The best digital marketing agency tools are built to scale, will impress your clients, and win you new business.

Two of the most reported challenges for marketing agencies are finding services to offer that differentiate themselves from the competition and adopting new marketing technologies to gain a competitive advantage.

This article will help you discover and get started with the best marketing agencies tools available in 2021.

So, what’s in your agency’s marketing tech stack? Hopefully some of the following:

1. Workflow Automation – Zapier
2. Web Chat Software – Customers.ai
3. Project Management Software – Teamwork
4. All-in-one SEO Software – SE Ranking
5. SEO Management Software – SEMrush
6. Marketing Analytics & Social Media Reporting – Whatagraph
7. Social Media Analytics & Management – Iconosquare
8. Competitor Keyword Research – SpyFu
9. Social Media Management – AgoraPulse
10. Facebook Messenger Marketing – Customers.ai
11. Facebook Ads Manager – Ad Espresso
12. PPC Management Software – WordStream
13. Landing Page Builder – Unbounce
14. SMS Marketing Services – Customers.ai
15. Content Marketing Planning – GrowthHackers Workflow
16. Graphic Design Software – Visme
17. Link Tracking Software – Rebrandly
18. Business Analytics Software – Databox

Marketing Agency Tools #1: Workflow Automation

As a marketing agency, you’re going to use a large variety of business and productivity apps. Every client is going to have a different marketing stack, and you’ll need a way to easily integrate many of them. 

Additionally, the need to adopt marketing automation for agencies is growing, fast.

Zapier is an awesome tool for marketing agencies because you can create automated workflows across tools in your mar-tech stack. In fact, Zapier is compatible with thousands of tools, and you can easily chain commands together with an “If X happens, do Y” structure. 

For example, the Customers.ai Zapier integration allows you to easily send information that’s stored to customer profiles in Customers.ai to other applications. 

Here are just some of the more popular “Zaps” for Customers.ai users: 

• Add all new leads to your CRM, such as Salesforce
• Send SMS messages or Slack notifications to new contacts
• Subscribe new Customers.ai contacts to MailChimp
• Register Customers.ai contacts to Zoom Webinars

One of the main selling points of Zapier for marketing agencies is that this automation allow you to combine multiple actions and apps together in a single Zap. So, let’s say a client sends you an email with an attachment. Using Zapier, you can store it on your Google Drive, share it with your team, and update your project management board without needing to do anything. 

Zapier will save your agency lots of time by automating repetitive tasks and please your clients when you’re able to work with their tech stack.

Marketing Agency Tools #2: Live Web Chat Software

The best live chat software allows you to proactively engage with customers and prospects in order to grow revenue, generate leads, and offer real-time support across multiple channels.

Studies have shown that live chat software:

• Boosts website engagement rates by 3X
• Increases conversions on websites by 45%
• Makes consumers 63% more likely to return to a website

Most web chat software is only available to use on a company’s website. However, with OmniChat™ technology by Customers.ai, you can engage with customers across multiple channels, whether that’s a website, SMS text messages, or other messaging apps.

There are a lot of web chat examples for marketing agencies to choose from, such as:

• Qualify and generate leads
• Build a sales chatbot
• Get more reviews
• Run a Facebook giveaway
• Send bulk text messages and Facebook Messenger chat blasts 

The ability to use live web chat on different marketing channels, all from one unified inbox, can be a game-changer for your marketing agency.

Marketing Agency Tools #3: Project Management Software

Teamwork is a flexible work management software that gives marketing agencies the tools they need to deliver exceptional projects for their clients.

As an agency, you’re not only managing your own work, you’re also managing your clients’ work. With Teamwork’s “Workload” solution, you can get a complete picture of your team’s capacity and manage it more effectively. 

This makes it easier for marketing agencies to respond to changes quickly and keep their team on track.

Additionally, Teamwork allows you to build custom workflows and gives agencies one central place to visualize team projects and tasks, deadlines, and workloads.

Lastly, client communication is facilitated by teamwork, as you can add clients as collaborators. By doing so, clients can leave comments, review assets, view the progress of projects, and eliminate many back and forth email threads.

