Marketing Guide
Our software tool recommendations for your agency
Take your Marketing company to new heights
Choosing the right technology tools for your business is a key aspect of building your success. They may be industry specific or hold multiple important functions you can utilise to reduce time spent on processes and boost the free time your staff have to hit their goals. We've put together a host of software tools we recommend for your industry whether you're a year into your business and looking to expand, or you've been running for 10 years and now need to make upgrades to certain processes.
When choosing your next tool we recommend considering the following points:
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Does the tool have the specific features you need?
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Is the tool scalable to suit your growth?
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Is the tool compatible with your other software systems?
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Does it handle multiple functions for your teams?
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Is the price suitable for your budget?
We have not built our resources guides as review articles which compare multiple tools against each other. We have taken one or two tools we would recommend and put them forward to make your life easier as we have either carried out the research or used the tools ourselves through our clients. Of course, we recommend you perform your own research to make sure they will fit your company but our aim is to save you the leg work!
You want to keep in mind how many tools you use in your business. You may be reliant on the free plans of certain tools if you're starting out but as you begin to grow the plans may start stacking up, costing you a pretty penny. We have tried to include tools here which offer multiple functions/features for you to keep costs down. Try to keep your tech stack small if you can! It will make building your systems easier.
To visit the website of the tool we recommend, simply click the logo.
Financial
Quickbooks is a fantastic tool for agencies to do the heavy lifting and manage your accounting needs. It has time tracking and worker management capabilities to help manage your team and keep finances in check. One of our favourite features of Quickbooks for agencies is the ability to scale up the plans as you scale up your agency, offering more tools and features. You also have the ability of integrating with your banking apps and other tools to streamline processes, it's a brilliant tool!
Pricing starts from £10/month and scales up to £30/month for agencies working with suppliers and needing to manage VAT and income tax.
CRM Tools
Insightly is a great CRM tailored more towards small and medium sized businesses with a smooth and intuitive user experience which you can tell they put a lot of time into. Some of the features for your marketing agency include automated and fully customised emails, marketing tool integrations, pre-built dashboards, and pipelines for contacts, projects and sales. If you find Hubspot to be too complex for your agency needs, Insightly is your next best option!
If you want to test the waters you can access the CRM free forever for up to two users. After that, you'll be looking at a starting price of £23/user per month. It's more expensive than other options on the market but does come packed with the right features for you.
Marketing
In our experience Instantly.AI is one of the best cold outreach email platforms when it comes to reaching your prospects inbox and providing a specific email workflow to introduce them to your brand. This tool will warm up each email account you set up, you can send email sequences at scale to be more effective, and easily personalise your campaigns to your prospects.
Starting at £24/month, this is a brilliant tool to start up your outbound marketing campaigns, or improve your processes on your current efforts.
Outbound marketing
Our recommendation for your email marketing tool is Campaign Monitor, as it works perfectly for marketing agencies and small to medium sized organisations. It boasts a great campaign builder with a no-code editor, SMS notifications, easily digestible reporting and analytics for Marketers, powerful segmentations and integrations with CRM tools. With 108+ templates, you'll save yourself and your team a lot of time creating your campaigns!
Starting at £32/month (500-2,400 subscribers) it is on the higher end of pricing compared with other tools, but it is very powerful for what it is. Book yourself a free trial and see how it fits your agency!
Inbound marketing
Hootsuite is such an easy, intuitive and comprehensive social media scheduling tool which is perfect for the agency model. One of our favourite features is the universal inbox which funnels all messages from each of your channels into one location allowing you to cover your different audiences from one location. The winning feature of Hootsuite for your agency over the likes of Buffer or Later is the ability to schedule in far more ways such as ads (FB, IG, LI), Youtube Videos, Pinterest Boards, and much more.
Pricing for Hootsuite starts at £89/month for one user to oversee all channels and moves up to £249/month for 3 users. Our opinion? Worth it!
