Agencies want to grow, but doing it too quickly can impose just as much of a danger as not growing at all – 74% of businesses fail due to quick scaling. Thankfully, there are agency growth tools that can help agencies control their growth at the pace they need.
So, which growth hacking tools are the best agencies using?
Well, worry not because we’ve done the heavy lifting for you. Here, we’ll have a look at the best SaaS tools designed to help marketing agencies achieve the growth and success they deserve.
We’ll look at project management, finance, human resources, a stellar marketing automation tool, and communication management software that will provide you with the ability to track projects, assign tasks, generate leads, create automated workflows, improve customer retention, and much more. In short—we’ll look at a lot!
Use these tools and launch your agency to the stars and beyond!
Preparing for launch: growth tools every agency needs in their tech stack
Growing a marketing agency is more than just increasing sales or running a successful marketing campaign. You need to have an evergreen strategy in place to manage your client’s projects and your own agency’s operations. You also need to keep an eye on whatever trends are popping up and keep up with them.
Marketing agencies that can keep track of their projects, understand their budgeting and spending, improve employee and customer relationships, and have constant communication are successful SaaS businesses—easy, right?
Growth marketing tools help solve every problem that agencies face–allowing them to have a smooth trip to the galaxy of success.
JM Littman, director of Webheads, says “you'll often be surprised at the tools out there that are incredibly specific to a given problem, so don't give up hope if you can't find the right one the first time round–keep searching! Don't be afraid to use multiple tools, and also make sure you're specific in your search for a tool.”
Paige Arnof-Fenn, founder & CEO at Mavens & Moguls, says that “the single most important digital tool today is still Google Analytics where businesses can track their performance across channels and understand which sources bring the most traffic to the website.”
However, the State of the Internet Marketing Agency in 2020 from WordStream reported the main problems for agency owners and agencies business development are getting new clients, managing time, hiring and training new employees, and retaining new clients. All of these challenges can be faced head-on with the appropriate SaaS tools–tools that go beyond Google Analytics.
Let’s have a look at the basic growth tools that are common in all agencies:
A Top Project Management Tool—or four!
Monday, Airtable, Trello, Clickup
These tools help you organize and manage your projects in a seamless way. By allowing you to integrate and have different ways to view your projects with Kanban, Gantt, Timeline, and more. You can keep track of everything and make sure your agency is running smoothly.
When you’re on top of the projects and your team can work together in perfect harmony, you’ll be setting your agency up for out-of-this-world success.
They all offer a free version–except for Monday–as well as free trials, and they range from $5-$20 per month with Enterprise subscriptions (which offer unlimited projects, Gantt charts, and other additional features) requiring a special assessment of your needs and budget.
Depending on your needs, each software will have a different USP available for you. Trello has the largest integration of them all, Monday offers 24/7 online support and no-code automation. Clickup has an integrated chat, and Airtable lets you change the project view in a matter of seconds.
ClickUp
Trello
Monday
Airtable
A Finance Management Tool
Xero, Expensify, Freshbooks
These are apps needed for expense management, client billing, payment processing, accounting, and more–making your finances something easy to control and understand and not as if they’re written in some alien language.
Keeping your finances in check is crucial for the success and growth of any business, but even more important for marketing agencies–managing budget, controlling expenses, and processing payments correctly is key when you’ve got multiple clients, in multiple industries and countries.
They all offer free trials, and Expensify offers a free version with limited features. Their subscription plans are between $5-$70 per user per month.
Expensify is an expense management software. Freshbooks is a billing, accounting, time tracking, expense management, payment processing, and project collaboration tool. Xerox is an accounting software. They’re all suited for small businesses, but Expensify serves mostly medium and small-sized agencies.
A Human Resources Tool
Breezy HR, Factorial, Snack Nation
These tools help your employees better engage with the company, either due to improved HR management, or thanks to community-building initiatives.
Anything that keeps your employees organized, engaged, and happy is worth having in your agency. Happy employees are much more helpful to customers and do better in their jobs. In fact, according to Gallup, happier employees show 147% higher earnings per share than their competitors.
Breezy HR has a free version and a subscription plan starting at $143/month for startups and $399/month for businesses. Factorial offers a business subscription that costs $4/employee. SnackNation boxes start at $26.95 for remote workers, and $201.95 for in-office snack boxes.
Breezy HR is a helpful tool during the hiring process allowing you to see where each candidate is in the recruitment pipeline. Factorial is a great way to keep all contract-related documents securely in one place and to have a broad view of the vacations or time off that everyone is taking. SnackNation donates food to those in need for every snack box that you get for your employees.
Breezy HR
Factorial HR
Snack Nation
A Comms Tool
Slack, Microsoft Office, G-suite, ChatHQ
These cloud-based communication tools allow your team to communicate easily, share important documents, and integrate with other applications so that it feels as if everyone is in the same meeting room while each can be on the other side of the world.
