of Bonsai’s CRM is to help you improve your interactions with existing and potential clients. It eliminates the need to maintain a multitude of apps, spreadsheets, and databases for tracking client data. With this feature, all the form fills, emails, quotes, and purchases for each lead and client exist in one place.
Accurate billing is critical to your agency’s profitability. Bonsai’s billing feature is highly automated to help you prepare invoices, collect payments, and file taxes on time. Eliminating manual labor in the billing process reduces the chances of errors and also saves time.
Invoice your clients in a few clicks
Marketing agencies manage different projects for multiple clients. If your team is working in different locations, it might be challenging to track progress. With Bonsai’s project management feature, you can organize all your projects in a central place. By doing so, you’ll have the bigger picture of tasks that are complete, in progress, and pending. In addition, your team will be able to collaborate and become more productive.
Manage your projects and tasks in Bonsai
If you don’t track time for your billable and non-billable tasks, it’ll be challenging to manage time altogether. The time tracker in Bonsai’s marketing software makes it possible to determine the amount of time each team member spends on a given task. This is a useful feature since you don’t always have to monitor anyone as they work, yet you’ll know if they are productive or not.
Bonsai’s scheduling feature integrates all your calendars, making it easy to manage your availability. Besides, it allows potential leads to book your services when you’re free and charge for the services up-front. It also has email reminders for your clients and leads to prevent them from missing any of your appointments. The reminder comes with a rescheduling option should anyone be running on a tight schedule.
Bonsai is the best agency marketing software because it brings all the tools necessary for marketing under one roof. Typically, when you have this tool, you won’t need any other supplementary software. Hence, you’ll have an easy time organizing your marketing projects and payments in one tool. Better still, you can win new leads and follow up to convert them to customers.
Using Bonsai also encourages teamwork through efficient communication, project updates, and file sharing. This improves productivity and time management.
Before committing to a subscription, Bonsai gives you a seven-day free trial. Take advantage of it to test if its features are a good fit for your business. After the trial, you can choose any of the following subscription tiers:
SEMrush is a well-known and widely-used software as a service (SaaS) platform that majors in keyword research. Designed to improve online visibility and performance, it also helps websites rank higher in search engines.
Businesses of all sizes can apply SEMrush in various instances, such as performing competitor analysis, running SEO audits, and evaluating existing online traffic. Nonetheless, it’s now more popular as digital marketing agency software.
SEMrush’s role is to provide businesses with analyzed data and insights into their online presence. As such, the software offers various features to facilitate businesses to improve their web traffic.
The keyword research tool helps businesses identify and track their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) target keywords. It does so by giving users access to a search volume that allows them to do a keyword analysis.
The site audit tool prepares an all-around analysis of business websites’ performance. It also singles out areas that need improvement, as well as recommendations for raising the site's ranking on search engines.
SEMrush has various social media management tools that create and optimize social media ads and also track social media presence. These tools include social media posters, social media ads, and social media trackers.
The advertising research tool enables businesses to enhance their ad campaigns. This is done by keeping track of competitors’ ads, keywords, and advertising budgets.
The market explorer tool collects and analyzes data on competitors’ market shares. The analysis helps to read market trends and identify opportunities where businesses can venture and gain advantage.
Although SEMrush boasts a wide and strong feature set, it has a few downsides. The major drawback is that the software is too expensive for small businesses or new market entries. It also offers a very limited free plan.
Other than that, SEMrush’s user interface (UI) can prove difficult to navigate for first-timers or individuals not conversant with digital marketing.
SEMrush has a number of pricing plans tailored to different business needs and budgets. For starters, you get a seven-day trial period to acquaint yourself with the features and determine if it’s a good fit. Afterward, you can choose either of these plans:
Zapier is an online automation tool that helps to integrate different apps and services. These automated workflows are known as Zaps. They start with a trigger event in one app that ends with an automatic action in another app, which ensures that your workflow is efficient.
Zapier can integrate with over 5,000 apps, which increases the likelihood of automating most, if not all, of the common web apps used by businesses.
Zapier has a simple UI and comprises various units.
