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Digital Marketing Software to Scale Your Business

If you are looking for digital marketing software to help with your business, you have come to the right place! In this blog post, we will discuss a variety of different tools that can help with everything from social media management to email marketing. Each tool has its own unique benefits, so it is important to find the ones that will work best for your individual business. Keep reading for more information on digital marketing software and how it can help scale your business!

Introduction to Digital Marketing Software

Hey, everyone! I’m Adrian Boysel, and today I have an important article for you. If you’re a marketing agency owner, now is the time to level up and get to the next place in your business. This is something I’ve done over the last 15 years in my career. The key to a successful creative enterprise is using the right tools to get the job done.

We’ve talked before about graphic design software and technology, but today’s article is a little bit different. Today, we’re going to discuss the back-end digital marketing technology that you should be putting to use in your own business and for your clients as well.

18 Software Tools Every Agency Owner Needs

I wanted to write an article specifically about the 18 digital marketing software tools that every marketing agency needs. These are going to be really important tools, and I want you to get a pen and paper or open a Google Doc and make sure you’re ready to take notes on all of these. If you’re not using one of these digital marketing software tools, I highly recommend that you start. I want to share these tools with you; they’re going to be really important. If you’re a marketing agency owner, whether you’re a new business or you’re an existing business, I really want you to implement these.

3 Software Categories You Need

These 18 digital marketing software tools are broken into three categories. The three categories that I’ve created are managing clients, marketing your clients, and keeping them happy by keeping them growing. This is going to be a little bit longer of an article than normal but I’m going to try to keep it as quick and as succinct as possible. There are links in the description of the video above for each of the things you need. So with that all being said, let’s go ahead and jump into it.

Managing Your Clients with Digital Marketing Software

The first thing you need to be able to do well in order to have a successful business is managing your clients. This is an area that many creatives struggle with, because understanding how to work with clients and manage them can be difficult. Here is a list of seven digital marketing software programs that I use in my agency and that my team uses in our agency to manage our clients.

1 – A CRM (Zoho One)

The first one is a CRM software program, and we use Zoho One. Now you could use a different software suite that maybe does other things like Salesforce. Those are much more expensive but I like Zoho One. I’ve made videos about it in the past because of its inclusivity – with Zoho One, you get a full suite of different software, with over 20 different programs included. Some of those just as an example are the Zoho CRM to manage all the relationships, birthdays, incoming, and outgoing emails so you can keep track of everything, the entire relationship history of that client, inside of your CRM which is a customer relationship management tool.

The second part of Zoho One is Projects. This is something we use to manage our clients’ projects, to put out time timetables, what the deliverables are, what each step is, and what the budgets are for these projects. And this is where we actually import documents. We can link Dropbox and Google Drive to this so Zoho Projects is a really cool tool. As part of Zoho One you have Books so invoicing, sending estimates – you have to have that. You also have Click which is your team communication.

If you have a team of people that you’re working with, you can all come into one place and communicate, similar to Slack, and then the last one that I use on a regular basis and that my team uses is Zoho Social. Inside of there, so this is a really important tool, I would get an all-in-one program like this just it’ll save you time, it’ll save you money and lower these subscription costs because as a marketing agency owner those things can really start to spike and pile up and that’s something that you want to avoid.

2 – G Suite

So, let’s get into the second one. The second we have is G-Suite. Now, this is obviously important because G-Suite offers Google Drive, they offer your email service through Gmail, and we use this for all of our clients. We set these up for our clients and we use these internally. But actually having a good email server, something like G-Suite, is really important.

You get a lot of storage space based on the membership plans that you choose. We have multiple licenses that we use, but I would definitely recommend you get a good email software suite. I used to use the webmail through GoDaddy and stuff like that, but it’s just not as good as Gmail. The Gmail inbox is really nice and customizable, so I really wanted to encourage you guys to check it out.

3 – Calendly

So, onto number three, and that’s Calendly. It’s not just for managing clients, but a moneymaker as well. This is one that I’ve used to make a ton of money. Calendly is an amazing tool for booking appointments with your clients or customers, depending on what kind of person you’re working with. But if you’re going to manage these relationships, you want to make sure that you have a way to book time with them.

So, when they actually want to meet with you, they book on your calendar in a time slot that you’ve set in advance and that is available. That way you’re not having trouble with being booked when you are unavailable. It can get really confusing and overwhelming to set appointments that way if somebody wants to meet with you. You can have a free meeting option for about 15 minutes. That’s what I do. You can do a 30-minute strategy session where you charge for it. Then you can do a full strategy session, which is what I do. This usually takes one to two hours, but I have also done longer sessions, like full-day branding sessions. You can charge whatever you want for these.