Clear, effective communication is key for any business to succeed–especially as 86% of employees and executives cite lack of effective communication as the main cause for workplace failures. These apps allow their users to easily communicate about clients, projects, and business strategy from one platform.
They all offer a free trial period, and Slack is the only one that has a free version. Chat HQ starts at $40/month, G-suite at $5.40 per user per month, and Microsoft Office starts at $6 per month.
ChatHQ will soon have screen recording and live video chat, Slack offers a wide variety of integrations that allow it to be a go-to tool for businesses. G-suite allows you to keep all important documents on the cloud and to have shared working on the same document at the same time. Microsoft Office has all the software needed to run a business like excel, word, etc.
Slack
ChatHQ
Reaching cosmic heights: 10 growth tools to take you to the next level
There are a few tools that you’ll need to make part of your toolkit if you want your agency to reach new levels. These are the ten tools that agency owners don’t want you to know about–that’s how good they are!
Sprout Social: make the most out of your social media
Sprout Social is a social media management tool.
It’s always you to create engagement campaigns, analyze your efforts, publish and schedule, and check on trends on your social media campaign.
Its subscriptions start at $89 per user per month.
The best thing Sprout Social offers is its ease of use. With many other tools to get the most out of your data and insights, you would need years of experience, with Sprout Social you’re just a click away.
“At DSLX, we’ve used SproutSocial as our go-to social media management platform for a number of clients. The platform enables our agency customers to get a clear overview of what’s on the calendar, they can approve, reject, or tweak any planned posts, and there are some nifty tracking features to help us report on our success at the end of each month.”
– Ray Slater Berry, Director @ DSLX—a B2B SaaS Content Agency.
Start to take advantage of your social media, and see your business grow with Sprout Social.
VideoAsk by Typeform: asynchronous video has never been so easy
VideoAsk is an asynchronous video comms software that allows you to pre-record questions and place questionnaires and surveys in the videos for your customers to answer.
It helps your agency by giving a more ‘human vibe’ to the conversations that customers have with your brand or your client’s brand. Instead of a lengthy email chain, customers can see a face behind the company and interact with brands by responding through text or video—whatever they’re comfortable with
VideoAsk hasa free version that allows up to 20-minutes of pre-recorded material, and their first paying subscription starts at $30 per month.
Being able to interact through video with customers, being easy to use, and allowing plenty of integrations make VideoAsk a great agency tool to have.
Want to engage with your customers through meaningful interactions, try VideoAsk today.
Levity: automate your workflows seamlessly with AI
Levity is an AI process builder. It allows you to create the automations that you need to streamline your business processes. It can be viewed as a project management tool, of sorts.
Automating your processes so that you can have more profitable projects and spend your time where it’s needed the most–on your clients and not on lengthy, repetitive processes—is key for business growth. Levity helps you achieve exactly that.
Levity’s subscription starts at $200 per month for startups, but it offers more extensive plans for bigger businesses.
With Levity you’ll be able to automate all your processes without writing a single line of code. Whether you’re looking to filter sales leads, automate budget tracking, score your website visitors, or something else, you’ll be surprised what’s doable with this tool. Easy, breezy, levity.
Automating your workflows can save you valuable time–give Levity a try and see all that you can do with the spare time on your hands.
Codility: hiring the best technical talent has never been easier
Codility is a tech recruitment platform that allows you to test the skills of developers and make evidence-based hiring decisions.
Codility is an awesome tool that streamlines your hiring process to get you only the best talent—crucial in your growing process. You don’t want to spend time and resources on candidates that might not be ready for your company, nor do you want to waste the time of candidates on a pointless job hunt.
Pricing will vary depending on the size and needs of your agency–so you’ll have to contact them in order to get the right price for your agency.
The best part about Codility is that there’s no experience needed from your hiring team thanks to the wide library of tests that it offers to assess the right skills of your candidates.
Growing an agency is only possible if you have the right team by your side, with Codility you make sure your tech team is the best it can be.
Maze: get the most out of your data
Maze is a product research tool. It allows you to collect all the actionable user insights you need to be able to make product growth decisions without guesswork.
Product research is a key aspect when it comes to developing the product your users need–Maze allows you to get these insights in just a matter of hours. Additionally, you’ll get all the data necessary to create the best matching user personas and improve your product and marketing efforts–check this handy user personas guide to make the most out of Maze.
Maze has a free version, and its professional subscription is $50 per month.
Maze makes sure that its software is a rapid remote testing platform that allows teams to create a product based on actual research, to ensure a product-market-fit from day dot.
Create the product that your users need by empathizing and understanding them with the right data–try Maze and create the product of your client’s dreams.
