Best Tools for Digital Marketing Agencies (2022): How Many Are You Using?

You simply can’t get away from using software and tools when running your digital marketing agency. Ask any agency owner or professional, and they are likely to rattle off a whole list of tools they use.

In fact, we started MarTech Wise as we wanted a place we could share more about the the software and tools we use in every part of our agency business. We wanted to highlight the ones that we loved and share how they are helping in our business.

So in this roundup, we’ll be sharing what we think are the best tools for digital marketing agencies, based on our experience and what we’ve gleaned from our community through the years. Without further ado, let’s jump in!

How To Use This Guide

Truth be told, the number of tools we use in our digital marketing agency can be pretty scary if you don’t know what they’re used for.

We think that reflects the dynamic and competitive nature of digital marketing, in which there are always new strategies, platforms and tools (and features) being introduced to give businesses an edge.

That’s why we broken this guide up into different sections. Use the table of contents to find the section that is most relevant to you and read what tools we have listed.

Totally Essential

When it comes to getting work done, we have a number of tools which are essential to our digital agency operations. I’ve listed them below, along with how we’re using them in our business:

• Microsoft 365 – The flagship office productivity suite from Microsoft is so much more than Word, Office and PowerPoint these days. For many businesses – including ourselves – it powers our entire workplace digital infrastructure through apps such as Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint.
• Google Workspace – We switched from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 a few years ago due to Microsoft’s bundling of Teams with their product suite (which saved us from having to subscribe to Slack. But we still have quite a number of Google Workspace licenses simply because we like the Google Docs, Sheets and Slides user-interface better than Microsoft still.
• ClickUp – We tried many project management tools for the longest time but eventually settled on ClickUp as it had the right balance of features and customization we needed for our agency workflows. It’s one of the most popular project management tools amongst digital agencies too based on word of mouth.
• Filestage – We’ve been using Filestage for creative reviews and online document and media proofing with our clients for close to five years now. It’s extremely useful and serves as a single source of truth when we are clearing creative work with client and trying to gather every stakeholder’s feedback and approvals.

Best In Class

Now that we’ve covered the most essential tools in our tech stack, here are the best in class tools we use for different areas in our agency:

• Hubspot – We’re using several products in Hubspot’s product suite, namely its CRM, Sales and Marketing suites to manage our own agency marketing and sales efforts.
• Vbout – On top of Hubspot, we’re also leveraging Vbout as a secondary marketing automation suite for our agency side projects.
• MailShake – This is a pretty awesome email automation tool which we use for outreach to sales projects, potential partners and target influencers we’re looking to work with.
• ContactOut – We need to find the email addresses of people we’re looking to work with and have found ContactOut to be really great for doing that. Besides email addresses, we’re also able to find important contact details such as their direct dials.
• WP Astra Theme – Building websites is a large part of the work we do on in our digital agency. For that our CMS of choice is WordPress and the theme we’ve been happily using for many years is the pro version of WP Astra.
• Elementor – Another essential component of our WordPress stack is Elementor, which has grown over the years to become the most popular page builder in the WordPress ecosystem. We’ve love Elementor’s huge ecosystem of 3rd-party plugins that help to extend its functionalities (and saves us from having to hard code them ourselves).

This list is not exhaustive by any means.

We’re constantly updating it so be sure to bookmark this page and check out which are the best tools for digital marketing agencies.