Become An Automation Expert
- Schedule Social Media Posts
- Project Management
- Sales CRM
- Nurture Leads
- Team Collaboration
- Invoicing
- Automate Support
- Manage Your Meetings
- Proposals
- Schedule Reports
Over the last decade or so Digital Marketing has become an important factor to consider for every business.
With the evolution of modern technologies and ad platforms, hiring an agency is the best solution for SMBs and Enterprises to sustain in this competitive market.
In the early 2010’s it was very easy to build a successful agency.
But now the easy growth is gradually going down as the agencies encounter a lot of problems, such as maintaining employees in house, hiring, using multiple tools, productivity, managing 10+clients and competition.
In recent years agency competition has grown 2X and is expected to grow more
It is very important for each agency to stay ahead of their competition.
Be it a social media agency, an SEO agency or a PPC agency, it is very important for you as an agency to understand the trends in the market and follow them accordingly.
To help you we have done the hard work. We spoke to 30 agencies across the world to understand their pain points and the problems they are facing in their daily life.
We found that automating their processes and increasing their team productivity seems to be leading the list.
As an agency, your time is very valuable and wasting time is like throwing money inside the trash.
In this article, I will help you with key tips and tools on how to automate your daily tasks as an agency.
I have made a list of 10 important tools to use and make your life easier.
Schedule Social Media Posts
As an agency, posting on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn) is a day to day task and repetitive.
Navigating and posting on different platforms for each client is a big ask.
Having a single dashboard to connect all these accounts and schedule your posts will help you save a lot of time for your agency.
Buffer, Zohosocial are major tools in the market which help you to automate your process of Scheduling Social Media Posts across different platforms.
Project Management
For you to focus on client goals, having your team aligned is very important.
Setting up your team individual activity, tracking their progress, managing them at one place is crucial.
Project Management tools like Asana, Trello will help you automate the manual work involved in this.
Using these tools will help you effectively organise your team’s work, focus on your goals, projects and indeed help you in growing your business.
You can plan, distribute all the work at one place into tasks and subtasks and manage your workflow with these tools.
Sales CRM
Be a business generating 10-50 leads or 100-300 leads a month, you need a CRM to manage your leads.
All the leads that come in may not be a qualified lead. You need to qualify a lead based on the interactions.
Having a CRM like Agile CRM, Pipedrive, EngageBay will help your sales in lead tracking and management.
Zoho is also a good choice at a lower price. You have industry giants Salesforce and Hubspot which provide a lot of features.
Nurture Leads
After getting the leads Nurturing them is the most important task to automate for your agency.
Having a manual process to nurture them doesn’t make sense. There are a lot of tools in the market which help you automate the nurturing process, setup drip campaigns and send emails regularly.
Leadsquared is a tool which does everything for you. You can set up a personalised emails sequence and forget it.
Team Collaboration
Managing a team is a big hassle. Assigning their tasks is not the only one involved with the team.
Constant collaboration is the key. Tools like Slack will help the project manager streamline their communication, share their work, documents, and knowledge videos internally and check their performance on a day to day basis.
Experts suggest that using these tools improves efficiency by 20%.
Invoicing
It is always a troublesome experience managing invoices.
Creating invoices and sending it to your clients every month is a time-consuming task and a painful experience.
Freshbooks, Invoicely, and QuickBooks are the tools needed for your agency to help you manage your invoices, prepare recurring invoices and share it.
Automate Support
Providing support is crucial for an agency.
For new enquiries or for old clients help at their fingertips is an ideal experience. But providing that support out of office hours or on holidays is a problem.
Here a Chatbot on your website is important. You can automate some basic stuff of your support through these chatbots.
Chatbots are mostly known as conversational agents.
Tools like Drift will help you with the solution of automating your support.
Manage Your Meetings
Using tools like Calendly help you manage your timings and appointment scheduling.
Setting up a meeting is a big problem.
Checking the availability of you and your clients and then arriving at a time where both are available takes a lot of communication.
Calendly has solved those steps for you.
You can set your available times and share your link with your clients.
They can book a meeting based on their availability. You can set up reminder emails of the calls scheduled inside calendly.
Proposals
Sending a proposal is very important in getting new clients for your agency. How are you doing it now? Are you spending a lot of time on designing stuff, arranging the labels?
Proposify, Pandadoc are amazing solutions.
You can create a beautiful proposals with amazing drag and drop feature to add images, text and videos.
You can automate all your proposals by using the templates already available in these tools.
Schedule Reports
As an agency, it would be very frustrating to pull data from different platforms and add them to a report.
On average, an agency spends 60 minutes to create a report.
GreyMetrics helps you automate your reporting
You can create reports in just 2 clicks and send it to your clients. You can also schedule your reports to automate the process.
You can add metrics that are useful to your client goals and use Live Dashboards to track the performance of your client campaigns every one hour.
The Bottom Line
Automating your processes will help increase the efficiency and productivity of your team and inturn helps you focus more on the company’s success.
I would suggest you create your goals before you invest in automating.
You can then decide the tools that serve you better based on your goals. If you plan to expand your agency then it is worth considering these automation tools.
The tools might differ based on your requirement and the size of your agency, the number of clients you provide service for.