Marketing can be an expensive and often complex undertaking for agencies. Thankfully, there’s marketing software on the market designed to make the process a bit smoother. However, some are more affordable than others—and “most expensive” doesn’t always equate to “best value.”
If you don’t take the time to determine the best marketing tools and techniques for your agency, then you may not see a valuable return on your marketing investments. That’s why we’re presenting our top-eight list of marketing software for agencies, so you can find the right solutions for your business based on your needs and your budget.
Choosing the best marketing software for agencies
A recent study by The CMO Survey shows that, on average, businesses are spending a whopping 13.8% of their budget on marketing. Every dollar counts, so it’s more important than ever to make sure software investments are solid.
But it’s a crowded field out there, and your software budget only goes so far. You don’t want to invest a big chunk of your budget in a new tool, only for it to be useless.
So when choosing the best marketing software for your agency, it’s important to take your specific business needs, goals, and budget into account. There are plenty of affordable (or free!) options out there that offer an abundance of powerful features.
And if you need more in-depth insights or capabilities, most of these tools also have higher-level tiers for an additional fee. So let’s jump in and check out these top marketing software solutions for agencies.
Note: These marketing software were found during our online research while writing this article.
1. Bitly
Bitly is a link management platform that empowers agencies to do more with their links with short URLs, custom short links, QR Codes, and a Link-in-bio creator.
Not only does Bitly give you a way to produce short, recognizable URLs, but we also give you powerful real-time analytics tools. So your team members can maximize performance on marketing campaigns and iterate your sharing strategy based on what’s working.
Bitly’s user-friendly interface makes analyzing, redirecting, and customizing links easy and straightforward. Customizable back-halves and custom domains help establish brand identity and increase conversion rates, while the Bitly QR Code generator delivers all these same benefits in a QR Code format.
Best features
Bitly’s link management tools deliver powerful value to agencies. For example, you can use one link in multiple places and formats, then redirect that link whenever necessary (to the latest promotional landing page, for instance).
Link tracking and analytics are important as well. With Bitly, you’ll get a clearer sense of how well a link is performing and where the clicks are coming from.
Bitly QR Codes deliver the same powerful link redirecting, tracking, and analytics. Our Link-in-bio feature also injects similar behind-the-scenes power into a streamlined landing page.
Bitly seamlessly integrates with numerous other marketing tools, and Bitly links can be used anywhere regular links can. Plus, app connectors to all major browsers and operating systems, Zapier, IFTTT, Twilio, Salesforce, and many more, give you deeper integrations when you need them.
Pricing
Bitly gives free users 10 links, two QR Codes every month, and one Link-in-bio page. If you need more, pricing scales with usage. You can get 100 links, five QR Codes, and one Link-in-bio page for $8/month; 500 links, 10 QR Codes, and one Link-in-bio page for $29/month; and 3,000 links, 200 QR Codes, and one Link-in-bio page for $199/month. Or, with the Enterprise plan, you can get customized solutions, along with a powerful suite of additional tools.
2. Semrush
Semrush is a wide-ranging research platform for search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), pay-per-click (PPC), social media marketing, and competitive research.
If your agency is doing any kind of digital marketing (and who isn’t?), then Semrush is a must-have. It provides a wealth of capabilities that help agencies improve technical and on-page SEO, strengthen their content marketing efforts, and cut through the noise on social media.
There’s also market research that can show insights on traffic to any website and powerful PPC tools to help you spend less while reaching more prospects.
Best features
Semrush offers powerful keyword research tools, and it’s an ideal platform for competitor analysis. Beyond keyword research, Semrush also provides technical SEO audits to make sure websites don’t contain technical problems that would hamper organic search efforts.
Semrush integrates with Google products, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WordPress, Monday, SurferSEO, Wix, Trello, and many more. Zapier integration allows customers to build connections to many other tools as well.
Pricing
Semrush is a powerful, wide-ranging tool that’s priced accordingly. The entry-level Pro Plan is $129.95 per month, capping out at five projects, 500 keywords, and 10,000 results per report.
The Guru ($249.95/mo) and Business ($499.95/mo) plans increase those limits and add features.
3. Calendly
Calendly is a calendar invite utility that turns appointment setting on its head. No more going through a long, drawn-out process with numerous emails or phone calls back and forth just to set up a meeting time with a client. Instead, you can use Calendly and let your clients pick a time that works for them.
With Calendly, you simply set your public availability and then send clients a Calendly link. That custom link allows them to see your available meeting times and then choose and book the one that works best for their schedule.
It’s a genius approach, one that saves tons of time and makes your clients happier. A no-brainer in our book!
Best features
Calendly’s signature feature is its scheduling capabilities. Clients can pick a time that works best for them, choosing from only those times that you allow. So everyone can show up to the meeting better prepared and with a lower chance of conflicts or reschedules.
Calendly also integrates well with many other marketing tools, including:
- Salesforce or Hubspot for CRM
- Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom, and GoToMeeting for collaboration and videoconferencing
- Stripe and PayPal for payments and ecommerce
- Notion for project management
There’s also a Calendly API, so you can build your own custom integrations.
Pricing
Calendly offers a free basic tier with unlimited meetings, but it’s limited to one calendar and one active event type. Paid plans range from $8 to $16 per person per month.
4. Google Analytics
Google Analytics (a part of Google Marketing Platform) is an indispensable tool for any business with a website. It’s home to all kinds of statistics and metrics on your audience.
You can see how many people are visiting your site, where they spend time once there, and how they got to the site. You can use this information to understand what’s working and what isn’t, helping you improve your ROI and offer a better overall user experience.
While Google Analytics is valuable for even surface-level information about site performance, you’ll find more and more value as you go deeper into the data.
