Tools are such a big part of digital agency life. They allow you to make life quicker, easier and in fact allow your business to scale up, be more efficient and allow you to offer a more data-led approach to your clients.
If you’re in a position where you are looking to scale up, or need tools to aid a small team, then there are some key tools that you really should have in your arsenal. To help you out, here are some of our favourites…
Social Media
When it comes to social media, there are tons of great applications and tools you can use to smoothen out your process, schedule tweets and analyse performance. Tools such as Hootesuite and Buffer are ideal for this and will allow you to do all of the above mentioned.
There are many more that can be used too, with the likes of Agorapulse also offering similar features and helping with workflow and bulk publishing, a great addition if you only have one social media manager for multiple clients.
Web Design & Development
Designers and developers don’t come cheap in this day and age and if your a small or up-and-coming agency that don’t get too many jobs, outsourcing those projects is often the way to go. However, there are also website builder tools that are perfect for creating simple and professional designs and builds that are scalable with the opportunity to work for one client or hundreds.
There are a number of brands out there that offer this. Duda is trusted by thousands of agencies and is among the most popular out there, working with a number of huge agencies and playing an instrumental role in scaling up that part of the business.
SEO Analysis
An SEO agency without any tools really isn’t an SEO agency. Every agency will have their favourite tools, and often that can be dictated by price. The likes of SEMrush, Ahrefs and Majestic are among the most popular, all offering solid levels of ranking analysis, while of course Google Analytics and Search Console are a must.
There are naturally many more tools that can do different things to aid SEO performance. Screaming Frog is another great tool for in-depth technical SEO analysis.
Time Keeping
A huge part of agency life is ensuring you’re delivering enough hours for your clients, while also not over-committing to one and leaving you short of time elsewhere. There are many time tracking tools out there and every agency should really have one, not necessarily checking up on staff’s time, but rather using it to see where teams may be stretched or have time available to be working on other tasks.
The likes of Harvest, Toggl, Asana, ATracker and many more do this perfectly and ensure the business is efficiently ticking over.
Brand Monitoring
As well as SEO performance, you’re probably going to want to monitor and understand the sentiment towards your clients. There are many quick and easy ways to do this, such as setting up Google Alerts. However, if you really want to dig into the details, tools such as Brandwatch are perfect, allowing you to monitor mentions of clients and the sentiment towards them across the likes of social media, news and everywhere else online.