When your portfolio of clients is small, using Google Drive (Docs, Sheets, and Slides) or Excel  to create marketing reports manually is common practice. These free tools keep costs down and work well for getting the job done up until a point. But as you start to grow and bring on more clients, this process can quickly become unmanageable, leading you to spend hours on reporting alone. Agencies who don’t solve this problem end up having less time to spend on the actions that actually produce value for their clients and their own business. For example: Working on strategic planning and technica ..read more

Client dashboards are powerful tools to present KPIs to your clients in a professional and visually-pleasing way, while also saving you time and improving your operational efficiencies. With growing competition among marketing agencies, selecting the right tool can be the difference that gives you the edge in increasing customer satisfaction and winning new business. How Can You Choose the Right Client Dashboard Tool for Your Business? Depending on the specific needs of your agency, certain dashboard tools will meet your needs better than others. For example, if you’re a small to medium sized ..read more

Klipfolio is a cloud-based tool that allows users to connect multiple 3rd party data sources, and then view that information through custom dashboards, visualizations, and reports. Their top customer segments include marketing agencies, consultants and advisors, financial services, and software developers. With good user reviews on G2 and Capterra, there are plenty of satisfied customers using Klipfolio. However, some users have felt that there are certain shortcomings with their service. For example: A data source limit of 10mb when working with CSV/Excel files A limited number of Klipfolio d ..read more

If you own or work at a marketing agency, you know that reporting your results and providing business intelligence to clients in a clear, concise, and professional way is just as important as the performance metrics themselves. The traditional way that marketing agencies create reports has been to piece together a variety of tools like Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, and manually create reports for each client to be sent out periodically. While that approach can work when you’re just getting started, as you grow, reporting can become a tedious and time-consuming task that doesn’t actually con ..read more

As communication efficiency improves, your ability to scale and increase revenue also improves. This is something we’ve learned over the last 10 years of developing reporting software for digital marketers. Recently we’ve increased our feature set to provide a more holistic marketing agency management software — one that invites collaboration and builds rapport. Our goal is to remove some of the frustrations inherent in onboarding and managing clients, and make it easier for you to scale and increase revenue over time. The new ReportGarden can help you to: Streamline your communication through ..read more

By keeping your finger on the pulse of what’s happening in Google (or Bing, Yahoo, etc.), SERP tracking allows you to monitor keyword rankings, shows you what your client’s competitors are doing, and helps you pinpoint opportunities for increasing their revenue (and ultimately your own) through paid and organic search. But in our experience, there are overlooked features of SERP tracking tools that can be used to strategically drive more revenue-generating traffic. The three most underutilized features of SERP tracking tools are: Grouping keywords into buckets (based on how they impact SEM str ..read more

If you’ve been looking for a PPC Budget Calculator, you might have noticed that a lot of them show you things like the number of leads, cost per lead, or expected return on investment (ROI), but they typically require that you already know the values of your marketing budget and CPC. They don’t actually tell you how much you should budget and how much you can expect each click will cost. We created a calculator to help you come up with an advertising budget and estimated CPC based on how many deals you’d like to close in a given month, and the amount you’re willing to spend on search ads to ac ..read more

After working with over 1,400 digital agencies over the last 6 years, we’ve witnessed unprecedented growth in the number of tools needed to do business. For example, if you’re involved with agency project management, you probably use some combination of: Google Drive for creating and storing your raw documents Asana, Basecamp, Slack, or Workamajig for team collaboration and file sharing Trello (or some kanban board equivalent) for project planning and task management Freshbooks or Quickbooks for invoicing and time tracking Proposify for creating proposals Ahrefs or SEMrush for SEO manage ..read more

After working with over 1,400 digital agencies over the last 6 years, we’ve witnessed unprecedented growth in the number of tools needed to do business. For example, if you’re involved with agency project management, you probably use some combination of: Google Drive for creating and storing your raw documents Asana, Basecamp, Slack, or Workamajig for team collaboration and file sharing Trello (or some kanban board equivalent) for project planning and task management Freshbooks or Quickbooks for invoicing and time tracking Proposify for creating proposals Ahrefs or SEMrush for SEO manage ..read more

Finding the right formula for your marketing agency proposals is an often undervalued aspect of streamlining your sales process.  When we asked our network to learn more about what makes a great proposal, a friend pointed us to Zlatko Bijelic, founder of the Tako Agency, saying that the proposals he’d received from Bijelic are some of the best he’s seen. So we reached out to Bijelic, who goes by “Z”, and he was kind enough to share how he perfected a 70% close rate on $40,000-60,000 proposals. For most marketers, the process of refining marketing proposals is old school trial and error testing ..read more