Essential Tools Every Digital Marketing Agency Needs to Succeed

This is the 7 Figure Agency Podcast. Discover the strategies and techniques to grow a highly successful and profitable digital marketing agency with your host, Joshua Nelson. On this video, I'm going to share 11 key softwares for running a successful digital marketing agency. You're going to want to check this out. Alright, so when it comes to running a digital marketing agency, there's lots of different platforms, right? And there's lots of things we have to focus on, from marketing and business development to client retention to delivery and kind of what we do to deliver the results. There's a couple of key software that we use in our agency that have become critical for the marketing and business development side of the equation. The first would be HighLevel, commonly referred to as GHL or Go HighLevel. It's our all-in-one platform for funnels, pipelines, CRM, marketing automation, emails, text messages, our calendar. We run our entire marketing strategy. We've got a training called the Ultimate Agency Funnel that we use and have used to grow our agency, Plumbing and HVAC SEO, to over $5 million per year. Um, and so our entire agency and marketing strategy runs on HighLevel. Massive fan of HighLevel. Eliminated so many tools that we used to have to pay for and and put them into one centralized place. Okay, next is cold Linux. When it comes to landing clients, when it comes to getting prospects, when it comes to growing your agency, you've gotta have list data. So I'm a big fan, you choose a niche and you position yourself as the expert in that space, and then you go out and you get clients in that industry to come to you pre-positioned to buy. Now, the first part of that is we've gotta get Prospect information. So if we're working with plumbing HVAC companies, who are the plumbing HVAC companies doing over $1 million per year? Who's the owner? What's the phone number there? What's their email address? How would I connect with them on Facebook, on LinkedIn? There's lots of tools that can help you gather that prospect information, um, but I've tried them all and my, my favorite by far is Coldlytics. What Coldlytics does is they use all of these scraping tools on the database you know, acquisition tools, and then they've got manual researchers on the back end that use expensive platforms to look up who the actual owner is, get you the actual phone number, the actual email address, so that as you go and do your prospecting, as you create your custom audiences, you've got great seed data that you're working from. And so Coldlytics is the best platform I found to do two things. Number one, to get that list, and to also enrich a list. So I'm a big fan of the Dream 100 process where out of the, let's say, 10,000 plumbing HVAC companies we might wanna do business with, what are the top 100, right, that we know have a need, that we know have money, that would be whale clients? You can get with Cold Linux and give them a list and they can enrich that data with more of the key contact information that you need. And so from a business development platform, Super powerful tool, highly recommended. Now, number 3, I don't need to spend a lot of time on, but is Zoom. We use Zoom in sales, marketing, business development for our one-to-one sales meetings with clients so that we can show the screen so that we can take them through our consultative sales process. We also use it for our webinars and for our podcast interviews. What's beautiful with Zoom is we can have multiple people in, we can record it in high definition, and then we can take the recordings and we can syndicate them out. Now, there's probably a million different tools within marketing that I could reference, but as I was trying to think, like, what are the key tools that actually run our marketing strategy today? These are the top 3: HighLevel, Coldlytics, and Zoom. Let me know from a marketing business development perspective, what are some of the additional tools that you use? I'm going to throw in one additional bonus on marketing and business development, and it's a tool called Sell Me This Pen. And what's so neat with this pen is, is it an AI assistant that you can roleplay your appointment setting process with. So if you've got appointment setters or if you're trying to do cold outreach today, and we know we've gotta pick up the phone, call a prospect, ask a couple of questions and see if we can schedule an appointment, you know, even if you've got a great script, there's something powerful about practicing that process. About getting the objections and handling them effectively. And Sell Me This Pen, you can literally have your sales team follow a sales process and speak with a tough AI individual and answer those questions and role play that process and get feedback on how to improve next time. We found this really helped to level up our appointment centers. And so that's Sell Me This Pen, if it's still available, If you search it, there is a lifetime access plan that you can purchase for very, very low, low dollars. Okay. Operations. Once we've got the client, what do we have to do in order to onboard them, in order to make sure the work gets done? What are the operational tools that we use day in and day out? ClickUp. There's lots of project management tools. You think about Basecamp, ClickUp, Asana, Monday, Teamwork. Amazing platforms for this. What we've found is ClickUp is a great platform. We're able to create templates, we're able to stagger due dates, we're able to templatize the process when we get a client. Here's all of the steps, here's who's going to be responsible, here's the time frame that it has to get done. We can also automate some of the communication as tasks get complete. One of the things I love about ClickUp is that it's got lots of integrations that we can plug into in order to really even streamline processes and streamline automations for further. And so we run all of our client fulfillment, all of our ongoing tickets, all of our client deliverables are tracked in ClickUp. And we believe if it didn't happen