9 Useful Tools For The Digital Marketing Agency

No digital agency is an island, and that means using all the resources available to you to get the best possible results for your clients. Sometimes, this even means free stuff.

With technology now becoming a thing we expect to change every year, there are plenty of apps and tools out there that can make digital marketing agency work that little bit easier.

We thought we would take a look at nine apps or tools that take the guesswork (and the hard work) out of making your clients happy.

Canva

This has been around for quite a while now.The earliest version of the versatile tool was created back in 2012. Since then it has spent some time being very much misunderstood. But it is well worth a try because it has ‘out of the box’, high quality marketing materials at your fingertips.

Right at the heart of Canva is a wish to make the creation of social media marketing images as easy as possible. So you can grab templates here, or create your own from scratch. It’s incredibly easy to use (one of the main reasons for its success) and can cut the work of an agency in half if used well.

It does require some experimentation before you hit your sweet spot in design. As a free tool that lets you create everything, from Twitter account pictures to a full flyer, it’s incredible.

Google Trends

It’s pretty fair to say that Google Trends qualifies as a tool that is still relatively unknown. It is an incredibly powerful one, and gets to the heart of aspects of market research quite quickly.

This can be used if a marketer really wants to know what people who buy their type of product are talking about. That gives you an instant blog post, and also a steer on how to improve what you do. It’s also great for a brand that wants to understand as much as it can about the competitive landscape.

Hemingway

This one is for the content marketers among you (and even ad writers). Hemingway takes your incredibly dense and fluffy copy and turns it into cold, clear prose, the type that the great writer himself enjoyed.

It’s a perfect way to put together a blog post, or a press release. It can even make your Facebook updates crisper, and more likely to sustain attention. If you’re looking for something that will make your writing more effective, this is the tool for you.

Wistia

Wistia is one of those tools that marketers can quickly fall in love with. It’s a video platform that allows you a different option (YouTube isn’t everything). However, it’s on this list because it seems to have been made exclusively for digital marketing.

No matter what your client’s needs are, they are bound to include video output. The best thing about Wistia is the extensive suite of tools that come with it, allowing you to publish and then market the videos themselves. It is free, but if you go for the paid option, you’re looking at a perfectly capable video uploading and distribution set-up.

For example, it builds in call-to-action buttons and gives you plenty of other features for marketing, such as email capture forms. It’s a hidden gem, and will certainly grab you more reach and engagement for clients. As a bonus, the site allows video playing on any device, so you don’t miss out on viewers in any situation. Dig deep enough into it, and it’s a serious (and more appropriate) contender for YouTube’s position.

Peek

It’s got a crazy name, but the idea behind it is pretty special to say the least. Imagine being able to watch people using your website and getting a real feel for the user experience. That’s Peek, and for a digital agency the options are pretty amazing.

Peek offers users a chance to see what people think about websites, apps and plenty of other stuff that would be part of what a digital agency does for a client. And as something you can show clients as part of your service, it’s more than useful.

You can also test websites on mobile devices too. It’s basically a great way to pull together user testing, so you can see how the customers will use your site. If you’re creating blog posts for clients, you can check out heat maps that show you the audience journey through a blog post. If you’re creating tweets or updates on social, you can see the exact journey someone makes when they click through. In other words, it’s a high quality user testing environment. Very much worth exploring.

Unsplash

If you’re looking for images and you want either free or inspirational (or both) then Unsplash is definitely worth a look. We don’t know why it’s called Unsplash but it’s a pretty cool name for anything, so it wins in our book.

Here you will find hundreds of images, all of them free to use. But there is a reason why Unsplash is so loved by companies, and it isn’t all about being free. The images are high quality, and obviously created by people who love taking photos. Put all this together and you have an amazing free resource that allows for great images in social media.

Buzzstream

This is not a new tool, but it has changed a little over the last few months and now provides digital agencies with a powerful way to reach out to influencers. It does plenty of other things but the ability to research influencers through the platform makes it invaluable for agencies working in the current marketing space.

You can find people in a company that you can focus on during a marketing campaign. This is all done through the platform and allows you to identify decision-makers. But it also allows you to track the work of influencers too. The campaign management features keep everything in one place, and the platform as a whole allows for targeted, sensible outreach to influencers.

It is free on a trial, but there is a payment structure, which is actually surprisingly cost-effective.

Sniply

We’ve chosen this one because it is actually a very simple idea, and one that is superbly executed. If you’re doing any kind of content curation for clients, you will be fully aware that there is always that nagging gap, the one that asks ‘what is my content curation achieving?’.

Sniply allows you to place a call-to-action button on every piece of content you curate. This means that people who follow links to the content you have curated can be directed to your content or offer. If the audience has responded positively to your content curation, they will most likely find it worthwhile hitting your link after they have consumed content.

Curation is useful because it shows you are trying to help the audience. Add an extra layer of marketing to it with Sniply and you have even better content curation. In fact, we can’t imagine any client that you currently have being averse to this neat little tool.

Hit Tail

Now this is something special, and if you’re involved in content marketing it could be responsible for a great campaign.

Years ago, the world of Internet Marketing finally wised up to the fact that keywords were becoming very difficult to rank for. Essentially, the market was just way too saturated, and this stopped brands, especially new brands, from ranking on Google and other search engines.

And that’s when the Internet woke up to the idea of ‘long tail’ keywords. These more complex forms of keyword work allowed brands (if they did it right) to target a bigger market.

Hit Tail claims it has analysed and delivered over 1.3 billion keywords in its quest to make clients happy. Use it for your clients in their digital marketing and you have a quick and very effective resource. There are a variety of payment plans available, but the ROI on high quality long tail keywords makes it hard to argue against any price.

If you need some apps or sites that make the digital marketing task a lot easier, it is worthwhile grabbing a free trial for Locowise. That’s seven days for free.