Marketing Agency Tool #4: All-in-one SEO Software

The comprehensive SEO platform SE Ranking is one of the best choices for marketing agencies. It combines all the necessary tools for everyday optimization activities, from rank tracking to keyword and competitive research, and even content creation. The report builder is a huge benefit for agencies and has many templates, a white label feature, and integration with Looker Studio (previously Data Studio). 

So which SE Ranking tools can help clients to create a comprehensive strategy?

• Rank Tracker that provides accurate position tracking for each keyword with many additional features like ranking cannibalization spotting and keyword grouping, and tagging
• On-page SEO Checker that provides an optimization score for the page and advice on how to improve it
• Keyword Research with valuable features like bulk keyword analysis, question generation related to your query, providing long-tail keywords, etc
• Competitive Research that analyzes the organic and PPC traffic of the client’s rivals and extends the competitor list
• Website Audit that evaluates the website’s health and detects any possible technical issues
• Backlink Checker that analyzes backlink profiles from every possible angle
• Content Marketing Module that helps to create briefs and high-performing content based on the client’s competitors.

Marketers and SEO specialists can also connect Google Search Console and Google Analytics so that all the data is in one place. SE Ranking was designed with the needs of agencies in mind, so it also offers:

• White-label functionality 
• The possibility of working in teams on one project
• Marketing reporting tools for presenting well-visualized reports for clients
• More affordable pricing compared to other SEO tools.

Marketing Agency Tools #5: SEO Management Software

SEMrush is one of the best SEO tools to make your clients visible online. 

Agency teams use SEMrush to help clients master content marketing, improve SEO across their websites, create PPC campaigns, and manage their social media presence.

Some of the most popular tools to create a plan for your clients consist of:

• Website audit
• Social media tracker
• Backlink audit
• Ad builder
• Keyword position tracking
• On-page SEO checker
• PPC keyword tool
• Organic traffic insights

So, if you think about it, not only can you use SEMrush for SEO optimization with your clients, you can also use SEMrush to find prospects and land new business. 

By gaining insights into potential clients, the better you’ll be able to pitch them. Use SEMrush to:

• Analyze potential clients and their online visibility
• Get insights into their online performance, marketing strategy, and budgets
• Understand their niche and target audience
• Locate gaps in their marketing strategy to offer a personalized action plan

Marketing Agency Tools #6: Marketing Analytics & Social Media Reporting

Whatagraph is a marketing analytics & social media reporting tool for companies, teams, and marketing experts to visually monitor campaign performance.

This tool enables professionals to automatically pull information from digital marketing channels and turn analytical data into visually appealing reports & dashboards.

Whatagraph enables marketing professionals to monitor numbers in real-time and share automated performance reports with important clients & colleagues.

Its main benefits include:

• Pre-made templates
• Automatic report delivery (keeps clients informed by automatically sending updated reports)
• Custom API (import custom data from any source to reports).
• Custom branding (colors, logos, etc).
• Dedicated account managers (personal onboarding).
• Integrations with all major social media networks & analytical platforms.

Marketing Agency Tools #7: Social Media Analytics & Management

Iconosquare is one of the leading analytics and management platforms used by agencies and social media marketers.

Agencies use Iconosquare to help their clients manage their social media accounts. (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are available).

Some of the best features for agencies on Iconosquare are:

• In-depth analytics to understand their clients’ audience for increased account growth and engagement.
• Easy reporting – easily report the performance to your clients thanks to branded PDF reports at the click of a button.
• Multi profile management – report and analyze the social media performance of multiple social media profiles and content for your clients from one dashboard.
• Automatic scheduler – save time by setting and forgetting your content in advance.
• Scheduler collaboration – facilitate collaboration with your clients or your team by sharing your scheduler calendar with external approvers.

Other useful features for agencies on Iconosquare:

• Competitor analysis
• Conversations
• Hashtag tracking
• Industry benchmark

Marketing Agency Tools #8: Competitor Keyword Research

SpyFu is the best tool available for competitor keyword research. 

And each of your current or prospective marketing agency clients are going to get excited when you tell them you can steal traffic and leads from their competitors.

With SpyFu you can search for any domain and see every place they’ve shown up on Google, every keyword they’ve bought on Adwords, every organic rank, and every ad variation in the last 13 years.