in ClickUp, from our team's philosophy, it did not happen. Slack. Internally, we've got a team of, I guess, about 60 employees at this point, some in the United States, some international. Across the spectrum of the different services and the spectrum of different departments within the company. We love Slack as an internal communication platform. We've got one-to-one access to our team members, we've got channels, we've got the ability to hop on and do huddles. We use Slack, and I, I think about it almost every single day throughout the day consistently as our main communication mechanism with our team. G Suite, don't need to spend a lot of time here, right? But sending emails, Google Slides, Google Docs, you know, the entire suite of tools within Google is phenomenal. And, you know, I believe these 3 tools cover most of what you would need in order to manage the operations of your digital marketing agency. Now, specifically in deliverably, like if we start talking specific tools for SEO, specific tools for pay-per-click, specific tools for Google Ads and, and things like that. There's some specific tools that we use and, and recommend. First would be Search Atlas. And so we're an SEO agency. We also do paid search. We're like full service, but SEO is one of our key deliverables. And over the years, we've been big proponents of Ahrefs, um, Surfer SEO, um, and, and literally 5 or 6 SEO-specific tools that we used to use— Screaming Frog and the list goes on and on. Just like HighLevel, there's a new platform I'm a big fan of called Search Atlas that takes most of those tools and brings them into a centralized place where we've got access to, um, our, you know, our entire suite of SEO services and SEO tracking mechanisms in one place. They've also launched a very innovative auto AI-generated SEO platform. So as you set a client up, as you get all of their information in and you sync in with, um, Webmaster Tools and you sync in Analytics and you sync in all of the GMB listings, you got all this information— or GBP profiles— you get all this information. Most of the tools that we think of for SEO are there to report, hey, here's an audit, here's some things you can change, here's some suggestions where they're headed with Search Atlas now is that it can suggest those changes and actually deploy them onto the website. And what this does is it makes it so you can deliver outsized results from an SEO perspective for your clients and be more efficient while you're at it. So big fan of Search Atlas. For paid search, Google Ads, running Google Ads for hundreds and hundreds of plumbing, HVAC, electrical, home service companies. Big fan of Optimizeer with the Y-Z-R, like the spelling of it's a little bit interesting. But what Optimizeer lets you pull in your paid search campaigns and get all kinds of granular data and make strategic decisions. What I find is one of the benefits of being in a niche is you get to get really good at what the keywords are, what the negative words are, what the text ads should be, what the, you know, what the whole lay of the land should look like. Optimizer gives you the ability to pull in your entire, entire database and data pool of clients and make strategic decisions across that, which makes you better as your client base grows. So big fan of Optimizer. Website hosting, like, you know, as digital marketing agencies, one of the most important things we can do from a delivery perspective is get our clients ranked, get them phone calls, get them leads, And all of that relies on super fast, super effective web hosting. And so we've used all the web hosting platforms over the years. At this point, I'm a big fan of BionicWP, Michael Borgelt's company. They will set up the hosting platform. They will make sure that it is ongoing optimized so that you get green on green with GTmetrix, and you pass all of the speed tests. Which drive better conversion, better rankings, happier clients. Also a big fan of BionicWP. Now, when it comes to retention and reporting, there's lots of different platforms out there to pull in the information, like how much do they spend, how many leads they generate, drill down on even more detailed information. Top 3 that we see for agencies are Agency Analytics, which is a very cost-effective platform that pulls in a lot of these data points. Obviously, Google Looker Studio takes a little more customization, but a world-class platform by Google to really present your data to your clients. And then NinjaCat, which is also a great platform, a little bit on the more expensive side. As I think about the 7-figure agency community, um, the lion's share use AgencyAnalytics. Many are moving towards Looker Studio and kind of customizing that platform. For our agency, we use NinjaCat, it just gives us the ability to pull in lots of data points and simplify what the client sees. When it comes to reporting, the key thing I would suggest is figure out a way to not over-report, but make it really easy for the client to say, "How much did I spend? How many leads did I generate? And what's my return on investment?" Right? The clearer you can answer that question for the client in any space of time, the more confident they're gonna say, "Okay, these guys know what they're doing." They've got a dial on this, and they're generating the results. So those are my favorite tools. I mentioned the top 11 that we use day in and day out in our marketing agencies to run a $5 million agency. And the ones that I hear a lot of our members reference, and the members in 7 Figure Agency are using. Would love to have you comment in comments, like, are there tools that you're using that you feel are mission critical that we didn't mention? I'd love to know that in the comments and have a conversation around this. I've got a complete resource guide that maps out all of my favorite tools with links and details on how we use them. If you'd like to access that, you can go to 7figureagency.com/tools. That's 7figureagency.com/tools to access the agency tools reference guide. Thanks so much for watching, and I look forward to talking with you again real soon.