6 Tools and Software to Help Digital Agencies Scale

Success as a digital marketing agency depends on a wide variety of factors, not least your ability to offer your clients a competitive standard of service.

While there’s no magic bullet when it comes to success as an agency, making sure you’re using the best possible tools in order to convert potential customers at every stage of the conversion funnel and delight your customers in order to scale your agency.

If your set of tools is overdue for an audit, or your agency is just getting started and you don’t know where to begin, then this post is for you.

Here’s 6 essential online tools to help you scale your digital agency.

Asana - Project Management

We don’t need to tell you that running a digital agency can sometimes be overwhelming. With so many client accounts, each with their own unique goals and industry nuances, making sure that every project is heading in the right direction can be a struggle for the most experienced industry professionals.

Modern agencies need robust project management software to keep on top of their commitments, and in our opinion, Asana takes the cake.

This popular software suite empowers users to interact with the same project using multiple different views, allows managers to automate repetitive admin tasks and workflows, and has all the features necessary to support Agile or Scrum-based styles of project management. 

It’s also highly flexible in terms of integrations, with the ability to work with a wide range of third-party apps, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Tableau, and Zoom, among others.

Another great thing about Asana is that it boasts an exceptionally feature-rich free plan compared to many pieces of competitor software, making it ideal for freelance consultants or agencies that are just getting started.

Hubspot Marketing - CRM

A digital agency will live or die on its ability to scale over time. If you’re looking for a way to monitor and manage all your client relationships through every stage of your sales funnel, then Hubspot is likely the best tool for the job.

Made to offer a great standard of service for companies of all sizes and specialisms, Hubspot has an exceptionally feature-rich free plan, with no irritating time limitations, and the capacity to manage up to a million contacts within your sales and marketing workflows.

Past their free version, there’s a range of plans that scale up in cost and features gradually, allowing you to add on new capabilities as and when you need them, without having to invest in resources beyond your means. 

Hubspot also offers both inbound and outbound marketing consultancy services helping you scale up your agency and find your way out of marketing ruts.

Like Asana, Hubspot stands out for how easy it is to integrate into your existing systems, with satisfied users reporting that it’s “intuitive and easy to integrate HubSpot with our data and marketing tech stack”. 

Featuring user-friendly tutorials for using Hubspot in conjunction with popular tools such as WordPress, Zoom, Gmail, and AgencyAnalytics, this CRM allows you to start using a highly sophisticated tool without disrupting your current ways of working.

SEMRush - SEO Analysis

The development of modern SEO has been one of the most significant driving factors that has turned marketing from an art to a science. Like any science, when you’re engaging in SEO, you’ll need access to quality, reliable data to help you make informed decisions about your campaigns. 

Semrush is a hugely popular all-in-one SEO software suite, and if you start using it at your agency, you’ll quickly understand why! SEMRush boasts a huge array of marketing tools designed to help both agencies and SMEs get better results from their SEO efforts. 

It will allow you to create detailed keyword research reports and health check summaries of any domain that you’re managing with just a few clicks. It will even generate fresh content marketing recommendations based on the keywords that you use it to target, making it that much easier to optimise content and attract more organic traffic.

One of our favourite features of SEMRush is its Domain vs Domain analysis, which produces a detailed comparison of how SEO-friendly a given domain is compared to a competitor. 

This can be invaluable when you’re taking on a new account and want to show the client where their website stands compared to close competitors in language they can understand.

BuzzStream - Blogger Outreach

If your digital agency is in SEO, then you’ll know how important well-strategised and targeted blogger outreach campaigns are to the overall success of a link building campaign. 

Though immensely powerful as a link building technique, guest posting or blogger outreach can be quite painstaking when you need to deliver quick, reliable growth to your clients.

BuzzStream is a purpose-built tool designed to make blogger outreach campaigns far easier to manage, giving you a single platform through which you can build a database of leads, search for new bloggers via keywords and URLs, and create effective outreach emails through a selection of powerful templates.

Transparency is an increasingly important deciding factor for B2B marketing clients, with many leading link building agencies showcasing their capacity for minute tracking of every publication through every stage. BuzzStream is also a great choice for agencies looking to scale thanks to its fantastic array of reporting capabilities.

From internal reporting templates like project leaderboards and template performance statistics to client-facing views such as links by domain authority and outreach trend charts, this tool will empower you to create insightful and easy-to-follow reports that will delight your clients.

Google AdWords - PPC Management

Google enjoys an impressive share of the PPC market, with the UK being the largest advertising market in Europe and one of the leading advertising markets worldwide. In 2022, ad spend in the UK amounted to £35 billion. 

If you’re an agency that deals with PPC optimisation, then using Google Adwords is a no-brainer, as whichever audience segments your clients are targeting, they’re almost guaranteed to be on Google.

Google Adwords gives its users access to its own Google Keyword planner, allowing you to get a clear picture of the ways that your clients’ audience is searching for businesses like theirs, and the kind of budget you’ll need to maximise their chances of success. 

This keyword research tool can also present a useful way for you to glean additional SEO insights, as the data comes directly from Google, removing the risk of popular SEO tools that can be slow to pick up on sudden fluctuations in search trends.

If you have clients that are in poor digital shape, this PPC platform can also offer an effective way to generate immediate traffic for competitive terms. 

If a client is trying to find a foothold in a notoriously competitive niche, and can’t wait for your SEO efforts to take effect, then bidding on these terms can give them a prompt boost in high-intent traffic, while you carry out work in the background to strengthen their organic rankings.

Due to Google Adwords’ popularity, the CPC on competitive terms can be very expensive, but with the massive volumes of traffic it can generate, there’s simultaneously a huge potential for ROI baked into the platform.

Canva Enterprise - Graphic Design

Though it may seem like a minor detail in the early days of your agency, the graphics you use in all your marketing materials, both for your own campaigns and your clients’, can have a massive effect on the success of your campaigns.

In an ideal world, you’d have an experienced in-house designer capable of turning your ideas into stunning visual content whenever you need it, but until then, you’ll need a more accessible solution to make sure your assets are up to scratch.

Canva is a simple and affordable design platform that allows you to create high-quality images through a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface. With its lowest-paid plan, you’ll have access to more than 100 million graphics, photos, videos, and fonts, giving you an excellent degree of flexibility to create visual assets for your website, social media posts, ads, and any other marketing materials you might need.

Canva also stands out thanks to its suite of content and social media marketing scheduling tools, including a built-in content calendar that will help you organise and schedule your posts ahead of time, and even publish directly from the platform. 

This may not be particularly appealing if you have your own social media systems in place, but if you’re a relatively young agency, it can be invaluable for making sure your posts reach the right people at the right time.

Final thoughts…

Whether you’re a fledgling new agency or you’re serving several blue-chip clients, we hope that this round-up of essential tools for agencies will serve you well. Although the software you use isn’t everything in marketing, when it’s backed up by plenty of experience and an innovative approach to long-standing challenges, these tools will provide immense value to your clients, and your agency’s growth.