Workforce surveys often ask, “Do you have the right tools to do your job?” You can find an almost endless list of digital agency tools to increase efficiency and improve your offerings. Here’s a look at why tools are necessary and some of the top-rated, most prolific tools to consider adding to your agency’s repertoire.
Why Tools Matter
Successful digital marketing agencies invest in tools that automate, manage, and sometimes revolutionize aspects of everyday workflow. Relevant, well-deployed tools free up time and enable your team to serve your clients better.
Great tools also provide senior leaders with quick access to key performance indicators. KPIs help guide decisions surrounding operations, human resources, marketing, purchasing, and other key departments to ensure your team works congruently to achieve your strategic goals and objectives.
How Tools Can Help
The correct tools can boost your organization’s productivity, efficiency, and profile. They also give you the time, information, and agility needed to get you where you want to go. They can serve as critical guides that help grow your business.
Strategic ways tools elevate your workflow include:
- Automate Processes. Deploying agency-wide processes and implementing automation across platforms benefits your entire team. It streamlines workflow and efficiently points all aspects of your organization in the same direction. Automated processes are an essential first step toward digital transformation.
- Track Progress. Digital agency tools provide effective and thorough tracking platforms that are easy to set up and customize.
- Manage Client Relationships. As your agency grows or diversifies, customer relationship management software can track client-facing touchpoints and interactions, as well as critical information for past, current, and potential clients.
- Generate Reports. Powerful and dynamic reporting tools quickly pull data from multiple sources into a single dashboard. A simple, understandable display helps decision-makers and those responsible for outcomes visualize complicated measures.
- Lead Your Team. The correct tech stack lets you know when and where to grow. It also allows you to allocate time to tasks that are meaningful to your clients.
- Increase Sales. Digital tools align teams with collaboration platforms that display goals and targets. They also help manage, track, and boost visibility and gather feedback. The best tools increase quality conversations and lead to meaningful, repeatable growth.
- Drive Marketing. Modern marketing is complicated. User behavior and experience profiles, impressions delivered, keyword selection, content, SEO, strategy, and management require seemingly constant attention. Digital marketing tools can provide continuous feedback and make necessary adjustments to keep your brand and services at the forefront of your market.
- Expand Your Services. Robust tools increase efficiency to free up your team’s time to explore service expansion. They can also help identify services your current and potential customers find valuable.
Tried and True Digital Agency Tools
The tools your agency uses directly impact your growth and success. But putting together the right combination of tools can be daunting. There are hundreds of products to research and choose from. We teamed up with the Bureau of Digital to take some of the guesswork out of your search for the best tools. We surveyed more than 100 agencies to discover the top tools by category.
Today’s favorite tools include:
- Design. Both Figma and Adobe Creative Cloud are vying for supremacy here, with Figma taking a slight lead. Many shops use multiple design tools.
- Accounting and Invoicing. Quickbooks is the clear winner. Many shops use Quickbooks or Harvest plus some custom Google Sheets or Excel spreadsheets.
- Advertising and Analytics. Google products take center stage in this arena, with almost 90% of firms using Google Analytics.
- Hiring and Applicant Tracking. Nearly half of the shops surveyed don’t use this tool at all. Of those that do, LinkedIn Recruiter is the most popular.
- Human Resources and Payroll. Half the respondents use either BambooHR or Gusto, while a fifth don’t use anything. Smaller shops tend to exclude this from their tech stack.
- Culture and Feedback. Most shops don’t use this type of tool. Of those that do, use varies across many platforms.
- Capacity Planning and Staffing. Many smaller firms don’t use this software, but shops with 50 or more employees use planning software. Harvest Forecast is most common.
- Project Management. This space is split among Jira, Google Sheets, Basecamp, Trello, and Asana. Custom spreadsheet solutions are used in conjunction with other tools to augment functionality.
- Video Conferencing. Zoom is the most commonly used tool in this section, with a decent percentage of shops using more than one video solution.
- Chat. Slack dominates the chat space, with nearly 90% of survey respondents using it.
- Marketing. Mailchimp and Hubspot are the most common tools used, but a full quarter of respondents don’t use marketing software.
- Customer Relationship Management. Hubspot and Pipedrive are the most popular CRM tools. But a significant number of respondents don’t use any CRM solution.
- eSign. Most shops use an eSign solution. But there is little agreement on the best option. DocuSign is the most used with Adobe Signature, HelloSign, and PandaDoc in a three-way tie for second.
- Issue Tracking. While Jira is by far the most used tool in this space, almost a third of shops don’t use any issue tracking software.
Promethean Research Can Recommend Digital Agency Tools
Tools help agencies accomplish their strategic goals more efficiently. Find out how Promethean Research can help you customize your agency toolbox.