Zaps are the automated workflows created when apps are connected in Zapier. These workflows comprise triggers, actions, and searches that you can mix, match, or create multi-step zaps to form complex and unique work sequences.
Triggers are the building blocks that institute workflow automation. Zapier then tracks the trigger and initiates actions in other associated apps. However, each app integrated with Zapier has its own triggers, which you can choose and dedicate when creating an automation sequence or Zap.
Actions are the resultant events caused by triggers. They are usually carried out automatically to finish off a task. These actions include:
Zapier filters come as additions when forming zaps or workflows. They basically set rules and conditions that zaps must follow by filtering out content streams. This ensures your working zaps operate in a specific way to meet your desired outcome and that only relevant information passes through.
Although Zapier has a user-friendly interface, it also has several downsides. Chief among them is a lack of customization that large businesses might look for in marketing agency software. Its simplicity means that you can’t create more complex zaps to meet the needs of big companies.
Also, some apps have restricted APIs, which limits their integration with Zapier. For that reason, you may find yourself unable to connect all your necessary apps.
First-timers have a 14-day trial period to test the waters and familiarize themselves with the features. Afterward, you can choose the following plans:
Apollo is an information and sales engagement software. With a wide database of contacts across an extensive network of companies, it allows users to run marketing campaigns.
Apollo stands out as an all-in-one platform that offers a number of features. Some of the key features include the following.
Apollo’s living database of over 300 million contacts is an invaluable resource that many large and small businesses want in marketing agency software. This feature comes in handy for small start-ups that struggle to get premium contacts. It’s also a great tool for companies that have a B2B sales prospecting strategy.
The Apollo database is too wide for any company to cover or need the entire breadth of contacts. As such, businesses can use the more than 65 Apollo prospecting filters to analyze potential contacts.
Apollo, as an end-to-end service, provides workflows that allow users to create custom sequences. This means they can have all their outbound channels in one place and optimize information accordingly. Workflows comprise emails, calls, and LinkedIn tasks.
Apollo’s wide database is a huge plus for many businesses. However, companies have to pay extra to get personal phone numbers of contacts, which can raise the cost for small start-ups. Additionally, the database, which is a collection of personal information, presents a huge risk of data breach if not secured.
Similar to other SaaS, Apollo also allows users to sign up for a 14-day trial period before subscribing to a paid plan. The paid subscriptions are as follows:
Freshsales is a beginner-friendly CRM solution. It helps marketing agencies to attract quality leads, use AI powered insights to drive deals, and cultivate better customer relationships.
Freshsales’ outstanding features include the following.
Freshsales uses forms, emails, and live chats to help you generate more leads. The forms are simple and embedded in the platform, making them user-friendly to your leads. Freshsales also has an integrated emailing feature that captures email senders who are already not labeled as sales-qualified leads in your system.
Live chat allows you to communicate with your leads in real time. This way, you have a better opportunity to engage and convert them into paying customers. While chatting, you can view your leads' contact information, the device they’re using, and when last they were in contact with your business.
Freddy AI is Freshsales’ system that provides insights on whether a contact would be an ideal fit or not. The AI analyzes your CRM data and historical engagements and then gives your contacts a score and a rating. With this information, you can channel your marketing effort where it’s more likely to yield bountiful fruits.
Freshsales gives you a simplified view of all your customers. It stores all your client’s details, including names, contact information, and company. Furthermore, you can get a customer’s open projects, scheduled meetings, and more.
Besides managing your customers, Freshsales gives you analytics on how your team performed on each project. By observing trends, you can determine areas that need improvement.
Sometimes, you might want to use other marketing tools alongside Freshsales. To prevent time wastage, Freshsales is designed to integrate seamlessly with other tools. Some of the tools it can merge with are QuickBooks, Shopify, MailChimp, and Advanced Automations.
When managing multiple clients, it’s easy to forget about appointments. Sadly, Freshsales doesn’t have reminders. As a result, you’re more likely to miss appointments and paint your agency in a negative light in your client’s eyes.
Although Freshsales integrates with a number of tools, it doesn’t support social platforms. As such, you’re limited to using forms and emails only to create leads and conversions.
