The ultimate guide to leveraging technology for agency growth

It seems like every year a software development company releases new technologies that can reshape the digital landscape. Staying on top of this technology is vital for agencies as when you leverage technology it gives your agency a competitive edge.

Whether you want to automate repetitive tasks, predict customer behaviour or streamline the sales process of your agency, technology can help. Here’s the ultimate guide to growing your agency by leveraging technology.

There’s digital transformation afoot. There’s been a shift from monologues to dialogues. From generic content that aims to score the top spot on search engines to personalised content that aims to secure the top spot in an audience’s mind.

The current trends in the digital landscape are a telling sign of the changes that have occurred in recent years. For example:

• Voice search and smart assistants
• Social and sustainability responsibility in branding
• Personalisation and AI-driven content/strategies
• Virtual and augmented reality in advertising

Each one is centred around new digital technology and offers new and interesting ways of marketing to an audience. Each piece of new tech belongs in your digital strategy, but which do you choose? What digital technologies can provide the most business growth?

Choosing the right technology for your agency and knowing how to seamlessly introduce these digital processes to your team and your clients guarantee operational success!

Let’s begin with essential technology for your agency’s operations. These are your key players, the ones that streamline workflows, increase efficiency and make repetitive tasks much easier to manage.

This technology aligns with how your team works, increases productivity, makes collaboration simple and can even help build strong client relationships – improving employee and customer satisfaction. These essential tools include:

Project management software offers key benefits for internal processes. Software like Monday.com and Asana, for example, allow you to create project boards, collaborate with team members, manage tasks and track progress.

This may seem like spying on your employees, but it’s a brilliant way of guaranteeing that projects are moving forward efficiently and that you’re delivering quality to your clients. With quality projects under your agency’s belt, growth will quickly follow.

While Asana and Monday.com could certainly be considered collaboration platforms, if there’s a need for a lengthier discussion about certain projects, you’ll need a separate tool. Tools like Slack, Zoom and Microsoft Teams allow your team to collaborate on projects like never before! They allow for excellent customer interactions, planning sessions with stakeholders and allow remote workers to join the discussion and get involved easily.

If you’d like to scale your agency using outside talent by offshoring, implementing freelancers or hiring people from further afield to ensure you have the best people on your team, collaborative platforms are essential! They are a central space for creativity, which is vital for growth!

CRMs build stronger client relationships and help to manage leads effectively. They are powerful tools for data-driven insights allowing you to collect and manage information about the people who are important to your business growth. Building a partner with a CRM provider like Hubspot also allows you to offer these powerful tools to your clients so they can gain valuable insights into their customer behaviour, which can help you build projects which align with their customer’s needs more effectively.

These essential pieces of software are key to growing your agency as they allow you to manage projects and employees easily. Delivery, data analysis communication with external partners and clients, all of this can be made easier with this technology.

Data-driven insights empower your agencies to make informed, objective and evidence-based decisions. It leads to better insights, improved accuracy, and the identification of areas of risks and new opportunities. Data also allows for more strategic planning centred around your clients and theirs. It also builds a culture of continuous improvement.

In short, data is one of the most important tools in an agency’s toolbox. But how do you make the most of this data? By leveraging technology, of course!

Whether you want to keep an eye on how your SEO deliverables are doing, track how viral a piece of content has gone or see how well a paid campaign is doing, there’s probably a free tool that can help.

Analytic tools like Google Seach Console and Google Analytics provide real-time data so that you can see how your client’s sites are doing. You can also provide feedback to your clients based on data-driven insights using these free tools.

Tools like Ahrefs and SemRush allow you to see what your client’s audience is searching for and build data-driven strategies to target this audience. These are powerful tools that your teams should be taking advantage of throughout the planning process.

Creating plans that align with your client’s business goals and buyer personas, as well as key terms that their audience is using is the best way to grow your client’s businesses as well as your own. A proven track record of helping companies grow gives you a competitive edge over other agencies that don’t have data to back up their efforts.

Along with these powerful SEO tools, site crawlers (like Sitebulb and Screaming Frog) can be used to gain insights into how a company’s site is performing at the moment. Find any glaring issues and you have the data to back up why your team needs to spend money putting things right!

Of course, it’s not just the backend of your client’s site that you need to gather data from. Gathering data about your client’s audience can also provide valuable insights into how they are interacting with their sites and changes that may help with your client’s growth.

Online tracking, on-page forms, social media monitoring and transactional tracking can all be used to gather data about how people are interacting with your client’s websites and products and your own. From there, you can build an insightful strategy to harness this data and deliver growth to your clients. As a direct result of growing clients, your agency will grow.

Using data to drive strategies gives your clients a clear understanding of what’s needed. And using the same techniques when pitching to a client ensures they know that the work you’re suggesting is valid, needed and vital to the success of their business.

