3 Biggest Challenges Facing Marketing Agencies and How to Tackle Them

In today’s ever-changing world, it’s easy to lose track of time, people, and goals. Luckily, we have tools in place to help us be more productive, get organized, retain talent, and keep a close eye on our objectives. Even so, some of the most common challenges are ongoing, and if left unchecked, can cost an agency a lot of time and money to recover. 

3 biggest challenges marketing agencies face are: 

• Setting (and keeping up with) deadlines

• Client retention

• Retaining quality talent

Working ‘harder’ or putting in more hours often aren’t the solution for pervasive issues. Agencies need long-term solutions that can be implemented within their daily workflow to keep their teams on track to success.

This article will explore solutions and provide tips on what agencies should look out for in digital marketing tools, to help you select the one that is right for your agency. 

Problem 1: Setting and Keeping up With Deadlines

Solution: Project Management Software 

While there are tons of project management tools available, many of them simply aren’t great for creative work. While you will still want to plan, track, and deliver projects on time and on budget, creative work done by your agency requires more flexible project management.

Tools like Monday.com and Asana are well known for their intuitive design and visually appealing interface. With this tool, your marketing team can see their work process, tasks, and projects at both micro and macro levels. Clickup is also great for cross-departmental use as you can divide by subject, but tag people across departments when they need to jump in. 

Look for project management tools that have: 

• Highly informative dashboards

• Integration with dozens of other popular apps, like Slack and Google Drive

• Automation capabilities

• Approval routing

• Forms and templates

• Custom boards and cards

• Checklists within task cards with custom deadlines

• Commenting sections

Problem 2: Client Retention / Reducing Churn  

Solution: Automation

Did you know that 68% of businesses are already using automation in some way? It shouldn’t be surprising. Marketing automation tools offer many benefits, from increasing revenue and productivity to reducing overhead. But in terms of client retention, it offers three very important things:

• Transparency

• Consistency in quality

• Clear communication

This trio is vital in retaining clients. If you can’t communicate your agency’s performance to your clients, they won’t know the value of your services. In marketing, there are so many metrics to track, analyze and report on, that it’s easy to confuse your clients and have them feeling overwhelmed. 

As it turns out, there are a lot of things you can automate:

• Client Reporting

• Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM)

Client Reporting Automation

Client reporting is one of the most important aspects of running an agency. Not only does it improve your clients’ customer experience, but it also saves your agency countless hours that manual reporting would normally take. AgencyAnalytics offers a robust cloud-based digital marketing reporting dashboard, you can monitor and report on all of your clients’ campaigns in the same place. Automatically.

Features include:

• Automated reporting

• White-label reporting Client and staff access

• 60+ marketing integrations 

• Keyword rank tracking

• SEO site audits

For example, you can use marketing dashboards to create fully customized reports for your clients. Just customize the template for each of your clients and their live metrics will populate on their own.

Read More: 15 Marketing Dashboards To Help Your Marketing Agency Scale

Customer Relationship Management Automation

Having the right CRM tool is also crucial to maintaining relationships with your clients – especially if your agency has over 100 clients. Tools like Salesforce and Hubspot have become the go-to solution for businesses that need a CRM that will scale with their growth. If your agency is on the small-to-medium end of the spectrum, Pipedrive or SharpSpring might be a better fit for you.

Apart from automation, look for a wide range of features: 

• Marketing automation

• Marketing attribution

• Contact management

• Lead management

• Deal stage management

• Revenue reporting

• Sales tasks management

Problem 3: Retaining Quality Talent  

Solution: Set Reasonable Goals and Hold Your Team Accountable to Them 

It takes on average three months to onboard a new employee. Your agency works hard to attract, seek out, and train new talent. Talent loss is nothing to scoff at – it is costly. Lack of the right talent is also the leading reason why agencies fail.

Managers need to be looking at what is causing talent loss, and what they can do to keep their marketing team intact. It turns out that one of the biggest reasons for lost talent is burnout. 

A recent poll by Monster found out that nearly 3 out of 4 employees working from home are experiencing burnout. Burnout is happening especially when teams are largely working from home and the hours and days become blurred. 

One solution is time tracking software. It can help marketing managers assign, distribute, and improve workflow. Knowing that deadlines are doable takes care of your team by respecting their time and talent. It’s not just about making sure your employees are working enough. It’s also that they’re not overworked. 

Many tools already incorporate a time-tracking element for this purpose. Here is a more extensive list to consider: Best Time Tracking Apps for Agencies

Which Digital Marketing Tools Should You Add to Your Agency’s Stack?

With so many digital marketing tools available, you’ll likely make your decisions based on the time-saving qualities and areas of need that your marketing team needs to be smoothed out first. 

Which tools will provide the biggest impact for your clients and help you reach your growth goals varies on your agency size, structure, and services?

With the right tools at your fingertips, you can streamline your workflows, and keep quality talent and clients loyal to your agency. After choosing the right tools for your agency, you can focus on what matters: your agency’s and client’s growth and success.