SpyFu has step-by-step guides on how to:

• Find the keywords most important to your client’s market
• Increase your clients’ ranking for specific keywords
• Plan a content marketing campaign
• Research your client’s competitors marketing strategies
• Start a new AdWords campaign

Additionally, with SpyFu’s AdWords Advisor tool, if you analyze your client’s website, you can analyze all of their competitors’ AdWords bidding history and recommend the most profitable keywords your clients aren’t yet targeting.

SpyFu makes it easy to delight marketing agency clients because you can walk into a room and present hard data that shows how you’re going to help them beat out their competitors.

Marketing Agency Tools #9: Social Media Management

Being able to prove your agency’s social media ROI to your clients can be powerful. AgoraPulse provides the tools you need to do just that.

AgoraPulse has publishing modal’s built-in UTM parameters to show your agency’s impact on conversions and revenue. This allows you to spot and eliminate spam and negative comments on your ads to encourage more positive engagement and ROI on your client’s ad spend.

For marketing agencies, anything you can do to save time is paramount to your success. AgoraPulse makes it easy to export reports with key metrics and analysis on engagement and growth to present to clients.

Furthermore, it never hurts to impress clients. So, add your logo to the PowerPoint decks generated by AgoraPulse and your clients will think you built it from scratch.

AgoraPulse also has tools to allow collaboration between marketing agencies and their clients. For example, with a shared calendar, clients can review, accept, reject, and give feedback on your scheduled social media content. Each shared calendar gives you unlimited calendar users and unlimited profiles.

Marketing Agency Tools #10: Facebook Messenger Marketing

Customers.ai supports chat marketing on Facebook Messenger and is a real marketing automation weapon to pitch your clients.

Using an omnichannel chatbot like Customers.ai, you can use the same dialogue as you do on your client’s website across multiple web chat apps. This makes it easy to get tons of Messenger contacts and their data using Facebook post autoresponders.

A little-known Facebook Messenger hack is that when someone replies to one of your Facebook Page’s posts, you get permission to send them an opt-in message.

If the recipient engages with the message, you gain access to keep sending them messages, and you’ll capture their contact information in the process.

The simplest way to do this is to ask an engaging question with buttons for leads to click. This is one of the most effective ways to collect free leads, nurture, and qualify them for your clients.

For example, a proactive live chat message like the following on Facebook Messenger can be very effective.

There are even more powerful ways you can use Facebook Messenger marketing for clients as well. One of them is through paid engagement.

And the main product for generating new leads through Facebook Messenger chat is click-to-Messenger ads.

It’s a news feed ad format that instead of sending traffic to a website, sends the traffic to an engaging Messenger chat session. 

As soon as they send your business a message, they become a contact and you capture their contact information.

Furthermore, you can use click-to-Messenger ads to drive people into messaging sessions that:

• Invite people to take surveys 
• Make a purchase 
• Register for an event

And this is more efficient than website traffic because it’s much easier to have all this work done in messaging than it is in a browser.

This is great for remarketing campaigns as well because you’re capturing all of their Facebook contact information. What you can do is segment the leads you capture for your clients into audiences based on certain properties, and then re-engage using customized bulk messages on Facebook, SMS, and other web chat apps.

Lastly, because you receive the user’s contact information as soon as the conversation starts, the cost per lead becomes incredibly low.

There are many more Facebook chatbot marketing tactics for you to explore, such as boosting a post on Facebook or sending sponsored messages directly into users’ Messenger threads.

Marketing Agency Tools #11: Facebook Ads Manager

Performance marketing agencies can quickly be in control of managing hundreds or even thousands of ads for their clients. That’s why a tool like AdEspresso can be a particularly useful addition to your marketing agency tools.

Whether you’re a freelancer or an experienced marketing agency, AdEspresso has the right combination of Automation tools designed to save you time and generate more leads for your clients. 

AdEspresso allows you to quickly create and analyze all your clients’ campaigns across three channels, all from one platform:

• Facebook ads
• Google AdWords 
• Instagram ads

What’s particularly useful for performance marketing agencies is AdEspresso’s ability to simplify the onboarding of new clients using its Onboarding Requests tool. With this feature, you can have your clients provide access to their pages and ad accounts with as little friction as possible. 