Automating repetitive tasks is one of the quickest ways to boost the spirits of every member of your team! There aren’t many people who love to do repetitive tasks, so finding ways of streamlining these processes is a great way of ensuring that your team can focus on the tasks they enjoy. Not to mention it saves time and money and reduces human error!

So, how do we automate processes but ensure that customer needs are still met? Well, we need to look at our daily operations and see whether there is a tool that can help. Thankfully, a lot of the latest technologies are geared towards automating repetitive tasks, including:

• Hubspot
• Hive
• Mailchimp
• ClickUp
• Kissflow

Implementing these tools into your workflow, whether that’s for email marketing or for the day-to-day running of the business, means eliminating the potential risks of human error, freeing up your staff to work on more important and building better working practices.

It will come as no surprise that AI and machine learning software are going to feature in this guide. AI can be used for so many things within an agency. Ask your team and they likely have a task that has been completely automated by AI already.

Whether it’s writing content briefs, internal linking optimisation, image editing or ideation for buyer persona-led content. AI can be used for everything bar making the coffee in the morning. Utilising AI to automate certain tasks frees up your team to concentrate on getting creative and producing high-quality work that is going to result in your agency growing.

Rich Mehta, the owner of Rigorous Digital took automation to the next level by moving hosting platforms to Nimbus. Our intuitive in-built tools – designed for digital agencies – meant that the team could get stuck in with very little technical background.

This allowed many of the more repetitive tasks to be automated or simplified and cut down on training time for new team members. So, when looking to streamline repetitive tasks, don’t just look for automative tools, look at the other systems and software that your employees use daily. Could a switch to a more powerful, yet simiplier version make a huge impact on workflow? Making a simple switch – Like Rigorous Digital switching their hosting provider to us – could make certain repetitive tasks a thing of the past.

As your agency grows, there is a risk that quality will slip. As owners and managers are pushed and pulled in different directions and more team members come on board, quality needs to continue to be a big focus. However, with a larger workload, some employees may feel the need to rush, use artificial intelligence to speed things up, or new members of the team may not fully understand the client and deliverables.

So, when it comes to scaling your agency, what types of technology can help ensure that the quality of the work produced stays consistent?

If you aren’t already using cloud-based software within your business, now is the time. Things like Google Drive, OneDrive and Zoho WorkDrive, for example, can be key in giving everyone in the business access to everything they need. Whether that is training documents, software, content plans or important spreadsheets, once it’s on the drive, everyone has access.

We aren’t claiming that your human freelancers are a new technology, but the way you interact with them or find them might be changing. Sourcing quality freelancers or finding reliable places to outsource work while you grow your team is difficult. So, it’s important to know what platform the best freelancers are using so that you can find them!

The platforms that freelancers are using right now include:

• Fiverr
• Toptal
• Jooble
• Freelancer
• Upwork

Keeping on top of which platforms the best freelancers are using is key for your agency finding the best of the best that can help your team as your business grows.

To scale your business successfully, you need a firm strategy in place to stay ahead of any hazards in your way. This includes a plan in place for when work gets too much for your team, a plan to build strong client relationships as your time is taken up with other tasks, and a plan for when market conditions change.

Implementing technology that can help your team streamline their workloads, automate repetitive tasks and aid in client management must be in your strategy for growth! Help your team, and they’ll help you grow your agency into the powerhouse you want it to be.

Emerging technologies like AI augmented reality, and blockchain will change the way digital agencies work forever. They will allow agencies to foster hyper-personalised marketing, immersive brand experiences, and secure data handling.

AI-driven analytics will optimise campaigns, Augmented Reality will enhance interactive storytelling, and blockchain will ensure transparent transactions. Agencies will be able to pivot towards consultancy, offering expertise in navigating these technologies and freeing up time with repetitive tasks that are done by machines.

Collaboration with tech firms will become integral for innovation while adapting to privacy regulations will be paramount. Ultimately, digital agencies will evolve into dynamic hubs of creativity and technological prowess, delivering unparalleled value to clients in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

To stay ahead of the curve, your agency needs to leverage technology today. Build a new system centred around automating repetitive tasks, gathering data and forming stronger relationships with clients.

Adaptation and innovation have always been key in digital agencies. But using technological advancements to further the abilities of your team, and help them manage workloads and projects will ultimately grow your agency like never before. Stay up-to-date with emerging technology to see what you could implement in your agency, and don’t be afraid to try new ways of working. It could just be the edge your agency needs to move forward.

To learn more about using AI to help automate tasks, speed up processes, and a great deal more, check out our recent webinar ‘Cut Through The AI Hype’ with AI addict and industry leader Heather Murray. Heather’s work in AI is unparalleled and she has some incredible insights into using AI within your agency to improve everything from onboarding clients, day-to-day running and even scaling sales!