By Digital marketers may have a challenging job, but it’s a great time to be in the digital agency space. Businesses of all sizes need marketing agency services, and when it comes to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), this important work is often outsourced to trusted partners.
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To compete and deliver solutions at scale, agency owners need the right tools and systems. Staying up-to-date on the latest digital marketing resources is non-negotiable since these tools are often what differentiate high-performing, growing agencies from their competitors. In this blog post, we’ll bring you up to speed on the digital marketing toolbox every agency should have, including resources for client relationship management, communication, creative, data and analytics, pay-per-click advertising (PPC), SEO, and social media.
1. Client relationship resources
Building strong client relationships is a core component of agency success. If you’re starting with no experience and need to build up a client roster, your job will become much easier as you establish solid relationships with clients you can depend on month after month. As your agency grows, those relationships form the foundation of your revenue base that you can use to further expand your business.
Giving your clients the attention they deserve is simple when you only have a few, but how can you maintain your high service standards as you scale your agency? This is where digital marketing resources for managing customer relationships come into play. Let’s take a look at the most important online marketing materials in this category:
- Customer relationship management (CRM) systems: CRM platforms like those offered by Vendasta or Zoho streamline and organize client data and interactions in a single location. Thanks to the automated communication reminders built into many CRMs also ensure you never forget a prospect because they fell through the cracks.
- Customer feedback and support platforms: Ensure clients have a straightforward way to seek support and voice their feedback with a ticket system, live chat, survey tool, or a combination of these.
- Email automation: Setting up automated email flows using a platform like Constant Contact can help keep your agency top of mind for clients and give them regular opportunities to engage. Segmentation and automation can take results to the next level.
2. Communication resources
Effective digital marketing resources for communication are essential both for internal conversations with your team and external communications with clients.
Internally, your digital marketing toolkit should track communications and progress on projects in a straightforward, centralized platform, ensuring all team members are on the same page, no repetition is required, and collaboration is seamless.
Salespeople and account managers should have tools for easy, real-time communication with clients. Additionally, your clients should feel confident they can get in touch as needed. Keep these tools on your radar:
- Project management software: Project management dashboards offer transparent project tracking, ensuring everyone in your organization stays on the same page regarding timelines and tasks—no cumbersome email threads required.
- Messaging apps: Instant messaging apps are great for real-time communication, reducing email clutter, and promoting quick responses both internally and externally. This can be especially helpful in the context of a client dashboard where clients can see all active services and tools and ask questions through a messaging app as needed.
- Video conferencing tools: Video conferencing platforms like Zoom have experienced a boom in recent years, and digital marketing companies should take advantage of the opportunity to foster stronger relationships through video as opposed to phone conferencing.
3. Creative resources
High-quality creative assets are essential to digital marketing success. Scroll-stopping visuals and compelling copy help SMBs emotionally connect with their audiences, which often drives purchasing decisions. The digital marketing strategies you deliver through your agency should include creative asset creation, and with the right digital marketing toolkit, you can do just that. Consider adding these to your workflow:
- Graphic design tools: Software for photo editing, vector illustration, and layout design helps digital agencies create the collateral to support winning marketing campaigns. Adobe Creative Suite is the big name in this space, and if you’re looking for the top-of-the-line, they’re a good choice. However, more affordable competitors like Affinity are also very robust.
- Video editing software: Still visuals remain central to website design, social media campaigns, and PPC advertising, but video is increasingly just as important. Adobe Premiere Pro is a popular choice.
- Content creation platforms: Content marketing requires regular output to be effective. Handling this in-house can be very time-consuming, so working with a white-label partner to create written content for clients is a great, scalable solution.
These tools are also helpful when creating assets for your agency brand identity, not just for client work.
4. Data and analytics resources
Effectively tracking and analyzing data generated by digital marketing campaigns enables marketing consultancies and agencies to convey their value to clients. It’s important to show your customers exactly what they’re paying for, and data and analytics resources make this possible. Additionally, using robust analytics tools enables you to improve your decision-making by responding to real-time data. Online marketing materials in this category include:
- Website analytics platforms: These provide performance metrics such as user engagement, traffic sources, bounce rates, and conversion rates, offering valuable insights into the effectiveness of your digital strategy. Advertising Intelligence, which uses Google Analytics, is a robust, accessible option.
- Data visualization tools: For more complex data visualization requirements, software like Tableau can be used to create data-rich representations of business information.
- A/B testing resources: Digital marketing resources for A/B testing are built into many marketing tools, like PPC ad software and website dashboards. Ensure you make use of these wherever possible to refine your campaigns.
Integrating the various tools and platforms used by your agency will enable you to get better, more accurate analytics data. Check out this video on how to better integrate your tech stack:
5. PPC resources
PPC advertising is often a major portion of your SMB clients’ marketing spend, so it’s a good idea to offer this service. Even if you’re an agency startup without much experience creating, monitoring, and managing paid ads, the right digital marketing toolbox can help you deliver conversion-boosting results for clients reliably.
Google Ads, Bing Ads, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), and other social media ad platforms can all be used to drive traffic to your clients’ sites. Instead of creating accounts for each platform and managing them manually, you can consolidate campaigns into a single dashboard using something like Vendasta’s digital advertising platform. The idea is to monitor all campaigns with a single login, so you can easily see which ones are performing well and which should be shut down. With less time spent monitoring, you can spend more time optimizing campaigns with compelling ad copy, keywords, and powerful creative assets.
If you’re scaling your boutique agency to a larger size and can’t monitor all of your client dashboards, you can also take advantage of white-label services to deliver PPC management under your agency’s brand.
6. SEO resources
While PPC may deliver quick traffic, SEO is key to building long-term, organic lead generation for SMB clients. Search engines are an important avenue for the discovery of products and services, and a robust SEO strategy can help businesses boost their discoverability when users search for products and services similar to theirs.
SEO encompasses a range of strategies and techniques aimed at getting businesses that coveted top spot in their relevant search results. The primary components of an SEO strategy include:
- Keyword research: Begin by brainstorming keywords related to your client’s niche. Then, use a keyword research tool to find the keyword volume and competition for those words. The biggest impact comes from high-volume, low-competition keywords.
- On-page optimization: If you offer web design and development, ensure SEO best practices are implemented throughout the site. This includes optimizing meta tags, headers, alt text, and the internal linking structure.
- Backlink analysis: Backlinks—or links pointing to your client’s website—play an important role in SEO performance. Building authoritative backlinks is an excellent way to improve SEO performance.
7. Social media resources
No digital marketing resource guide would be complete without covering social media. The average global user spends over 2.5 hours on social media each day, making it a valuable component of any successful digital marketing toolbox (Statista). Whether you’re starting an agency or are already well-established, the most useful social media management tools for marketers include:
- Content scheduling platforms: The right content scheduling platform will enable your agency to manage multi-platform social media campaigns in less time and with less work, by planning out and scheduling campaigns in advance.
- Reputation management tools: Solutions for reputation management are often used to generate, track, and respond to reviews, but they can also be used for social listening on social media. By using a solution with social listening functionality, you can ensure your clients never miss a conversation online, enabling them to forge stronger relationships with their clients.