Additionally, if you need to add external services, you can also request access to your clients’ CRM to connect AdEspresso.

Other useful tools for agencies on AdEspresso:

• Request approval for your campaigns
• Create and send customized reports
• White label the product to the look and feel of your agency
• Team collaboration and permissions management

Give your Facebook ads some extra juice with these 19 powerful Facebook advertising tools!

Marketing Agency Tools #12: PPC Management Software

WordStream for agencies helps to replace multiple complex platforms and spreadsheets with a single user interface designed to streamline Google Ads, Facebook, and Bing workflows. 

Additionally, WordStream’s Advisor tool for agencies makes recommendations to optimize performance across platforms and will highlight your best results each month to your clients. 

The most notable WordStream features to consider for your set of marketing agency tools are as follows:

• Prospect Tracking & Management
• Customizable Proposal Generator
• White Labeled Google Account Audit
• International Currencies
• White Labeled Facebook Account Audit
• Automated Keyword Lists
• Google Places Match

WordStream’s Client Center dashboard is designed to give your agency a view of every account you manage and to assess where to spend your time more efficiently. It comes with tools such as a performance tracker, budget tracking, and spend notifications.

Marketing Agency Tools #13: Landing Page Builder

Unbounce is a popular addition to the list of many marketing agency tools. It allows you to create custom landing pages with no coding required. 

Additionally, Unbounce’s Conversion Intelligence and Smart Traffic tools help to set Unbounce apart from the competition. 

As an agency, you’re under pressure to turn client campaigns into success stories. Well, sending traffic to your client’s website isn’t going to be successful because websites are for exploring, not converting. 

Landing pages, on the other hand, are focused on the messaging that brought visitors to the page in the first place. A landing page with one, focused goal tailored to a marketing campaign will absolutely increase conversions, and therefore keep your clients happy.

With Unbounce, you can duplicate your most successful landing pages across client accounts to save time and build high converting pages in bulk. Furthermore, you can A/B test variations of landing pages to see which messaging and design works best for your client.

Marketing Agency Tools #14: SMS Marketing Services

SMS marketing is rapidly growing in popularity, and that’s because it’s instant, convenient, and universal.

Outdated mobile-targeting tactics are costing you conversions, clients, and revenue. Meanwhile, SMS marketing is lurking in the background, waiting for you to capitalize on it.

Using Customers.ai SMS marketing tools, agencies can set themselves apart from the competition by dramatically increasing open, response, and conversion rates.

Customers.ai SMS marketing tools empower businesses to send customers both bulk and personalized messages at scale with smart features like: 

• Contact list growth tools
• Text message delivery time scheduling
• Triggering text messages to send based on behaviors and interactions
• Results tracking and analytics

Getting your clients’ audiences to opt-in to text message marketing campaigns is simple with Customers.ai. Multiple opt-in options exist, such as SMS keywords, a website chat SMS opt-in widget, and an SMS opt-in popup form. 

For example, here’s one of our CTAs where we’re using a dedicated phone number and the keyword “UNICORN”: Join my Unicorn Marketing Club for news and updates once a week by texting “UNICORN” to 1-309-740-3151.

When you text UNICORN to the number, you’ll receive a text message that reads:

“Hi, this is Larry Kim. Thank you for joining my unicorn marketer’s text message club. I’ll send new marketing hacks — once or sometimes twice a week. You can type STOP at any time to unsubscribe. ???? be a unicorn in a sea of donkeys.”

Go ahead and test it out for yourself to receive marketing news and updates from Larry Kim!

There’s so much more you can do with Customers.ai SMS marketing tools. Here’s just a few:

• Bulk text messaging
• SMS drip campaign automation
• Automated responses and proactive messaging
• Send GIFs, emojis, and images in text blasts
• Trigger workflows through Zapier and the Customers.ai API

Not sold on SMS marketing? Take a look at these 60 SMS marketing statistics, and you’ll surely change your mind.

Marketing Agency Tools #15: Content Marketing Planning

GrowthHackers new Workflow tool helps businesses plan, create, distribute, and analyze content marketing at scale through intuitive and integrated software.