Freshsales has a free version with basic features and a capacity of three users. To get more from it, you can opt for either of the following pricing:
Do you want to keep your sales pipeline full while cutting down repetitive tasks? If so, you can’t go wrong with Zoho. This CRM tool automates most marketing activities to ease your team's work without compromising on efficiency.
Zoho stands out in the market with some great features.
Zoho’s sales automation feature does more than track contacts and leads. First, it helps you to create leads using emails, social platforms, and forms on your websites. Then, these leads get automatically added to your contact list in your CRM. You also get an option to set an automatic action after a lead has been added to contacts. For example, sending a welcome email.
The lead scoring feature gives each contact a tag that can guide your team on whether to do a follow-up or not.
With Zoho’s analytics feature, you can monitor each aspect of your sales cycle at a glance. The tool has a dedicated analytics dashboard that presents sales data in widgets such as charts, kpi" id="">key performance indicators (KPIs), quadrants, and funnels. This helps your team to make data-driven decisions.
Customers have different communication preferences. Zoho reduces the hassle of maintaining multiple communication channels separately. It integrates live chats, website forms, social media, and phone. This way, you can keep your prospects satisfied and interested in your business.
While Zoho has many beneficial features, they make the user interface a bit complex. For that reason, there will be a learning curve involved before your team is able to use it efficiently.
In terms of automation, Zoho’s built-in feature might be limited in cases where a project has several conditional triggers. In addition, you might need the help of a developer to set up complex customizations.
Before committing to a monthly subscription, Zoho gives you a 14-day trial period. Afterward, you can choose any of the following tiers per user:
Brand24 is a cloud-based social observing and listening tool. It allows users to track competitors, monitor their brand mentions, keyword searches, and marketing strategies.
Brand24 has various features that assist users with online reputation management and sales boosting. Some of the foremost attributes are as follows.
The discussion volume chart displays graphs with lines, representing the number of brand mentions, consumer keyword searches, and social media reach. Lines that have an upward trend on the graphs are signs of improvement.
The sentiment analysis feature works simultaneously with the discussion volume chart. It tracks your brand mentions and keywords and classifies them as either positive or negative, depending on associated words. This gives you an insight into consumer inclination towards your product.
The various filter options on Brand24 enable you to focus on individual mentions. You can also narrow down the filters to specific social media sources, such as Facebook or X.
The mention feed is a list of brand mentions and keyword searches from all social media platforms. The feed also has metrics such as the number of likes or shares, comments, followers, and time and date.
Despite its deep social listening and monitoring functions, Brand24 isn’t an absolute package. It lacks features such as comment management and real-time updates that are part of social media management solutions. This means businesses may incur extra costs to source for other complimentary tools.
Brand24 offers various pricing tiers and a 14-day trial period for those not ready to commit to a paid plan. The paid plans are as follows:
AdCreative.ai is an advert-generating software. It’s designed to help businesses create social media creatives, banner ads, and display ads for advertising campaigns.
AdCreative.ai eases digital marketing and advertising by leveraging AI creative automation to design a wide range of ads. Some of the core features of AdCreative.ai are outlined below.
AdCreative has an extensive collection of creative templates that can fit on any social media platform. The different layouts are tailored to suit individual advertising goals.
The text generator AI feature further facilitates ad creation by producing headlines, calls to action (CTA), and punchlines to make the display more compelling. The text generator also ensures that the text in the ad aligns with your brand’s message.
AdCreative provides users with access to a large database of images that they can use as visuals for different ads. This feature also comes with brand customization options that enable businesses to design unique and captivating advertisements.
Although the AdCreative platform is a progressive marketing agency software, it has a few limitations. The major drawback is that it lacks a comprehensive customer support system that can address user issues as they arise. Also, the software’s AI is still learning and may produce identical ads for different companies.
AdCreative has six pricing tiers and a 7-day trial period. The pricing plans include:
Calendly is a marketing agency software that helps schedule events such as client meetings and appointments. You can embed it on your website and allow your customers and prospects to book an appointment at a time that works for them.
Below are Calendly’s key features.