You can actually build that directly through that calendar booking system, then link that up to Stripe and that will transfer right into your bank account. So this is a really cool tool and a really good way to meet and manage your clients. I really want to encourage you if you’re not doing a lot of meetings with your clients: this is an area where you’re leaving money on the table. Each one of those meetings as an opportunity is a sales opportunity for you to actually make more money, solve more problems, and keep the relationship strong between you and your client.

4 – Lead Butler Call Tracking

Number four is a shameless plug because this is one of my own digital marketing software programs. It is called Lead Butler Call Tracking. We use Lead Butler Call Tracking as part of our company to manage calls, track calls, and send text messages. There’s a lot that we can do with this, but this is the program that I use to manage my incoming and outgoing calls. I can make the calls right from my phone, or even from my browser.

There are a lot of really neat options for you there, and there are a lot of really cool tracking abilities that Lead Butler has. If you haven’t checked it out already, definitely check out Lead Butler and you’ll see the call tracking tab at the top. But if you want to use something else, there are tons of other ones out there. That’s just what I use personally.

5 – CoCard

So number five is an important one. Now, a lot of people may want to use Stripe or PayPal or some of these other payment services, but I really wanted to cover this because managing your clients and getting paid from them is a really big deal. You want to find something that plugs in universally with your digital marketing software programs. CoCard plugs in with my Zoho One and several other programs that we use at Adrian Agency.

Definitely check out CoCard. I actually saved myself a ton of money by using CoCard. They’re a local mom-and-pop business, but they handle thousands of accounts and they will link you up with an authorized.net account as part of their program. This is a really good software to use; it’ll save you money on those transactions, especially if you’re doing large reoccurring transactions. You want to try to save as much money as possible, and CoCard is the best way to do so. 

6 – Loom

So the sixth one is Loom. This is one that everybody on my team uses. I use it for internal management of my team, and for client management, by sending quick videos. If you haven’t heard of Loom yet, I really want to recommend that you check that out. It’s a really good way to pop open the program/software on your computer and record yourself making a quick video.

Then, you just shoot them the link to that video through that program, and boom they can watch the video. They can comment on it, give it a thumbs-up, download it, and enjoy all of the really neat features. I really encourage you to try this tool out if you’re an agency owner; video is a much higher form of communication, and I’m not personally a fan of email. I’m more of a face-to-face kind of person, so this is the closest thing you can really do to achieving that.

7 – Zoom

Then, as a double whammy on the video, there is Zoom. Video communication is really important to me. As I mentioned above, I’m not a fan of email. I do a lot of meetings through Zoom and I use Loom as a visual aid in a lot of my back and forth correspondence. Zoom is one of the easiest virtual meeting programs I have ever used, and it’s no wonder that it became the go-to program over the last few years. When companies had fully-remote staff in traditionally brick-and-mortar positions, Zoom was there to facilitate communication that includes body language.

What Digital Marketing Software Do You Use?  

So now that we’ve gone through the first part of this, I want to know how you manage your clients. What software are you using? Maybe there’s something new that I haven’t discovered yet that you can share with me. This should be a two-way street, right? Iron sharpens iron, so I want to know what software you’re using, and are you using multiple software programs for your CRM, your project management, your books, and your team tracking? Or do you have them consolidated as well?

Marketing Your Clients with Digital Marketing Software

So, the second piece to this is marketing your clients. Now, this is important because if you don’t get results and you’re not able to successfully market your clients, you ain’t going to keep them around. A lot of marketing agencies really struggle with this at the beginning of their careers. They come up with one or two strategies that are decent, like some Facebook ads or maybe they’re doing some Google My Business stuff, or maybe they’re doing some Instagram ads. They have one or two little tricks in their bag and they don’t have a full pipeline of abilities.

One of the benefits of knowing me and working with me and my company is that we offer a full suite of services, from video marketing to SEO to pay-per-click to man content marketing. You name it, we can pretty much do it and we’re really good at a lot of those things. We really specialize in a lot. We have a deep knowledge in a lot of these areas because we’ve been doing it for so long.

That’s why we come in as chief marketing officers. So if you want to send us your clients, we can manage them and make sure that it’s all under your brand. This is an important thing I wanted you to be able to take away from this article. But also, if you want to manage it and do it all yourself, there are some tools that you’re going to need here. I’m going to read through them, and we’re going to continue on through all these software tools.

