Running a marketing agency can be lucrative. But relying on talent, skills, and passion can only get your team so far. You need the proper tools for specific marketing tasks.
The issue is that “marketing” is such a broad term. There’s a lot to cover. We’re here to help narrow it down. In this guide, we’ll be going over:
- Why you need marketing agency tools
- The types of marketing tools
- Tools needed for different marketing services
- Best practices to follow.
Why Every Marketing Agency Needs the Right Tools
Marketers need conduits to let their ideas flow and come to life. That’s where marketing tools come in. The right tools streamline, optimize, and enable marketers to reach their full potential.
Imagine the best racecar driver being limited to a 2004 Honda Accord. It’s a great car. But, it bottlenecks the driver. The same goes for your marketing agency without the proper tools.
Remember, marketing is a saturated industry. You’re at a constant disadvantage against the competition. But with the right tools in your arsenal, you get the following advantages...
Improved Customer Engagement
The fundamentals of every marketing discipline are rooted in connecting the right audiences to the right products. Analytics, segmentation, and engagement tools help achieve this.
With marketing tools, you can make dynamic sales strategies that are measurable, repeatable, and scalable. This ultimately leads to your agency gaining more predictable revenue.
Predictable Revenue
Most marketing tools come with analytics. This is great since most marketing practices are aimed toward data-driven strategies. Data can help forecast sales and help marketing agencies generate better, predictable revenue.
We can achieve this by monitoring customer and sales cycles through analytic marketing tools. All businesses benefit from this too. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in enterprise or a small marketing agency.
Helps Smaller Agencies Stay Competitive
Marketing tools are the great equalizer. If you already have the knowledge and skills, marketing tools can enable your team to do precisely what bigger agencies do on a smaller scale.
Think personalized content, leveraging predictive analytics, or tailored product recommendations. Bigger agencies all have this. With the proper tools, you can too!
Types of Marketing Tools Every Agency Needs
Marketing is an umbrella term covering multiple disciplines. Each discipline requires a different marketing tool. Luckily, there’s a lot of overlap between them.
There might be a tool with all the features you need. To help you narrow down the choices, here are the types of marketing tools for most agency needs.
Traditional
Although marketing is mainly done on social media, traditional marketing is far from dead. We still use tools like paid print advertisements, radio, and TV advertisements.
There are also marketing agencies that act as a publication for businesses. They can handle billboards, banners, or flyers.
Digital
Digital marketing tools cover several disciplines, including search engine optimization (SEO), social media, email, affiliate, influencer, and more.
One of the most important digital marketing tools agencies need are tools for tracking, analyzing, and engaging with customers.
Social Media
Social media falls under digital marketing. You’d need tools to support inbound and outbound sales efforts. Think content marketing, social media analytics, or lead generation tools.
Tools for engaging with leads automatically, like chatbots, are also essential. Agencies benefit from scheduling tools as well to support content marketing efforts.
Promotional
Promotional materials like business cards, websites, or videos also act as marketing tools. Websites, especially, are an essential tool. They act as a 24/7 lead generation machine, a landing page for potential clients, and a centralized hub for marketing efforts.
Tools Needed for Different Marketing Disciplines
Every marketing discipline demands unique tools. As mentioned earlier, there are tools with features that overlap disciplines. Here’s a look at the best tools for each.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is integral to every business, not just marketing agencies. You can use it for cold outreach, welcome emails, transactional emails, and everything in between. With email marketing, you’d want tools to help you automate, personalize, and scale, such as:
Instantly
Instantly is a holistic email marketing tool that provides intuitive analytics, A/B testing, and many automated features. You can automate email sequences based on customer behavior, personalization, and email warmups.
With just a few clicks, all your sending accounts can get unlimited warmups thanks to Instantly. That means your domains get protected from the potentially negative effects of cold campaigns and get high deliverability rates.
Hubspot
Hubspot is a CRM with email marketing support. It can send emails based on customer activity, so you never miss a beat. But Hubspot isn’t good for starting cold email campaigns. What it is good at is sending automated follow-ups to warm leads already showing interest.
