A marketing agency without the right tech stack is like a ship without sails — it’s going nowhere.
Fast-changing consumer behaviors and preferences are challenging for a company to stay on top of for themselves. You're in a much harder position — you're doing it for multiple clients at once. And each has their own expectations and standards.
While most companies invest in digital tools to run their businesses, you also need to use certain tools to deliver results and value to your clients. Since your agency depends on them to stay afloat and they're a huge part of your budget, you'll want to choose the right ones.
In today's article, we'll walk you through the best agency tools, how to use them, and where they fit into your workflow.
If you can think of a business problem, there's probably a tool that solves it. This is a blessing and a curse.
It's possible to get Shiny Object Syndrome with business tools. Any time you hear the words "optimization" or "automation" followed by "...for {insert pain point/business process}," it's tempting to try it out.
What you might not consider is how all your tools will work together (and how they affect your team members).
Having dozens of tools might solve your individual problems, but it creates one much greater: disorganization.
The key is finding the balance between using enough tools to solve your problems without sacrificing organization.
Usually, this means consolidating your tech stack. You're probably wasting time and money on tools with overlapping features. The fewer you have, the fewer problems you'll face with pricing, maintenance, and scalability.
There are tools purpose-built for agencies and those built for general businesses. Purpose-built tools cater to the specific needs of marketing agencies, while general tools offer a broader range of functionality.
Sometimes, this distinction doesn't matter.
Calendly, for example, isn't an 'agency-first' tool — anyone can use it. But scheduling meetings is a standard task, so agencies can get the same benefit from using it as any other business.
When you're using the tool to perform business-specific functions, though, you'll want to pick a tool designed for that purpose.
Let's say you're running a full-service agency and one of your core offerings is web design/development packages. It'd be way harder to use a standard website builder compared to Duda's website builder for agencies, which comes with white-label options and a dedicated dashboard for managing multiple client sites.
Depending on the specific function and category of tool you’re looking for, there will be different operational features.
But, every tool should have certain features that will make it easier to use, such as:
You might also want to consider white-label tools, which give you the ability to package a website, SEO audit, or any other end product and sell it to your client as your own. Unless you're selling high-ticket, entirely bespoke solutions, white-labeling saves you a ton of time and money (and probably improves the quality).
The right tools in any category will meet three criteria:
If you can't sync data from one platform to the next in real-time, you're going to waste time and report inaccurate info to your clients.
Another consideration is the learning curve. The more straightforward, the better. Weigh user experience heavily when considering a new tool; your team won't be able to (willingly) use a tool that is difficult to use.
You'll also want to consider each tool's pricing plan/model. Most software platforms use a combination of tiered and usage-based pricing (e.g., $50/month, plus $5 for every 1,000 contacts in your CRM).
Some platforms are cost-prohibitive for smaller agencies, but the pricing scales with you as your business grows. Others have a flat monthly rate, but they might not offer enough features for larger agencies. Or, one essential feature may only exist in their higher price tier while other vendors offer it in their mid-tier plan.
Beyond that, you'll definitely want to read G2 and Capterra reviews. They'll give you a sense of user sentiment, the product's shortcomings, and how well it performs agency-specific functions. Usually, you'll see a keyword or checkmark next to a feature that reflects the user's business model (agency, in our case).
There are several categories of agency tools:
You might not need tools from each category. Some of these tasks might not even be part of your operations. That's okay — we're here to give you the full rundown so you can choose the appropriate tools for your business model.
HubSpot Marketing Hub is the most extensive and streamlined marketing software. Its platform is built for all company types, with a few special features for agencies.
The marketing automation software has features specifically designed to support agency workflows, such as:
What makes HubSpot so great is its suite of tools. The ability to manage email automation, sales processes, partnerships, content marketing, and customer service (to name a few) within the same interface is incredibly useful for agencies. Like we mentioned earlier, a few scalable tools are much more valuable than dozens of separate ones.