8 – Ahrefs

The eighth digital marketing software tool that I want to give you is Ahrefs. Now, this is one of my favorite software programs because for SEO there’s really no better tool out there. There are a few others–Moz and SEMRush and some others–but Ahrefs is the best that I’ve used hands down. It’s consistent and reliable and they put out a ton of content – shout out to those guys on YouTube! They put out a ton of really valuable content for the industry. I’ve learned a lot from these guys, and I highly respect the Ahrefs team.

People like Matt Diggity and all the people who are industry veterans always use Ahrefs, so if you’re not using Ahrefs, I highly recommend you do. You’re going to need this not just for your clients’ SEO and seeing where they’re at, what’s working, and what’s not working, but you’re going to need this for your own SEO and understanding where your business is.

You need to market your business as you would your clients’ businesses, so this is one of the mistakes that I see all the time from marketing agencies: they don’t market themselves as hard as they market their own clients, and so they’re never able to keep their pipelines full or have enough clients coming in. This is something important you need to know – you need to use this tool not just for your clients, but also for yourself.

9 – Zapier

So, let’s jump over to number nine which is Zapier. Zapier is a really cool tool that I’ve been using for a long time – I can’t even remember how long. It’s a way to automate and create workflows within your business. So, let’s just use this as an example: a client comes on to your website. You would create a Zapier Zap so that every single time that happens, all the information they fill out on the form goes over to a spreadsheet, maybe it goes over to your CRM, maybe it goes over to a Slack channel.

You can also create a Zapier link that, every time a payment is collected from, let’s say, Stripe or PayPal, it always automatically sends you a text message or notification that the payment is coming in. So there are a lot of really neat ways to plug multiple programs together and automate workflows. That’s why I’m such a big advocate for Zapier – efficiency is really important, and that’s why automation makes so much sense.

10 – ClickFunnels

Number ten is ClickFunnels. Some of you guys may disagree with me, but I don’t really care because this is something that’s made a ridiculous amount of money for me, it’s made a ridiculous amount of money for my clients, and it’s made a ridiculous amount of money for all of the people that are industry veterans, that people that I look up to and respect, who have generated hundreds of millions of dollars. ClickFunnels is an amazing digital marketing software program, and they’re about to come up with ClickFunnels 2.0 which is going to blow your mind. I’ve heard some amazing things. I have a feeling it’s going to render some of these other software programs obsolete, but I’m not going to hold my breath for that.

Russell Brunson is one of the biggest innovators and industry leaders around. Not just in the marketing industry, but in the business-to-business world as well. ClickFunnels is a really good tool, if you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly encourage you to do so. It’s a pretty simple drag-and-drop, what-you-see-is-what-you-get builder software program that allows you to make landing pages, sales funnels, and things like that. I can’t do a deep dive into that right now, but ClickFunnels is definitely the funnel software that I would use to market my clients. You can create a campaign just under a subdomain, so let’s use this as an example.

We have an auto detailer we’ve generated tens of thousands of dollars for through our campaign. His ClickFunnels site is actually built under deals.visualdetailing.com – it’s not actually under his main domain name. So we have a ClickFunnel that’s specifically developed for advertising, and which is what you want to use funnels for mostly. They’re not generated for SEO but more for paid advertising, so this is something you should be using to build your own business and build your clients’ businesses.

11 – WordPress

Number eleven is WordPress. WordPress is an open-source digital marketing software program, which is also the way that most websites are built. I’m actually going to be talking about WordPress and websites in general in a much deeper way here in the next few weeks, so definitely stay tuned for that. This is going to be a huge moneymaker for you. But WordPress is a really great software to build your website as your portfolio, you can showcase blogs, and you can put videos. It’s pretty much unlimited.

You can even put e-commerce and create entire workflows and systems and build your entire business around your WordPress website. It’s almost unlimited, so WordPress is definitely a tool that you should be using if you’re using something else for a content management system like Squarespace or Weebly. Those are fine for a beginner, but if you really want to take the next step, I highly encourage you to check out WordPress.

12 – TubeBuddy

So this one is for my fellow video people. I know some of you guys are video pros that love video, maybe motion designers or graphic designers. To the motion designers reading this: I love making videos. I’ve been doing videos for years, and you need to have a good software to be able to get the word out on these videos. Number twelve, and what I use for myself and for all my clients, is a program called TubeBuddy.

