Complete List of Agency Tools You Need for Digital Marketing

Note on Costs (Optional reading for the lazy ones)

I am not an accountant, so apologies if I misuse any technical terms here, but before we get started, I want to note that the “costs” we refer to in this article are what I understand as operating expenses. These are the costs you can expect right out of the gate when you start your agency.

In slightly oversimplified terms, there are two types of costs in business (not including taxes): operating expenses (OPEX) and cost of goods sold/cost of goods and services (COGS). COGS are the expenses directly related to producing, selling, and implementing your product or service. OPEX includes every other cost you incur to run your business.

For example, if you run a coffee shop, your COGS includes coffee beans, machine, filters, and wages for baristas, and your OPEX includes rent, utilities, cleaning supplies, and insurance.

When you start your SEO agency, you don’t need to incur any COGS before making a sale because you will most likely act as the entire sales department, and you don’t have any physical product. So, if you’re somewhat savvy, you can take 100% of your COGS out of each check from your first few clients before you hire a salesperson.

For OPEX, you’ll need to lay down some cash right at the start. We’re focusing on OPEX in this article because we want to help you understand what it takes just to get up and running.

One More Thing...

Technically, none of these tools are required, but they will speed things up A LOT, and you should be able to cover everything once you have one or two clients.

Okay, now let’s (finally…) talk about the online business tools you need for your agency.

Website Building

One of the first tools you’ll need to get familiar with is a great website builder. These days, there are a million options, but one website building tool stands out from the rest for agency owners: WordPress, and Elementor Pro to go with it.

Many page builders like SquareSpace and Wix are designed to make it easy for someone with zero experience to bang out a simple site as quickly as possible. On the other hand, some hardcore coders might want to write every line of html by hand.

WordPress gives you the best of both worlds, and it’s set up exceptionally well for search engine optimization (SEO). When you install Elementor, you’ll be able to create professional quality sites without writing a single line of code, but if you need any specialized features, you can easily add in some custom code to individual pages or the whole website.

Because WordPress is one of the most popular website building tools, there are nearly limitless resources to help you build, including education, free and paid templates, and compatible plug-ins.

The one exception to our WordPress/Elementor suggestion is for those building online stores. Shopify has emerged as the top tool for e-commerce websites. It performs well for SEO, is extremely easy to build on, and hosts websites for some of the top brands in the world.

Domain Ownership

In order to publish a website on the internet, you need to own a domain. GoDaddy is the most popular marketplace for buying a web domain.

This can be nearly free or insanely expensive, depending on what you want to call your company. However, you can usually cut down the cost by using a less common domain extension like .co or .ai instead of .com. For example, at the time of writing, the domain MrLeads.com costs at least $50,000. But MrLeads.net costs $14.99 for the first year, and MrLeads.xyz costs $1.99. You can usually get a serviceable domain for under $50 per year when you’re just starting out. To keep things simple and consistent, we’ll call it $5 per month.

Hosting

Once you have your domain, a reliable website hosting service is absolutely crucial to house your agency website and the sites you build for your clients.

Look no further than Kinsta. This platform is reliable, affordable, and has great customer service. What more do you need?

Cost

Here’s how much these tools cost. For all tools in this article, I’m listing the price for the package I’d recommend for someone starting out as a solo agency owner. You can get bigger packages as you scale up, and these will cost more, but your bang-for-your buck will get way better.

WordPress: FREE!

Elementor Pro: $99/mo

Shopify: $29/mo

Domain: $5/mo

Kinsta: $30/mo

When you start your agency SEO tools are an absolute must. They are your primary resource for keyword research, which drives your entire marketing strategy.

A good one will also provide you with website audits to evaluate your site’s technical and SEO health. They will also let you keep track of your clients’ and competitors’ performance.

The most popular choices are definitely SEMRush and Ahrefs. Both are great options with a lot of functionality. It really comes down to personal preference.