Plus, its free plan is extensive — budding agencies and future agency owners in the freelancer stage can use it, and HubSpot's pricing scales with your business as you grow. As one of the biggest names in business software, HubSpot is also top-of-mind for other software vendors' integration libraries. It integrates with just about everything.
Mailchimp is perhaps the best-known email marketing platform. Recently, it's expanded its horizons to tackle social media marketing, landing page creation, lead nurturing and scoring, and behavioral targeting for ads and email campaigns.
As agency owners or freelancers, Mailchimp users get:
An added bonus is Mailchimp's familiarity. You can streamline client workflows and keep them in an interface they're familiar with. And, like HubSpot, it integrates with almost everything.
ActiveCampaign provides a comprehensive approach to marketing automation. What makes it great is that it recognizes the importance of human touch in your marketing efforts. It excels as a tool that strikes the right balance between user-generated tasks and automated processes.
Agency-specific features include:
As an ActiveCampaign agency partner, you can purchase multiple accounts for your clients at a discounted rate. You can then resell them for a profit with your value-added services, which makes ActiveCampaign great for full-service agencies that need to manage their own marketing efforts and their clients' campaigns.
Customers.ai (formerly MobileMonkey) is a lead generation and customer engagement platform you can use to automate lead generation, nurturing, and customer engagement funnels for your company and your clients. It's purpose-built for digital marketing agencies, so you won't find any extraneous features.
What Customers.ai offers is...
What sets Customers.ai apart from the rest is its focus on internal agency processes in addition to regular marketing features. You can onboard clients to the platform at whatever price you like (e.g., value-based) — they'll still bill you for each account at the same flat rate. And, you control 100% of your clients' lead data, not them.
Project management software has evolved to be something of a headache. They're confusing to set up and have a lot of moving parts. Out of the major project management tools (Asana, Monday.com, etc.), we've found ClickUp to be extremely user-friendly. This is hugely important, since you'll be onboarding new clients who have potentially never used your system.
ClickUp's unique Hierarchy structure ensures every item in your workflow serves a purpose. As an agency, you can build that hierarchy in numerous ways:
Beyond this hierarchy, you can use whatever kind of PM interface you want — kanban, Gantt, list, calendar — or decide you want to change it all. And ClickUp's massive library of templates and how-tos make companywide adoption a breeze.
If you hate spreadsheets but don't need a 'do-it-all' PM tool, Trello for Marketing Teams is your go-to. It's not really in the same playing field as Asana, Monday, or ClickUp because you can't use it as a sales pipeline or customize it as extensively. But you can use to manage clients, individual projects, and keep all your freelancers/employees in the loop.
It's perfect for smaller agencies that need a friendly, straightforward software without any of the extra stuff.
With Trello, you can:
Trello is amenable to marketing agencies because it's very intuitive. You'll know exactly what needs doing, and it doesn't take long to get set up.
Slack is far and away the best collaboration software.
Slack is perfect for agencies because it's specifically designed for teams. It doesn't matter how big your agency is — every team member can be in on the conversation.
There are other video conferencing tools. There just isn't a reason not to use Zoom. It's the most integrated, familiar, and reliable service available.
Zoom offers a variety of features that make it the perfect tool for agencies:
You can use Zoom to run sales calls, debrief your team, have an hour or two of close collaboration, and even host webinars to bring in new clients.
Shameless plug, here! We've built Duda for Agencies to be the best website builder on the market for agencies. There's no other website builder that does it all.
Plus, you'll find upsell and revenue expansion opportunities within the platform. That way, you're always adding value to your clients and boosting your bottom line.
If you want to know why your clients' customers are buying or not buying, Optimizely can help. It's an experimentation platform that allows you to test different variations of your website to see what works best for your users.
Some key features include:
While it isn't an agency-specific tool, your agency should offer conversion rate optimization and reporting as an additional service because it'll help your clients achieve their goals faster. Isn't that your goal?
It's right there in the name — AgencyAnalytics is an all-in-one reporting tool for agencies. It's a white-labeled platform with customizable dashboards, automated reports, and integrations with 75+ marketing tools.