Companies and marketing agencies can use Workflow to: 

• Brainstorm and approve their editorial lines 
• Create content for blogs, social media, and emails 
• Organize and publish through an integrated drag-and-drop editorial calendar 
• Keep track of their content production and workload 
• Analyze results from an SEO and social media perspective after publication

As a compliment to GrowthHackers Experiments tool for running growth tests, they built Workflow for teams to also be able to execute their hypotheses from one platform. 

Workflow helps growth and content marketing teams guess less, learn more, and work together.

Marketing Agency Tools #16: Graphic Design Software

Visme is an all-in-one visual content creation tool that allows you to design anything from social media graphics and presentations to reports and infographics, and much more.

Start with one of Visme’s thousands of professionally designed templates and fully customize it to fit you or your client’s brand and marketing needs. The intuitive design interface comes with many design assets like icons, popular fonts, color themes, animation and interactivity elements, as well as animated graphics and illustrations that are exclusive to Visme’s platform.

A few categories of templates users can choose from include:

• Presentation Templates
• Infographics
• Flyers
• Brochures
• Schedules
• Instagram Posts
• Instagram Stories
• YouTube Thumbnails
• Greeting Cards
• Certificates
• and so many more!

Business account users can even add in their branded colors and fonts so that they’re easy to access in all-new designs. Save customized templates to reuse in your designs.

Marketing Agency Tools #17: Link Tracking Software

Rebrandly is the industry-leading link management platform to brand, track and share short URLs using a custom domain name. 

Rebrandly is great for creating many different short links with your client’s brand name on the links, making them more than 30% likely to be clicked. 

Using Rebrandly, you can do the following and much more:

• Build, schedule, and send custom reports based on the traffic your links receive.
• Send visitors to specific landing pages or direct them to your mobile app based on their location, device, browsing language, and other factors.
• Fire retargeting pixels directly from your links, add users to your retargeting lists in Facebook, AdWords, Twitter, and more.
• Quickly build UTM parameters on all your links to know the medium, source, and content traffic is coming from. 

For agency teams, you can set up folders where members of the same team can connect to view and manage sets of branded links collaboratively.

Marketing Agency Tools #17: Business Analytics & KPI Dashboards

Databox is a business analytics tool that brings all data into a unified platform so users can track performance and discover insights in real-time.

This tool allows agencies to mix and match their data from different sources into one dashboard, and visualize a complete overview of business performance.

Some of the best features for agencies on Databox are:

• Agency + Client Accounts: agencies can create client accounts under 1 umbrella account. Clients then have access to monitor data anytime via URL, mobile application, TV data stream, or office wall.
• Client Performance Screen allows an agency to monitor up to 5 KPIs per client on a single screen. This is great for agency owners, managers & directors that want to quickly review account performance.
• Mobile Application – Databox has a native mobile app that allows users to check data from anywhere, at any time. Data Boards will automatically adjust to fit the mobile screen, so you don’t need to build them twice.
• Calculate KPIs From Different Sources – Data Calculations allows users to aggregate metrics from multiple data sources, calculate different ratios, return-on-investment, financial metrics, then track them over time.
• 3rd Party Automations – 70+ native integrations & 250+ Zapier & Integromat automations that you can connect with Databox.
• Scheduled Snapshots – Your clients or agency may not want to log in to Databox every day to check data. Snapshots allow them to send monthly or weekly updates to important stakeholders, without asking them to log in to the web or mobile app.

Other useful features for agencies on Databox:

• Dashboard Annotations
• Drag-and-Drop Editor
• Pre-made Templates
• Quick Setup
• Smart Goals
• Alerts

Important next steps

Watch the Marketing Agency Growth Accelerator Summit with Larry Kim.

Check out our Marketing Agency Pricing Guide to find the pricing models that work best for your agency.

Customers.ai agency Team Plan partners get advanced web chat marketing automation features, multi-page and multi-user dashboard, and new client referrals as a certified Customers.ai agency.

See all the tools in Customers.ai’s multi-channel chatbot platform by getting started with Customers.ai for free.

FAQs about Marketing Agency Tools