Calendly works seamlessly with most of the marketing tools that agencies use. It can work with email marketing, project management, and CRM tools, including Bosai. This way, your data can flow smoothly between different applications.
Calendly allows you to automate most repetitive tasks, such as sending thank-you notes and reminders to clients and team members. When booking appointments, Calendly uses the client’s local time. Plus, whenever someone reschedules a meeting, everyone involved gets a notification.
Customers come to your site for different reasons. Yet, they can find a solution to their needs from a specific person in the team. To avoid delays, Calendly uses a routing feature to ensure a client’s needs are directed to the right person.
Being able to match all your marketing tools with your brand gives customers a personalized experience. Unfortunately, Calendly isn’t customizable in this way. Another issue is that the tool is solely dependent on a strong internet connection. Naturally, it’ll be unreliable where there’s no connection. Lastly, Calendly doesn’t have CRM and project management features, making it a less comprehensive marketing tool.
Calendly has a free version with basic features. If this version isn’t satisfactory, you can choose any of the following subscription plans priced per user:
Hootsuite is a leading social media management platform. It’s crafted to help businesses control their social media network channels from a central console.
Hootsuite is loaded with features that help in the management and creation of content for a company’s social media platforms. Some of the main features include the following.
The post scheduling feature allows users to draft social media content in advance, and then Hootsuite posts it in the channels at a later date.
Streams allow users to monitor real-time updates on different social media channels. They do so by providing a constant feed of your keywords, hashtags, and post mentions. Streams also enable you to respond to other posts quickly regardless of the social media channel.
Hootsuite analytics gives you a glimpse of your social media posts' performance on all networks. The metrics used in the analysis include:
The content library houses stock images and pre-approved templates that marketing teams use to create social media posts. Users can also assign tags and add personal notes to the images and templates.
Hootsuite has robust features that automate social media management. However, its overreliance on third-party integrations is a major drawback since changes in the apps also affect Hootsuite’s operation.
Additionally, the software has lots of features that may take time to learn and navigate all of them. This presents a steep learning curve for social media marketing newbies.
Hootsuite offers four pricing plans and a 30-day trial period after billing starts. The pricing plans are outlined below:
When you decide it’s time to get marketing agency software, you want to ensure it sets your business up for success. However, marketing tools are designed to meet specific needs. Here are some tips to guide you when choosing your agency marketing tools.
Ideally, you want to bring marketing software that will simplify your work. Before making a choice, it’s important to define your short-term and long-term marketing objectives. It’s also necessary to know the kind of audience you’re targeting. With this in mind, you can assess each tool’s features and functionalities to see if they align with your goals.
Most importantly, you should ensure the tool is customizable. The reason being, a one-size-fits-all tool may not cater to the specific needs and preferences of your agency. Customization options ensure that the software can be tailored to optimize your team's workflow.
Typically, an agency uses a variety of tools to improve efficiency and productivity. To avoid incurring additional expenses, your chosen tool should connect and communicate with the existing tools seamlessly. Moreover, it should be compatible with your client’s websites, social media platforms, and operating systems.
As more companies shift to remote and hybrid setups, it’s also advisable to consider a tool with cloud access.
The goal of every small business owner is to grow. For that reason, your chosen software should be able to handle increased traffic and data volumes. Besides that, check whether it’s stable and backed up by support and regular updates to fix bugs and improve security. Speaking of security, your software should keep all unauthorized persons from accessing your clients' confidential information.
Since losing data is always a possibility when working with digital technology, ask the vendor how the software handles backup and recovery issues. You don’t want to lose clients because of mishandling their data.
While most marketing agency tools pride themselves on having a simple user interface, your team might not readily know how to use them. Check the availability of training resources and support services provided by the software vendor. Comprehensive user training will help your team make the most of the software's features, and reliable customer support ensures that any issues are promptly addressed.
Unless a tool is absolutely new in the market, you can find testimonials and reviews on its official page. Reading them gives you fast-hand information on the kind of experience other users have had with the software. This way, you’ll be well informed of the pros and cons and evaluate whether your agency can accommodate them.
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