Some highlights include:
AgencyAnalytics also offers a 14-day free trial so you can test it out before committing to a plan.
If you want a reporting tool that lets you build completely custom dashboards with any metric or KPI you can think of, Klipfolio for Agencies is the way to go. It's a cloud-based dashboard and reporting platform that integrates with all your marketing tools to give you real-time overview of your clients' performance.
Some features include:
Compared to AgencyAnalytics, Klipfolio has more pre-built connectors (175+), more out-of-the-box KPI dasboards, and a solid free plan with no X-day limit. It's more expensive, though.
You can't talk about reporting tools without mentioning Google Analytics. It's the most widely used web analytics service, offering in-depth insights into your website traffic, user behavior, conversion rates, and so much more.
Every time you onboard a client, you'll either set them up with Google Analytics or connect your agency's account to their website. Some features you get with GA include:
You can also integrate the data with SEO, advertising, and optimization tools for a more holistic view of your every client's online presence. You’ll still need paid plans from other tools, but GA integration improves their data and feedback quality.
Related:
Google Analytics 4: How To Prepare Your Agency And Clients For The Transition
For marketing teams, Freshsales has all the features your marketing team needs to flourish. It's got a rockstar usability score because it's one of the most accessible platforms out there, and it's got an abundance of email templates, preset dashboards, and automated reporting features.
It also offers:
It's also got some of the best customer support and knowledge base material, meaning you'll get your issues resolved in a timely manner. As an agency owner managing all your client relationships while juggling project completion, this is one of the most important (and often overlooked) decision factors.
With such an awesome suite of Marketing, Sales, and Support tools, using HubSpot CRM plays straight into our advice: Keep as many tools in the same interface as possible.
Clients like it. Employees like it. Agencies around the world use it with great success. And 99% of the blogs like this you'll read will list it as one of the best.
Trust us. It is.
For agencies, our favorite features of Sales Hub include:
Besides Salesforce, HubSpot is one of the only platforms out there with 1,000+ integrations (and tons of plugins in the App Marketplace). And it offers unparalleled scalability — you can take it with you from freelancer to enterprise.
You should never have to ask a client, "What time works for you?"
It's confusing, annoying, and adds tons of friction. If they don't get to your email reply 'til the next day, you're also wasting valuable time (yours and theirs).
With Calendly, you can easily schedule meetings and calls with clients, leads, and team members without the back-and-forth emails.
Some key features:
A Calendly link is the expectation these days. Don't make your clients jump through hoops just to schedule a meeting with you. If you’re choosing a booking calendar for your clients’ websites, Calendly is a great option too.
Hunter is a tool you can use to find email addresses of prospective clients. It searches a database of 200 million+ addresses and has integrations with popular tools like LinkedIn, Salesforce, and HubSpot. You can also use Hunter to verify the legitimacy and deliverability of certain email addresses.
It's perfect for smaller agencies that want to grow their client base, but it's also useful for larger agencies to keep their contact lists organized.
If you're running an SEO or link building agency, Hunter will be your best friend for outreach and prospecting.
AhrefsBot is the most active search engine crawler, behind GoogleBot and BingBot. It's got the most accurate search engine data on the planet and is used as the most trusted backlink database.
For SEO agencies, you'll be using Ahrefs for:
As an agency owner, you can load all your clients' sites as separate projects. You can set up automatic crawls and audits on a monthly or weekly basis. And you can print all your reports or export them to a spreadsheet.
Basically, you can do all their work and your own in the same platform. It's about as simple as it gets.
Ahrefs is the best keyword research and link building tool, but SEMrush is the other one vying for that spot. It is better in a few ways, though.
Separate modules available (for an additional cost) within SEMrush include:
If you're running a full-service agency, you might prefer SEMrush because you can manage all these things in the same platform.
Content optimization has become one of the hottest topics in digital marketing, and there are plenty of tools out there that fit the bill. But Surfer SEO takes it to another level.