MailChimp
MailChimp is one of the most known email tools on the market. Like Instantly, it has various automation features for your sales cadence needs. But since its acquisition, prices have gone up significantly.
Content Marketing
Content marketing supports most sales efforts from inbound to outbound. These tools enable your team to create tailored content for better customer engagement and lead generation.
Photo Editing Tools (Canva, Photoshop, Etc.)
Photo editing, graphic designing, or logo making are all brand-building essentials. Among the most popular tools are, of course, Canva and Photoshop. Anybody can pick up Canva and make decent graphics. But if you want more powerful features, learning Photoshop is worth it.
WordPress
Content isn’t just limited to images—copy is just as important. Blogs, articles, or guides are great for building authority and finding inbound leads. One of the best platforms that enables marketers to do this is WordPress.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo helps you identify the “Buzz” in your industry. It lets marketers know what’s being discussed, the topics that get the most traction, and even the influencers that can help you improve your outreach.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Websites are the center of all marketing efforts. You want it to get as much visibility as possible. This is where SEO comes in. SEO aims to help your site rank higher on search engines. But it also helps websites improve the overall user experience. For SEO, we recommend:
SEMRush
SEMRush is a robust SEO tool that covers everything from keyword research to competitor analysis. It can audit sites and identify issues and how to solve them. Unfortunately, because of all its features, it’s not the cheapest SEO tool out there. A more affordable alternative is AHrefs.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs can do most of what SEMRush can do at a cheaper price. It includes an SEO dashboard, rank tracker, keyword research, and site audits. Both SEMRush and Ahrefs are great tools. At the end of the day, it’s up to preference.
Google Looker Studio (Data Studio)
Looker Studio and Google Analytics are integral to SEO success. They provide a complete overview of your site’s performance, indexing status, and trends. The best part about these tools is that they’re free to use.
Lead Generation
Marketing mainly boils down to lead generation. All marketing efforts, in some capacity, aim to find leads for a business that can potentially convert into paying customers. You can buy leads, look for them manually, or use the following tools:
Instantly B2B Lead Finder
The main issue with lead generation is ensuring that leads are verified. Instantly’s B2B Finder provides a database of over 80 million B2B leads (and millions more being added)—all verified!
Marketing agencies can leverage Lead Finder to find the emails of ideal clients using advanced filters and keywords. Then, import those leads to existing Instantly campaigns, eliminating the need for third-party tools.
Apollo
Apollo has over 256M leads in its database. It includes sales intelligence features and leads scoring to help you qualify on the spot. But if you’ve already tried Apollo and want to find similar tools, here’s our list of recommended alternatives.
Hunter
Hunter is an email finder that helps marketing agencies find publicly available contacts from any domain. All you have to do is enter the domain. It also has bulk task options for finding emails and verifying from multiple domains. Hunter is great for finding lead information, but other excellent alternatives exist.
Collaboration Tools
Marketing agencies often overlook collaboration tools. But having a dedicated tool for collaborating task assignments, and management can significantly streamline workflow. Here are the tools we recommend
Slack
Slack should be the default communication channel for most marketing agencies. There are alternatives, but Slack already brings great and intuitive features. Slack can organize conversations into channels to keep your team in sync.
Trello
Trello is a simple collaboration tool for assigning tasks to your marketing team and project management. It uses cards and columns to track your team’s progress. When a task is done, you move it to the next card until completion.
Discord
Although unconventional, Discord can work similarly to Slack with the ease of instant voice and video communication. You can create a server for your team and organize channels within it for specific tasks, resources, and needs.
Key Takeaways
Marketing agencies need the right tools to thrive in the current competitive markets. As a refresher, marketers need tools for email and content marketing, lead generation, SEO, and collaboration. Some of the best tools we recommend include:
- Instantly, Hubspot, and Mailchimp for email marketing.
- Canva, WordPress, or BuzzSumo for content marketing.
- SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Google Studio for SEO.
- Instantly’s B2B Finder, Apollo, or Hunter for lead generation.
- Slack, Trello, and Discord for collaboration.
For marketing agencies that want to scale their business through email, Instantly has you covered! Sign up for a free trial today.