TubeBuddy is a software program that allows you to optimize your videos. Find out what’s trending, find keywords, find out what’s working on your videos and what’s not – really optimize your videos to get the highest performance possible so that your videos have the highest chance of being competitive against all the other millions of people that are uploading videos on YouTube.

13 – Jasper

Number thirteen is one of my little secret weapons and I’m almost hesitant to be giving all of these away because this is a really big deal. Some of these tools are controversial and people might not agree with me. Well, the truth is I’m all about efficiency, and if the job gets done the right way it doesn’t matter what tool I do it with. So one of the tools that I used to use and I’m still using to this day is an AI writing assistant.

My team is using a tool that used to be called Jarvis but is now called Jasper. Jasper’s a really amazing tool that is a copywriting AI tool. It helps to get you unstuck or to rephrase your content as well as generate new content for you. So we’ll plug in a content piece like a video transcript. We’ll transcribe it and load that content on there, and it’ll regurgitate and actually write an entire article just based on some basic information for us. It still needs to pass through the hands of a human copywriter to catch errors and ensure factual accuracy, but it saves a ton of time by generating a nearly-finished copy. So if you’re trying to come up with copy for a website or copy for a Facebook post, Jarvis, now called Jasper, is a really good way to do that.

14 – Lead Butler Connect

The fourteenth falls under marketing your clients again and I wanted to make sure you guys knew that Lead Butler Connect is another one of my tools. Lead Butler Connect is an amazing tool for LinkedIn. Many of you guys are on LinkedIn, but you don’t have hardly any connections, your profile isn’t optimized, you’re not connecting with people consistently on a day-to-day basis, and you’re not sending out messages. and

When you are sending out messages, you’re sending out these long, four-paragraph spammy messages that ensure that person will never open a message from you again. Well, Lead Butler Connect allows you to do it automatically, while you’re sleeping, send out connection requests and send out a sequence of messages. I have to be careful about this because there are some rules around LinkedIn, but this is actually done manually as well as automatically. And so there are some really neat ways that we utilize Lead Butler Connect.

If you’re a business owner, helping your clients on LinkedIn is a massive opportunity. There are millions of LinkedIn users, and the clients you can find on LinkedIn are much higher in net worth than those you’ll find on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. So if you’re looking for high-end, high-net-worth individuals, LinkedIn is the way to do it. Lead Butler Connect is the way to get the most out of your money and time – which is worth more than money. That’s how you’ll market your clients.

Now let’s jump into keeping your clients growing and happy!

Digital Marketing Software to Keep Your Clients Happy And Growing

So, the third piece of this is keeping your clients growing and happy. How do you keep these clients for the long term? A lot of our agency clients really struggle with this: they’ll bring on a client and two, three, four months in, the client cancels and moves on to somebody else. They churn and burn through agencies, through clients all the time. This is something that I want to stop from happening because it’s giving the industry a bad name and it’s giving marketers and creatives like you and me a bad name, saying that we’re just a bunch of scammers. That’s just not the truth.

I love human psychology, I love human behavior, and I love helping people get influenced by actually providing value. So if you’re providing value to the world and you’re actually solving problems, you should have no shame in that and so keeping your clients happy and keeping them with your company long term is an important aspect of what you should be doing. These next tools that I’m going to go through are going to help you do that.

15 – DashThis

So number fifteen on this list is DashThis – a reporting software that can compile all the information you need from website traffic to Google Analytics to Facebook campaigns and Instagram campaigns, etc., into one place so you can provide your clients with reports. It saves you hours of work every month.

When we started looking at reporting software, we started looking at the math of how much it was going to cost us to have someone on my team put together these reports for each client. It would take us three to five hours per client to manage this. Now, we do the math, and let’s say the hourly rate is $20 per hour. That’s going to cost you $60 to $100 to actually do the reporting alone for each client. And that is a lot of time. And that’s weekly reporting, not monthly. If you spam that across a month, I could be up to 20 hours worth of work. So really understanding that it takes a lot of time to gather all that information manually and generate a report from that means you don’t want to be doing that manually.

So this is why we implemented DashThis into our agency – to help our business grow. This is something that you should implement too. You can plug in all these different programs, all these different campaigns, into one place, and then the client can automatically get an email weekly, biweekly, or monthly of what’s going on in their business. Now you’re going to have to teach them and go over it with them and show them how to use it because they’re not just going to know right off the bat.