After using Surfer, you'll never write an article without knowing what keywords you need to hit and where your existing content is falling short.
Client SEO audits are a two-step process:
The Surfer algorithm will then analyze your content and give you a detailed report on what changes you need to make. It'll tell you how many words, headings, images, and outbound links are needed for the best chance at ranking. And it'll show you exactly how your competition fares.
If you're offering content creation or optimization as a service, you can input the target keyword you'll rank the page for, then write the content according to semantic suggestions.
Respona is a relatively new tool, but it's quickly gaining popularity among SEO agencies for its fully managed link building outreach and PR services. It's kind of like a CRM for link building — it helps you find prospects, organize outreach campaigns, manage negotiations for guest posts and link placements, and track results.
As an agency, you'll get:
Link building is one of the toughest services to organize. Usually, it's done in spreadsheets, which is a mess if you're reaching out to thousands of people per week. Respona streamlines this process, so you can focus on delivering the end product to your clients and ranking their sites.
WooRank for SEO Agencies is an SEO auditing tool that helps agencies identify areas for improvement on their clients' websites. It provides a comprehensive analysis of your site's technical, content, and backlink performance, and offers recommendations for how to fix any issues.
WooRank works within the Duda editor, so you can fix any issues directly on your clients' websites. Some of the platform's key features include:
With all the information above, WooRank produces white-label reports you can sell to your clients as-is, include in a larger package, or act on and implement the fixes in real time. Agencies can also access a dedicated WooRank partner portal to track their clients' progress and receive direct support from the WooRank team.
Sprout Social for Agencies is great for social media management agencies because it lets you manage multiple accounts with ease. And you can collaborate across teams, so clients with multiple social profiles get a seamless experience. Its detailed reporting features are among the most digestible as well.
Its supported platforms are:
For agency owners, its standout features include:
Onboarding clients is also a breeze. The platform allows for seamless out-of-organization collaboration so you can invite clients to collaborate on approvals without needing a Sprout Social account themselves.
It's everything an agency needs and more, all in one platform.
Like you'd expect from a veteran software product of its caliber, Hootsuite offers post scheduling, advanced analytics, social listening and sentiment analysis, custom reports, shared inboxes, and a curated content library.
For agencies, it also has:
Hootsuite supports the same platforms as Sprout Social — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube.
Buffer is a lot like the above mentioned platforms, but it comes with a few features that may set it apart for your agency.
Plus, Buffer browser extensions and mobile apps function seamlessly across different platforms, enabling you to schedule content while exploring the web and planning your clients' campaigns.
The only drawback is it doesn't allow external collaboration, so you'll need to onboard every client you bring on.
QuickBooks is the tried-and-true accounting and invoicing solution for agencies. From freelancers to scaled marketing agencies, it's the go-to tool for financial management.
It also estimates taxes and shows you P&L in real-time and estimates each project's profitability. You can integrate it with your banking app and automate expense management. And it supports flexible billing for recurring payments, one-off projects, and variable costs.
QuickBooks also integrates with many popular tools — PayPal, Stripe, TSheets, and tons of non-financial tools. And because it's widely used by small businesses and self-employed individuals, finding how-to articles and videos is simple.
Honeybook is great for agencies because it helps them manage their contracting process. You can automate updates, send automated reminders for payments, and create custom proposals.
Here's what you'll get:
It also integrates with QuickBooks, so you can sync your data with accounting and still reap the benefits of its reliable platform.
If retainers are your monetization model, Chargebee is an invoicing and payment automation tool that helps you create subscription plans for clients. You can also use it to receive payments from one-off projects.
With recurring revenue, you're opening your agency up to better analytics and scalable growth. Chargebee can help you take a data-driven approach.
ChatGPT — perhaps the most famous tool of the last year. It's an AI tool people seem to think will take over their jobs and automate everything from content creation to customer service.
But it's not here to replace humans. It's here to make research and content creation faster, leaving you with more time for strategy and creative work.
Here are a few examples:
You can use ChatGPT for just about anything imaginable. From an agency standpoint, it's best for planning and researching marketing campaigns and analyzing data (NOT copywriting).