TravelPerk: out-of-this-world business travel management software
TravelPerk is an all-in-one travel management software that makes sure your employees and business travellers are moving around the globe happy and in control.
Today, agencies work with businesses from all over the world, and face-to-face interactions remain unbeatable for better working relationships. Consider a corporate travel management tool in your tech stack to help your business travel plans take flight–for your managers and employees.
TravelPerk is great for businesses of all sizes because it offers a free version, but it also has a cost per trip model, starting at $15–making sure you’re not paying for something you’re not using–talk about budget-friendly, right?
TravelPerk offers a five-star customer service that is available 24/7 to deal with whatever may happen during your trip.
Make sure your team is traveling happily and safely thanks to TravelPerk–get their free version now and grow your business to international levels.
Answer The Public: understand exactly what humans are looking for
Answer the Public is an SEO content ideas tool that will help you get better insights into what people are looking for on the internet.
Creating high-quality content is now a requirement to survive in not only the digital world but in the SaaS world too.
Answer The Public’s subscription starts at 99 $/month.
The best thing about Answer the Public is it's an easy-to-use platform. All you need to do is look for the keyword you’re interested in and you’ll find all the related searches people care about. Additionally, it supports 15 languages.
Get the insights you need to create only the best quality content for your customers with Answer the Public.
Wynter: test product messaging with ICPs
Wynter is a product message testing tool that allows you to see what your target audience wants and thinks, and most importantly how your marketing efforts are perceived–a great way to improve your customer activation efforts.
Your target audience is the most important thing for your agency and your clients. Understanding how people see your marketing and product messaging is key to knowing what needs improvement or what’s fine as it is.
Wynter has a pay-as-you-go subscription in which each test costs $899. You can set the account and play with all the different settings there are before paying for the test. You can choose your audience depending on their job title and three different seniority levels, and other specifications that will allow you to test and get reliable feedback from your ICPs.
In the paid annual subscription that starts at $15,000 you can get results in as little as 12 hours!
Use Wynter to hone in on your marketing and product messaging, and ensure you go to market in a way that makes sense.
SpyFu: cut the guesswork out of your SEO strategy
SpyFu is an SEO competitor keyword research tool. By typing a domain you can see all the keywords it ranks for.
SEO is the holy grail–it’s what’s going to let your customers find out about you. Anything that can help you better position yourself on the web–like this SEO tool–will be a key tool for growth.
SpyFu’s subscription starts at $39 per month.
It covers organic SEO and paid PPC which is valuable information when you’re checking the competition to improve your own SEO efforts.
Get ahead of the competition by using SpyFu to leverage your SEO efforts.
Benevity–formerly known as AlayaGood: keep employees happy, and see your business succeed
Benevity is an employee purpose tool. Happy employees are good to customers and great for business. With Benevity, you can engage your employees through volunteering, donations, and building new positive habits in the workplace.
Engaged employees have a 17% higher productivity compared to unengaged employees. If you’re looking to grow your business, you need to keep a workforce that’s happy, productive, and genuinely caring about your customers and your company.
Through Benevity, you can ensure employees are heard, seen, and know they’re making a positive impact on communities they care about.
Pricing depends on your company’s size, and goals–so better have a chat with the team and let them know what you need.
How to choose the right growth tool for your agency growth plan?
We’ve seen some great growth marketing tools that will guarantee your agency’s growth. Remember, not all tools are meant for all agencies. As Vicky Wu, CEO at Vicky Wu Marketing, said “the most important advice I have is that you need to be really clear about what functionality you need from the platform you're choosing.”
There are two main ways to approach growth tools:
- You want to increase operational efficiency
- You want to improve or develop agency services
Taking some time to consider what you’re looking for and researching the possible tools will be the best thing you can do before choosing a tool.
Top Tip: Seize free trials to give the tool a test run before committing to a year-long contract.
Last but not least, keep in mind what Hanna Wiginton, founder at Hannah Wiginton Consulting, said “find ones that save you time, so you can work on the most important part of your business–helping your clients succeed.”
Use these tools that industry leaders and the best growth marketers use to take your agency to new cosmic levels.
Agency growth tools FAQs
Any tool that helps your business to manage your projects, customers, employees and finances better. It will be a key tool to help you grow and scale.
By having effective communication with your customers and employees, by achieving winning projects, and by understanding your billing and accountability you’ll be able to scale your agency. All of this can be achieved by using the right SaaS tools for your agency.
Digital agencies use cloud-based, subscription based tools like project management, finance management, human resources, and communication tools. All agency teams will need these tools to provide better services for their clients, and to be able to grow.
There’s a great variety of tools that marketing agencies can use. Sales tools, tools that offer a client portal, tools that help take the customer through the sales funnel and get data of the process, and plenty of other tools. What’s important is that each agency finds a tool that suits their needs.