If you just send them a report, they’re going to be confused. They have a report, but they’re not going to know what they’re looking at. So you really need to take the time to walk them through it and make sure they understand DashThis and the cool part about DashThis is that you can label it with all your own branding. You don’t have to use the DashThis branding; you can put your branding on there, making it look like your reporting system. That will look beautiful; it’ll look professional, and it’ll save you a lot of time, energy, and money.

16 – Mailchimp

So we’re coming towards the end of this and this is another software I want you to use. This is number sixteen, which is Mailchimp. Mailchimp is something that we use. We could use our Zoho CRM, but I just like Mailchimp – it’s simple and easy, and we seem to have really good delivery rates – the actual emails that make it through to our clients is really high with Mailchimp.

Mailchimp is a great software for email marketing your clients by building databases, scrubbing your list, and being in constant communication. Now, I want to make sure that you know this because this is really important if you’re just constantly emailing your clients asking for stuff – they’re going to delete it. They’re not going to read it, and you’re never going to be able to get them to open one of your emails. Your open rates are going to be horrific. I think the industry average open rates are anywhere between 5% and 10%. Some of the email campaigns that we do for our clients – my wife is a good example – sometimes get 50%, 60%, and 70% open rates. Why? Because they’re offering real value. If you’re not offering real value and being a giver to your clients, then you’re being a taker, and nobody wants a taker. People are always asking themselves “what’s in it for me?”

So make sure that the first email you ever send to them is something that they’re going to love because then they’re going to open your second email. The 80/20 rule really applies to this: give, give, give, then ask for something once in a while. This is a really important part of all marketing and even social media in general. Don’t just constantly ask for something–offer value and educate the marketplace instead.

17 – Synup

So, let’s jump over to seventeen before we get to our last one. This is a company that I’ve actually covered on my YouTube channel. I’m probably going to do a new one because some things have changed, but it’s Synup. Synup is spelled funny, almost like “syrup”. They’re a company based out of India and they offer a lot of different services but their main one is voice search.

A lot of people are doing voice searches. Find a local attorney near me or find a right they’re giving different examples of voice search so you want to be able to use Synup for voice search listing yourself on all the directories managing your reputation or your clients’ reputation. This is a really big deal. This is what I use to manage them inside of my business. There are a lot of other features and tools that they’re adding to it, they’re constantly innovating. But check out Synup it’s a really good software program with a really good system and really good people. I highly recommend them

18 – Google Analytics

So we made it all the way to the very end, and number eighteen I’m saving for last – not because it’s the best, but because it says it’s an essential tool to understand the performance of your clients and understand what’s growing and what’s not growing. This is going to keep them happy if you can explain this and show this to your clients, and really make sense of this. You will be light years ahead of all of your competition. So number eighteen is Google Analytics. It’s a really common software, a lot of people probably already know this. You’ve probably already heard of it, especially if you have a website.

If you’re not using Google Analytics combined with Google search console, these two tools work well together. This is the software that you need to be using for all of your clients. I had a couple of clients recently who came to me and they didn’t have Google Analytics installed on their website. It drives me crazy when you can’t see how long they’re staying on your website, what pages they’re visiting, or where they’re falling off. All of this information can help you trigger different events that are happening on your website.

You’re really only hurting yourself by leaving so much money on the table. You can’t reiterate and optimize your website if you don’t know what’s happening. Along with Google Analytics, there’s an advanced analytics tool I want to make sure you know about. You can also use Hot Jar or Crazy Egg, which are almost the same and allow you to track how far they’re scrolling down the page, what they’re clicking on, and what they’re not clicking on. It’s like an advanced analytics tool like Google Analytics on steroids.

Final Thoughts

This is a lot of information, and I think that’s enough for one day. It may seem like a lot of tools, but this is primarily what we use to manage our clients, grow our clients and market our clients, and then keep them happy working with us long term. I know that’s what you guys want. So if you gained value from this, reach out on our social accounts and introduce yourself. Let me know what you think. If you have feedback or criticism, I’m open to that as well.

If you haven’t already, check out our Instagraphics Pro Network on Facebook. It’s a private community of creatives – web, graphic, and motion designers. I’d love to have you there, but you have to make sure you fill out all the questions or I’ll hit reject and deny your admittance. We want to make sure we have good people in our community–quality over quantity–and the professionals we’re looking for pay attention and can tell us about who they are. So thank you guys so much for reading. My name is Adrian Boysel. I’ll see you guys on the next one, and as always, keep looking out!

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