Social Media
Project Management
Teamwork is a superb tool tailored for collaboration and projects, perfect for your Marketing agency. Task & resource management, communication, templates and a friendly user interface are the key features that make Teamwork stand out above the rest. One of our favourite features is the easy to understand and read Gantt chart view capable of taking your project and showing you the visual timeline dependent on your timeframes. The best thing about Teamwork? Its highly intuitive setup means you will be underway in minutes, other tools require a long setup time with complex industry jargon.
Teamwork comes with a 30-day free trail for you to test whether it will work for your team, with the Deliver plan starting from £10/user per month, with a minimum of 3 users. This price is applicable when paid on their annual plan.
Automations
Your business software stack is never complete without an automation tool, and Zapier is the pick of the bunch! We love Zapier as it allows (most) software tools to communicate with each other, making processes far smoother.
Imagine you have a prospect who signs up for your newsletter, and you want to nurture them. You can use Zapier to send the signup from your webform into your email marketing tool, send them into your CRM, and start a workflow of an email campaign to warm them up. Once they express interest, Zapier can handle your tools to get them onboarded.
It's truly great software which we recommend starting with on the Starter plan of £23.97/month because it offers multi-step automations and 750 "automations" per month.
Additional Tools
We've added some additional tools which aren't necessarily tailored for your industry, but they are widely regarded as the best options for day-to-day business functions such as messaging, security, design and more.
Whether you are working with a virtual or an in-house team, you're going to want a strong password manager which offers a high security rating to protect your passwords. Lastpass offers the ability to store passwords in customisable folders, it will generate highly secure passwords for you, and gives you the ability to share login information with a team member without giving out the password itself.
We recommend this password manager to all of our clients as it's a safe and secure method for keeping your data secure, and many people haven't considered the risks before being introduced to the tool. Starting from £3.40/user per month, it's a small price to pay for peace of mind.
Slack is a supurb messaging app to bring your team together in one application. It's easier to use than MS Teams and certainly operates better than Whatsapp for team use, but the biggest selling point is its ability to integrate with other software tools. One example is connecting it to a project management tool and automating notification messages to team members when changes are made on tickets.
While Slack does have a free plan, for smaller teams we recommend the Pro plan which is £7/user per month. This does make it a more expensive option in the market, but the capabilities more than make up for it.
Your writing is one of the foundational keys of your business, so you want to make sure it's flowing well and without errors. Grammarly is like having a wizen teacher stood behind you with a ruler, constantly peering at your spelling. The tool ensures your writing is free of spelling mistakes and grammar issues, with a surprisingly good AI module now developed with the recent push of AI technology. Grammarly runs in a host of applications meaning you'll always have the ability to check your work.
Grammarly has a great free plan to keep you in check, and for those who would be considered the team novellist, there is a paid plan of £10/month.
Canva will always be at the top of our list for web-based design work for entry and intermediate level design work for social media and documentation requirements. The templates available offer a great basis for bringing your idea to life and the design tools you have at your disposal allow for in-depth customisation.
If you have one person in your business looking after design work, we recommend the Pro subscription at £9/month, and if you have a team each adding their input to the design process you should opt for the Team plan for £100/person per year, which has a minimum of 2 people.
Miro is a fantastic visual collaboration tool tailored for innovation and creation. It provides you with a virtual whiteboard to plan, map, discuss and discover new ways of working and building your product or business processes. Whether mapping out product roadmaps, conducting brainstorming sessions, or facilitating remote team collaboration, Miro is the tool to use. You no longer have to print off a process map and hand it out to team members before a meeting, now you can all work on the same board simultaneously. We use it, and we love it!
Miro offers a free plan to get you started and feel how much better collaboration can feel. If you need more than 3 boards and more features, the Starter plan is £6.28 per user per month when billed annually. This is the plan we recommend.
That concludes our list! We recommend your look into the options we've provided and see how they fit into your company based on size, budget and how experienced your team are with adopting new tools.
Should you require help setting up and running these systems, please send an enquiry in and we will set you up with a member of our team to support your business.