Spoiler alert: You can't fire your copywriters and replace them with artificial intelligence. Machines can't replicate human creativity.
But they CAN make content marketing faster, less tedious, and more scalable for an already-skilled writer. And Jasper is the best AI tool for agencies to do that.
Here's what it does:
What makes Jasper more impressive than other content creation platforms is it reads your article as you're writing it. Press CMD + J, and it'll continue writing exactly where you left off. To date, this is the only tool that does this.
Duda is a website builder (duh). Agency owners use us to build and manage their clients' websites (also duh — by now, hopefully).
Our AI assistant is here to help you do more of that with less of the pain. It’s the perfect marriage of technology and design, providing a solution for agencies looking to quickly build and launch professional websites at scale.
Pretty cool, right? Not to toot our own horn, but... we know.
Part of ad and social media creative is video; it drives better engagement and conversions than still images. But creating video is tough (and expensive). Actually, not really.
DeepBrain enables you to create marketing, how-to, training, and explainer videos for your clients’ businesses in a matter of minutes. You can create custom avatars based on the message you're trying to convey, it'll automatically turn a script into a full-fledged video.
It won't make you into Steven Spielberg, but it'll make it easy to create video ads that drive results.
Whether it's a sales call, contract negotiation, or briefing for a new project, you'll probably take notes when you and your client go over things. The problem is, notetaking takes away from what you should be doing (paying attention). So, let Fathom do the work.
Fathom has some of the best note-taking AI in existence. It's like a voice recorder that transcribes what you're saying, and it does it incredibly accurately.
Some other interesting features:
Fathom is perfect for agencies because it takes away the manual work of note-taking. You can focus on building relationships with your clients while leaving the admin stuff to Fathom.
You can use Lavender for your outbound prospecting and client work. It's a simple AI plugin that lets you write better sales and client emails with ease.
Whether you're sending cold outreach emails to potential clients, need to write effective follow-ups for current projects, or need your copywriter to give you a few sales emails for a client, Lavender can help you get the job done (better).
Zapier is an automation tool that connects all of your favorite apps and tools together. It can automate basically anything.
For example, you can send a pre-call email as soon as someone books a discovery call, add their info to CRM, and send a Slack message to yourself. All without coding.
Even if two apps don't natively integrate with one another, creating a "Zap" can bridge the gap. It's a huge time-saver for agencies, eliminating tedious manual tasks and keeping all your tools connected.
Zapier also integrates with Duda, so you can instantly connect it with thousands of other apps.
Gusto is nice and simple. If you're running a smaller agency, Gusto can help you manage payroll, benefits, HR, and tax compliance. It's a low-cost option for agencies with fewer than 100 employees.
It doesn't matter if you have agencies and contractors, people in multiple states, or a mix of both — Gusto's got you covered.
With Gusto, you can:
It's by far the easiest to understand and use, which is important for agencies, which often skip the HR function in favor of building their service-based roles first.
Loom is perfect for all those times your clients need a little more context. Instead of writing a long email or jumping on a call, just record your screen (with audio) and send it off.
Here are a few ideas for how to use it:
Loom's main purpose is to simplify communication for teams and clients. Most people would rather watch a quick video than read an email or attend a meeting. We're willing to bet you would, too.
Ultimately, the choice is yours. There are thousands of tools out there — a mathematically small proportion made this list.
Your agency might have a specific function, such as ad buying or design, that sets you apart and makes a specific tool necessary.
Just remember to set your priorities: save time, save money, and improve results for clients without creating additional work. Carefully evaluate how each tool fits into your workflow.
When in doubt, consolidate your tech stack, especially for your core tasks.
Always prioritize platforms that offer more than just one function — That's exactly how we've built Duda; with native capabilities beyond just website building. Duda includes and AI Assistant, Client Billing (even for non website building services), team collaboration and client management, Zapier integrations, SEO capabilities and more.
That's how you really save time. Start a free trial.
