My marketing career is still young, but if there’s one thing that’s become crystal clear so far, it’s that in-house and agency marketing jobs might as well be different fields completely.
Sure, the end result is ideally the same: campaigns that rock people’s socks off.
But your relationship to the brand you’re marketing – whether you work for them as an employee, or with them as a client – shapes so much of your process and how you get to that end result.
Most obviously, when you work at an agency, you’re essentially “becoming” multiple brands at once. To create marketing content for a company, you have to get in the mindset of their customer and the voice of their brand. Doing this for several companies at a time is like having multiple personas or alter egos you have to keep track of.
Then, there’s the red tape. With agency-client relationships, a lot more people are involved in each decision. That means there’s usually more back and forth and ultimately a longer decision-making process.
And oh, who can forget all the literal accounts for each account you manage?
Just one brand can have dozens of marketing accounts: Facebook pages, Twitter profiles, Instagram and Snapchat handles, not to mention any other workflow tools they need you to use because the rest of their team uses them.
But when you have dozens of brands with dozens of accounts? It’s…a lot.
So obviously, it can be hard to manage.
We talk to successful social media marketing agencies all the time – ones who’ve figured out ways to do it all and keep track of it all, deliver great marketing campaigns, and keep clients happy in the process.
So today, we’re sharing the social media marketing tools those agencies love – grab a pen and take note!
(But first, a shout-out to BuzzSumo and SproutSocial! Out of the dozens of responses we received to our recommendations request, only a handful didn’t mention one of these two apps! I love them both myself, but wow, our customers and readers really do too!)
What to look for in agency tools
Before we dig into the actual social media tools, let’s clarify a few things. Earlier, I mentioned that agency jobs come with a unique set of problems. Obviously, it takes tools with specific, unique features to solve them.
- Collaboration: this one’s a given. Since there are so many hands involved in managing your clients’ accounts, both from their end and your own, it’s so, so key for your social media marketing tools to have really easy and seamless collaboration and team communication.
- Multiple accounts: another obvious feature. If you’re managing a ton of different social profiles, you absolutely don’t want to have separate logins for each of them. What a nightmare.
- Reporting: you’re getting paid by clients to get results, so you need to be sure of them. Clean, easy reports also helps you prove your worth to clients.
- Permissions: lastly, you need to make sure no one completely screws anything up by changing something they shouldn’t. Different user permissions allow you to set restrictions on what different departments and members of your client’s team can change and do within the software.
So now that we know what agency/client relationships need in social media tools, let’s look at the tools that meet them!
Advertising tools
Qwaya
“My favorite social media tool is definitely, Qwaya for Facebook ads. All of our clients’ ad accounts are in one dashboard, so we don’t have to bounce around business manager to work with all of them. It’s also just way more powerful than Power Editor, especially with their audiences and split testing capabilities. If you’re handling Facebook ads for more than 2 clients, you should be using Qwaya.” – Sujan Patel, WebProfits
TubeMogul
Recently acquired by Adobe, TubeMogul is an all-in-one solution for planning, buying, and measuring video advertising campaigns. And it actually just serves agencies and brands; it’s not customized or marketed for in-house marketer use, so it has lots of really targeted features for your team and clients.
“Mostly for video upload and syndication, it allows us to upload a single video clip to dozens of video sites – not just YouTube. The real advantage of TubeMogul is that we get comparative statistics, i.e. how many views did our video get on each site, and how long on average did viewers watch our clips on each…
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