Being a digital marketer is tough. The world of digital marketing is constantly evolving, and digital marketers must be prepared to quickly adapt to the changes. Plus, digital marketers are responsible for performing a wide range of tasks for their clients, which means their to-do lists tend to grow longer by the minute.
The key to taking control of the chaos is using the right agency client management software. Which tool is right for your digital marketing agency? What tasks should agency client management software handle? Here’s what you need to know:
What Tasks Are Involved in Client Management?
Digital marketers perform many different types of tasks, including:
SEO
To manage SEO campaigns effectively, marketers must be able to balance dozens of initiatives simultaneously, including:
- Keyword research: Identifying keywords that reflect the buying cycle for target personas is essential for any SEO strategy. But keyword research is much more than just creating a list of keywords. Each keyword should be supported by other relevant, long-tail keywords and pages that link to each other. Making sure that you use the keywords without keyword cannibalization is important too. Identifying keywords that competitors are ranking for and your site isn’t is also important.
- On-page SEO: No SEO campaign is complete without on-page SEO, which involves publishing optimized content on a regular basis and optimizing HTML source code, such as meta descriptions, title tags, headers, and more. This practice can improve the ranking of specific pages on a website.
- Technical audits: Some examples of issues include missing meta descriptions, broken links, and duplicate content. Performing an audit helps marketers identify issues that need to be fixed and opportunities to improve the site’s SEO.
- Content creation: Marketers must create and publish blogs, videos, infographics, and other forms of content regularly as part of their SEO efforts. Each piece of content must be informative, of high quality, and optimized for specific keywords that are relevant to the site’s target audience.
- Link building: Effective link-building campaigns require a tremendous amount of organization. You need to be able to track dozens, even hundreds of conversations and stay on top of every conversation to achieve link placements.
Paid Search
While SEO efforts focus on organic search results, paid search efforts focus on paid search results. Managing a paid search campaign involves:
- Keyword research: The first step in every paid search campaign is performing keyword research to determine which keywords to bid on to drive the most traffic at the lowest price. Keyword research also helps digital marketers ensure their ads show up in the right place at the right time.
- Landing page creation: To increase conversions, agencies may have to create dozens of landing pages, as well as landing page A/B tests.
- Ad creation: Digital marketers can handle every step of the ad creation process, including writing the content of the ad. Marketers must clearly communicate the message their client wants to promote and incorporate specific keywords while also adhering to strict character limits.
Design
The design of a website can impact the results of its SEO and paid search campaigns. For this reason, digital marketing agencies typically offer various design services, including:
- WordPress rebuilds: The content on a website isn’t the only factor that could impact its ranking–the design of the website itself affects SEO, too. Digital marketers can help their clients redesign and optimize their WordPress websites to improve their ranking in the search results.
- Mobile optimization: This is the process of adjusting the design of a website to improve the experience for users who are accessing the site with a mobile device. It could involve making changes to the site design, structure, and user experience.
- Speed optimization: Page speed, or how fast the content on a page loads, is important to SEO. A slow page speed could negatively impact a website’s ranking within the search results, which is why digital marketers often help their clients with speed optimization.
Client Relationship Management
The key to maintaining a good relationship with clients is communication. Digital marketers successfully manage their relationships with their clients in several ways, including:
- Emails: Digital marketers typically communicate with their clients via email. They use email services to discuss marketing strategies, provide timelines, follow up on specific issues, share results of marketing campaigns, answer questions, and send content or other deliverables for approval.
- Meetings: Clients expect digital marketing agencies to meet with them on a regular basis to discuss new strategies, the status of their campaigns, or the results of recent campaigns. Digital marketers must not only schedule these meetings, but also prepare agendas for them.
- Reporting: Agencies must prove to clients that their investment in digital marketing has paid off by providing reports that show the results of their campaigns. Some clients expect these reports weekly or bi-weekly, whereas others only want to see results when a campaign is over.
Operations
In addition to all of these highly technical digital marketing tasks, agencies must perform many different basic tasks to keep the business up and running, including:
- Project management: Digital marketers must keep track of each of their tasks in order to meet tight deadlines and ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. This means managing each project from concept to completion.
- Distribution of work: Every digital marketing project may involve multiple parties, including writers, editors, SEO experts, and graphic designers. Digital marketers must ensure that tasks are distributed to the right parties at the right time.
- Invoicing: Digital marketing agencies cannot get paid for their work without a proper invoicing system. Marketers must make sure invoices are sent to and paid by clients in a timely manner. Agencies must also manage invoices sent by third parties, including freelance writers, graphic designers, and editors.
- Expense tracking: Digital marketing agencies incur various expenses while performing services for their clients. Keeping track of these business expenses, including who incurred them and who is responsible for paying them, is an important part of day-to-day operations at a digital marketing agency.
What Are the Most Popular Client Management Tools?
Digital marketers rely on a number of different tools to perform their job duties. Some of the most popular tools used by digital marketing agencies include:
- Slack/Skype: Agencies often use Slack or Skype to send instant messages or make video or voice calls to other team members. They can use these tools to discuss projects, ask questions, or check on the status of certain tasks.
- QuickBooks: This software is used to manage invoicing, handle payroll, and track business expenses. It can also be used for time tracking, which is important for agencies that bill clients or pay workers by the hour.
- SEMRush: This tool is used to conduct research for SEO campaigns. Digital marketers mainly use this tool to discover keywords to target in their SEO campaigns, but it can also be used to perform technical SEO audits and provide valuable information on competitors’ SEO strategies.
- WordStream: Whereas SEMRush is used for unpaid SEO efforts, WordStream is used for paid search campaigns. Digital marketers can use WordStream to create and implement ads across multiple platforms, including Google, Bing, and Facebook.
- Gmail: Many digital marketers use Gmail to communicate with other team members, clients, and other third parties.
- Asana/Trello: Both of these tools are used for project management. Digital marketers can use Asana and Trello to organize, assign, and track various tasks.
These tools can make it easier for digital marketers to get their work done. But the problem is that each of these tools can only be used to manage a specific type of task.
For example, SEMRush is only used for SEO projects, whereas Asana and Trello are only used for project management. As a result, digital marketers must switch back and forth between programs in order to complete their work. This is time-consuming and inefficient, but fortunately, there is another solution.
How Gryffin’s Agency Client Management Software Can Help
Digital marketers can use Gryffin’s agency client management software to streamline their workflow. Gryffin is an all-in-one tool that digital marketers can use to perform SEO, paid search, design, client relationship management, and operations tasks.
You can use Gryffin to create editorial calendars, assign tasks, communicate with clients, manage invoices, track projects, analyze SEO results, and more. There’s no need to pay for or switch back and forth between multiple tools–all you need is Gryffin to take control of your workflow.
Gryffin was built by digital marketers, so it is designed to meet all of the unique needs of digital marketing and SEO agencies. Learn more about how Gryffin can help you manage the chaos of being a digital marketer by starting a free 14-day trial today.