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Email marketing is one of the oldest and best tricks in the communication playbook, and newsletters are an excellent tool for brand awareness, audience engagement, and lead nurturing. But newsletter planning is challenging. Coming up with and delivering fresh ideas...
Nov 20, 2024
Whether you’re a marketing or advertising agency, you know that choosing the right marketing tools for agencies isn’t just beneficial — it’s essential. From fine-tuning content creation to approving a marketing calendar, these tools empower your agency to keep up with all of your clients’ needs.
Timely content delivery, easy approvals, swift feedback — the right marketing software and tools transform potential chaos into structural, strategic campaigning, leaving clients happy and marketers sane.
In this article, I’ve gathered the best agency marketing tools and software to help you at every stage of your workflow. Dig in!
Content management requires a lot of resources, even when done for one client — let alone when managing multiple accounts.
Marketing management tools for agencies help teams optimize their workflows to produce impeccable content quickly and steadily.
When choosing marketing agency software, you can consider things like:
Collaboration between the agency and client is challenging and yet crucial for processes. Opt for marketing agency tools that ease feedback exchange and approvals to push content down the pipeline faster.
Agency tools should include a marketing calendar to help plan and track campaigns and content schedules effectively and give a comprehensive overview.
Look for user-friendly interfaces that make your clients and teammates want to use the tool rather than bounce back to inefficient but familiar processes.
Ensure the tool integrates with your agency’s other platforms, be it design tools, cloud storage, multiple social media channels, or a task tracker.
With these criteria in mind, here are my top marketing agency software picks:
Planable is the ultimate tool for content collaboration and management. Its core feature and true essence lies in efficient real-time collaboration. Your teammates and clients can exchange feedback on the platform using real-time comments, suggestions, annotations, and other collaboration tools for agencies.
Content collaboration in marketing agency software Planable
You can organize work into dedicated workspaces (either by client, by project, or by brand) to keep things in order as you scale. Each workspace also allows you to easily define roles for team members and client stakeholders by granting the permissions they need.
Workspace permissions in Planable
I absolutely love the multi-level approval flow, which can be set up to give several internal approval stages before a final approval stage goes to the client. Perfect for agencies who only want the client to see the final product.
Multi-level approval flow in Planable
Combined with the platform’s ability to use internal notes between team members, you can collaborate on content and work out the kinks in private before the client sees the finished product.
Internal team notes in Planable
Planable supports your team at every stage as a social media management tool. Once your social media posts are written, approved by the client, and ready to go, schedule them for their social media accounts and watch your content go live automatically.
The content calendar looks great and lets you plan out all of your marketing efforts in one place, whether we’re talking about individual social media posts, full campaigns, or longer-form content initiatives.
Social media content calendar in Planable
As the best marketing agency software on the market, Planable’s features go beyond social media. Its Universal Content feature expands to any written content, from newsletters and blogs to briefs, landing pages, scripts, and more.
Collaboration on a newsletter in Planable
Key features
Invite team members, clients, or experts to collaborate directly within the platform. Set up roles and permissions to divide creators from approvers to ease feedback exchange.
Get a green light from your clients faster with built-in approval workflows. You can choose the approval approach for each workspace: none, optional, mandatory, or multi-level.
Organize content for multiple clients in separate workspaces, each with its settings, team members, and content calendars. Every client gets its own ecosystem.
Use the calendar view to plan and visualize the publication schedule across all platforms. For social media, you can preview content as a grid, list, or feed.
Drawbacks: Planable’s automatic scheduling tools only work for social media content. You can plan your blog post in a content calendar, but it won’t publish automatically.
Pricing: Planable offers a trial version with 50 free posts. After that, its flexible pricing allows you to tailor the package to your needs based on the feature set and number of workspaces, starting from $33/month per workspace.
Sprout Social is a social media management platform that excels at social listening and influencer marketing tools. Its features for monitoring conversations include audience analysis, crisis management, industry analysis, and sentiment research. This tool handles end-to-end influencer campaign management, from finding creators to generating real-time custom reports.
Key features
Drawbacks: While Sprout Social usually ranks high among social media management tools, multiple users mention problems with LinkedIn, so it might not be your best choice if this platform looms large in your social calendar. There also seem to be customer service issues, especially when medium-sized agencies try to scale up.
Pricing: Three out of four tiers include a 30-day free trial, so you can really get a feel for which feature bundle works best for you. After a month, the Standard plan is $249/user/mo, billed monthly.
Mention is a powerhouse for marketing agencies that need to monitor brand mentions across the web and social media platforms. It delivers customizable real-time alerts on brand mentions, tags, or specific keywords marketing teams want to track.
Key features
Drawbacks: Mention can be hard to grasp at first, especially with brand names that can be misinterpreted as an ordinary word. If your brand is “Apple”, it might take you some time to teach Mention to differentiate between mentions of your brand and the fruit.
Pricing: Mention offers four paid plans starting at $49/month.