Best features
Google Analytics provides powerful data tracking and performance insights, helping agencies understand the customer journey and identify underperforming site pages. The platform becomes even more powerful when used in combination with other tools (such as Google Search Console) to add SEO data to the picture.
Because Google Analytics is the gold standard, most other marketing tools can easily access its data. And if you can’t find the connections you need, you can probably build them using one of Google’s APIs.
Pricing
Google offers its Google Marketing Platform (which contains Google Analytics) as a completely free service for small businesses. (Custom-paid plans are available for enterprise customers.)
5. Slack
Slack was the first collaborative chat app to hit the mainstream, and it’s still holding its own against newer competitors like Microsoft Teams. Slack is a great way to get quick answers and solve problems without the bulk and delay of email. It’s also a solid audio- and video-conferencing solution.
There’s much more to Slack today, including huddles, clips, a workflow builder, and Canvas (a text document builder that lives inside Slack). Combined, these features make Slack a relevant marketing software choice for any agency.
Best features
Slack is perfect for seamless team communication, 1:1 chats, file sharing, and light project collaboration. Some teams will run into limits that push them to a broader project management solution. But even then, Slack might offer a better communication solution (and an integration to handle the rest).
Slack isn’t meant to do it all, so it integrates with dozens of other tools you might be using, including Zoom, Salesforce, Workday, Microsoft 365, Jira, Google Workspace, and many more.
Pricing
Slack offers a robust free tier that includes the core channel-based chat experience (with a 90-day history) and up to 10 integrations.
Slack Pro ($7.25/user/month) adds unlimited workflows, full message history, and more. Business+ ($12.50/user/month) adds advanced identity management and compliance.
6. Zapier
Zapier is all about connections. It’s a way to build automations and workflows that connect various tools in ways that go beyond what their own integrations can do. It can also connect tools that don’t have integrations with each other.
For example, you can use Zapier to trigger an event in ClickUp or Teamwork when something happens in your CRM or in Google Sheets. You can set up much more complex automations too, stringing together numerous apps and actions.
Best features
Zapier is a great solution for workflow automation. It can connect different marketing tools, using triggers to launch actions or a series of actions that can run across multiple tools.
As far as integrations, Zapier integrates with everything—that’s pretty much its whole reason to exist.
Pricing
Zapier’s free pricing tier allows only single-step Zaps (an automated workflow or integration created between two or more apps using Zapier). The Starter plan is $19.99/month and gives you 750 tasks and multi-step Zaps. Pricing escalates from there and scales with the number of tasks you need in a month.
7. Teamwork.com
Teamwork.com project management software was built by former agency leaders who understand the unique concerns and challenges agencies face. From ultra-simple to complex projects, agencies won’t get bogged down in menus upon menus as you’ll find in the super technical project management solutions.
Teamwork.com is a true middle ground. It goes way deeper than Trello or Asana, but it keeps the interface friendly and understandable for the nontechnical people that tend to lead agencies. You can access time-tracking tools, task management functionality, and a host of reporting capabilities that help your agency keep an eye on resource utilization and profitability.
If sticky notes and Excel spreadsheets aren’t getting the job done, Teamwork.com is your ideal next step for project management in an agency context.
Best features
Teamwork.com offers a range of project views, including a drag-and-drop Kanban board view for agile workflows, more traditional Gantt charts, lists, timelines, and more. Teamwork.com delivers project visibility, so everyone knows the status of a project, what task is next, and who’s responsible for what.
Fostering better collaboration in your agency is key, and Teamwork.com is an ideal solution. No more emailing around asking who can do that next task or where a certain project got stuck. With Teamwork.com, everyone can find the answers to these questions immediately, allowing teams to collaborate better.
Teamwork.com integrates well with numerous other agency tools, including Teams, HubSpot, SoftSync for Jira, Slack, Gmail, Zendesk, and more.
Pricing
Teamwork.com offers a Free Forever plan for up to five users. Paid plans range from $5.99/user/month to $19.99/user/month, adding powerful automations and forms, workload and capacity management, advanced budgeting, and reporting.
8. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is all-in-one social media management software that can help your agency understand, organize, plan, and manage your social media strategy. Plus, they make it easy to post that social media content across numerous platforms.
The analytics features in Sprout Social give you a central dashboard where you can see how posts are performing on multiple platforms. The increased visibility (compared to manually checking performance on every platform) is a huge advantage for agencies that rely heavily on social media.
With Sprout Social, you’ll be able to visualize value and ROI faster and gain insights into social performance that aren’t available anywhere else.
Best features
Centralizing social media management is the core advantage here. By pulling all social platforms into one hub, Sprout Social enables better planning, organization, management, and scheduling. It also delivers stronger, more insightful performance analytics.
Other notable features include listening tools to find trends and insights in social conversations and engagement tools that help you streamline and scale.
Sprout Social is deeply integrated with Salesforce and with every major social media network. Many other integrations are available, including a Bitly website and link tracking integration we’re especially fond of.
Pricing
Sprout Social offers three pricing tiers. Standard is $249/month, Professional is $399/month, and Advanced is $499/month. Each tier has a limited number of users, and each additional user will cost you $199-349/month.
Choose Bitly for your marketing agency
As your agency continues to grow and add new marketing software tools, it’s important to choose the right solutions that support your business goals and budget. Agencies of all sizes rely on Bitly for stable link shortening, link customization, link redirects, detailed analytics, and more. Best of all, Bitly works seamlessly with most of the other tools reviewed in this post, bringing a new level of synergy to your campaign management.
From email marketing to lead generation to social media posts, Bitly’s custom short links and QR Codes deliver more value and help increase conversions.
Ready to see all these benefits? Get started with Bitly for free!