Interactive content is the king of engagement, and Outgrow rules engagement-generating digital marketing tools. Perfect for digital agencies aiming to spice up their clients’ marketing strategy, Outgrow helps you create quizzes, calculators, giveaways, surveys, and more.
Key features
Drawbacks: Users mention that despite the cheapest plan starting at $22, Outgrow has many pay-per-feature costs, making it more pricey than it seems.
Pricing: Outgrow has six paid plans starting at $22/month. There’s also a free plan that allows you to create four content pieces of one type.
Surfer SEO is among the must-have digital marketing agency software if you work with search engine optimization and aim to boost your clients’ ranking. Surfer SEO analyzes tons of ranking factors in real time to provide actionable insights that align with search engines’ algorithm updates.
Key features
Drawbacks: Surfer SEO limits all plans to 100 keyword searches per day and 100 monthly pages to audit.
Pricing: Surfer SEO has four paid plans starting at $89/month.
MarketMuse is an AI-driven platform that elevates marketing agencies’ content strategies through advanced analysis and optimization. It’s particularly useful for agencies looking to enhance their clients’ search engine rankings with AI-backed insights.
Key features
Drawbacks: If you’re on the fence about relying on AI to drive your content efforts, MarketMuse might be a bit too experimental.
Pricing: MarketMuse offers three paid plans starting at $149/month. It also provides a free plan with limited functionality.
BuzzSumo is among the best digital marketing tools for staying ahead of the curve in content trends and engagement analytics. It’s a content research tool that helps you find relevant ideas, reach out to influential journalists, and benchmark your content performance against core industry rivals.
Key features
Drawbacks: BuzzSumo’s social media pool is limited to Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, and Pinterest. It can’t monitor and analyze Instagram and LinkedIn.
Pricing: BuzzSumo has four paid plans starting at $199/month.
ActiveCampaign is great email marketing software for digital marketing agencies that work with multi-leveled email strategies. Its main feature is the automation of advanced email campaigns, which allows marketers to design complex yet intuitive and dynamic email sequences.
Key features
Drawbacks: Users mention that the email template editor is quite clunky, and, in general, the UI could use some work.
Pricing: ActiveCampaign offers multiple packages depending on your needs, from email and marketing automation only to a bundle of automation and CRM. The automation pack starts at $15/month.
Mailchimp is a versatile and user-friendly software ideal for marketing agencies looking for a straightforward solution for email automation. Mailchimp’s remarkable feature is the AI assistant that helps marketers personalize emails based on subscribers’ previous behavior and even draft emails.
Source: Shopify
Key features
Drawbacks: Mailchimp’s marketing automation features are less sophisticated than those of ActiveCampaign. For instance, Mailchimp doesn’t use conditional logic, while ActiveCampaign can adapt based on user interactions and data.
Pricing: Mailchimp’s pricing depends on the number of contacts. There’s a free plan and three paid plans starting at $13/month for 500 contacts.
Drip is among the best agency software for email marketing solutions tailored to e-commerce businesses. It helps create personalized, behavior-driven campaigns that meaningfully connect online retailers with their customers.
Key features
Drawbacks: Drip’s focus on e-commerce might limit its utility for non-retail clients.
Pricing: Drip charges based on the number of contacts. Plans start at $39/month for up to 2,500 contacts.
Marketing agency lead generation platforms can enhance client acquisition strategies, helping agencies grow their business alongside managing campaigns.
Asana is a comprehensive project management software that enables marketing agencies to orchestrate their projects and tasks efficiently. Asana allows teams to create, assign, and prioritize tasks, ensuring everyone knows their responsibilities and deadlines.
Key features
Drawbacks: Asana can be overwhelmingly detailed for a smaller marketing agency, complicating the workflow instead of simplifying it.
Pricing: Asana has a solid free version and five paid plans starting at $13.49/month.
monday.com is a project management platform first and foremost, though it includes a wide variety of other features. It’s used by teams working in IT, customer support, dev, sales, and of course, marketing. It’s also got a plentiful template center with over 200 templates and workflows that can help marketing teams with everything from campaign planning to product development to client management.
Key features
Drawbacks: Users mention the mobile app as having limited functionality, plus the fact that customer service can be unreliable at times.
Pricing: monday.com has a 14-day free trial that comes with two user seats and 500 MB of storage. After that, plans start at €9/user/mo.
In addition to project management capabilities, ClickUp has a whole range of agency management tools geared towards collaboration, resource management, and workflow management. However, one of its strongest distinctive features is the knowledge management bundle. It lets the entire team manage docs, create custom wikis, and use a powerful Universal Search feature that finds things in the app, in connected apps, or on your local drive.
Key features
Drawbacks: Users mention the app can be a bit unstable and buggy (for example, with unexpected refreshes that lead to the loss of recent work).
Pricing: The free plan stays that way forever with unlimited tasks and users, but only 100 MB of storage. Paid plans start at $10/user/mo, billed monthly.
Airtable combines a spreadsheet’s simplicity with a database’s complexity, making it a good marketing agency tool for those who require flexibility and customization in their workflow management. Airtable allows teams to create custom workflows, databases, and dashboards designed to meet the dynamic needs of specific creative projects.
Key features
Drawbacks: Airtable is not a plug-and-play solution. It requires significant setup time to harness and adapt its capabilities to your specific needs.
Pricing: Airtable has a free version and three paid plans starting at $24/month.
Trello is one of the simplest project management tools — ideal for marketing agencies that need straightforward task management. Its card-based system makes organizing projects intuitive, transparent, and flexible: you can add checklists, due dates, and more, enabling team collaboration.
Key features
Drawbacks: Trello might be too simple if your marketing agency manages big multifunctional projects.
Pricing: Trello has a free version and three paid plans starting at $6/month.
Wrike is made for project, workflow, and resource management, all with a task-focused approach. Industry-specific use cases range from financial services, legal services, and manufacturing to marketing agencies and creative agencies. This agency management software is best suited for large enterprises, especially since its analytics and reporting features are very thorough (and useful for complex projects).
Key features
Drawbacks: There’s definitely a learning curve and task management isn’t as straightforward as it should be. There are also limits to customization and prioritization.
Pricing: Tiers are sorted by type of team and marketing plans start at $24.80/user/mo. All three have a 14-day free trial.
HubSpot has a whole suite of agency marketing tools, from CRM to chatbots and email campaign solutions, designed for digital marketing agencies seeking an all-in-one solution. The marketing automation tools help a great deal in nurturing leads and growing client relationships.
Source: Software Advice
Key features
Drawbacks: HubSpot is everything everywhere, all at once — it might take you some time to figure out what features your marketing agency needs and how you can use it to organize your work.
Pricing: HubSpot’s pricing depends on the hub you choose. HubSpot’s CRM is free, while its Marketing Hub starts at $800/month.
Salesforce is renowned for its advanced customer relationship management system. Although quite pricey and complicated, Salesforce is a good option for digital marketing agencies in need of a flexible CRM solution for large-scale projects.
Key features
Drawbacks: Salesforce can be daunting for smaller teams or those new to advanced CRMs.
Pricing: Salesforce’s pricing depends on the products you need, plus possible add-ons. The starter CRM suite costs $25/month per user.
SharpSpring, now rebranded as the Lead Gen & CRM partner solution by Constant Contact, provides an affordable CRM that integrates seamlessly with marketing automation tools. This combination helps you understand your target audience better and effectively nurture leads into paying customers.
Key features
Drawbacks: Users mention SharpSpring’s oversaturation with data and somewhat unfriendly UI.
Pricing: Constant Contact offers to schedule a demo for its partner solutions. The cheapest CRM bundle plan starts at $35/month with 500 monthly emails.
CRM tools are vital for managing relationships and streamlining communication. Additionally, integrating marketing agency lead generation tools ensures a consistent influx of potential clients, complementing client relationship efforts and driving business growth.
Google Search Console is an essential free tool for digital marketers focused on SEO and Google Ads management. It provides crucial insights directly from Google, enabling agencies to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot their clients’ websites and ad performance in search results.
Source: Corkboard Concepts
Key features
Drawbacks: GSC is quite basic, offering just the bare necessities. For instance, it provides insights into which search queries lead users to a site but doesn’t show data for queries that don’t rank well.
Pricing: Google Search Console is free.
Ahrefs is an extensive suite of SEO features. Equipped with a site audit, content explorer, rank tracker, and SEO tools, Ahrefs provides all the data you need to devise effective SEO strategies and improve your clients’ online visibility.
Key features
Drawbacks: With all its fancy features, Ahrefs can be quite complex for those new to SEO tools.
Pricing: Ahrefs offers four paid plans starting at $119/month.
Semrush is an all-in-one marketing platform that goes way beyond SEO and SEM. It also brings agency-specific solutions, plenty of support for creating impactful content, and a market research suite that can really shine a light on what your competitors are doing.
Key features
Drawbacks: Search engine data is restricted to Google only and important add-ons like competitor research can get pretty pricey.
Pricing: Semrush has two types of free trials: a Sign-Up Account (with no time limit, good for folks with limited marketing needs) and a Free Trial Account (with 7 days of access to everything in one of the paid plans). After that, plans start at $129.95/mo.
Clearscope is a specialized tool designed for digital marketing agencies that prioritize content optimization. It helps optimize content for higher search engine rankings by providing detailed recommendations based on current SEO best practices.
Key features
Drawbacks: Many users mention that Clearscope is a bit pricey for its functionality and that the relevance of semantic keywords can be improved.
Pricing: Clearscope has three paid plans starting at $199/month.
Marketing agency tools help you optimize your processes, building a responsive, flexible system that brings results. Whether you need to track your progress, power up your marketing campaigns with data, streamline approval, or exchange feedback with clients, b2b marketing tools are up for the task.
If you’re ready to level up client and team collaboration and streamline content planning, creation, and publishing, try Planable today — your 50 free posts await!
Content marketer with a background in journalism; digital nomad, and tech geek. In love with blogs, storytelling, strategies, and old-school Instagram. If it can be written, I probably wrote it.
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