Cost

SEMRush: $129/mo

Ahrefs: $99/mo

SEO and digital marketing in general are dynamic processes that take time to work. Tracking your progress and analyzing your efforts will help you hone your methods and figure out what works best.

Additionally, providing progress reports to your clients will give them an understanding of where their money is going, and it will build trust when they see that you are being transparent with your efforts and results.

Fortunately, it really isn’t necessary to pay for this. Google gives you web traffic data for free when you own a domain! When you launch your website, set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console for the domain and you’re good to go. To build custom reports, you may want to watch some YouTube tutorials.

Cost

Google Analytics: FREE!

Google Search Console: FREE!

That covers everything you need to deliver for your clients, but it turns out there’s a lot more to running a business than that!



There are a million tasks on every agency owner’s plate, and while it’s not 100% necessary to use these tools, they will save you tons of time and help you focus on taking care of your clients and getting new ones.

Email

This one might seem obvious, but it’s still worth mentioning because you’ll look like a fool if you email someone from noobagency69@gmail.com. Google and other servers will also send your messages straight to Spam when they see that you’re using a free account.



Link your domain to Outlook or a Google Workspace Gmail account so that you can have a professional handle that clearly comes from your business. It will look something like ‘yourname@noobagency.com.’

Payments

Collecting payments from your clients can be a pain, so getting a tool like Stripe to help you automate things can be super helpful, especially as you scale.

Stripe will take a small percentage of your revenues, but it will allow you to automatically send invoices and process payments. You’ll even be able to set your clients up with autopay, which takes a task off their plate and makes it so you don’t have to chase them down for payments every month.

Since you only pay for Stripe when you collect a payment, we’re categorizing it as COGS, so no OPEX cost for this one.

Task Management Software

If you’re a pen and paper list kind of person, skip this part. But if you’re like me and keep everything on a laptop, you’ll want an intuitive task management software to keep yourself…on task.

ClickUp gives you MUCH more than a simple checklist. ClickUp’s free plan gives you a highly customizable tool for tasks, contact organizing, team management, and much more. 

Document Management

This one isn’t 100% necessary if you are completely solo, but if you have any partners, employees, or contractors, it gets pretty annoying to organize documents without a good file-sharing system.

Google Drive is a decent budget option because it’s free up to a storage limit, but it limits you to working with Google’s versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, which…suck.

Box.com starts at just $20, and gives you access to your files both online and on your desktop, completely synced. It’s also super easy to control user access, plus you can create contracts that let your clients e-sign!

Appointments

Allowing prospects to book demo appointments with a calendar app is convenient and it looks professional. Calendly gives you an easy-to-use appointment system for free! You’ll only get one user and appointment type for the free package, but it’s perfect to start out.

Graphic Design and Stock Images

Canva might be my favorite tool on this list. It is definitely the best free graphic design software I have come across.

While they do have a free plan, we recommend getting a Pro account so you can also get access to A HUNDRED MILLION stock photos, videos, and graphics. Trust me, you will want these, and you’ll end up paying for them one way or the other.

Email Automation

You may find that manually writing every email you send to every prospect, client, follower, subscriber etc. quickly starts taking up entire days or weeks.

Consider buying some more time back with an email automation tool. MailerLite is a great option that let’s you send mass email campaigns with professional, customizable layouts.

Agency CRM

To help manage your agency CRM tools are almost a must-have. CRM apps let you manage clients, prospects, employees and more. A good one will keep you organized and moving through your goals.

The best CRM for marketing agency we’ve seen is HighLevel. This software gives you way more than a simple contact list. It’s basically a personal operating system for your agency. You can even use it to source prospects in your target industry.

This one is a little pricier, but they do offer a 2-week free trial so you can see if it’s worth it. In our experience, you’ll happily pony up month after month.

Content Writing

If you haven’t heard about ChatGPT by now…maybe you should stop reading this article and exit your cave.

You probably already know that ChatGPT can write stuff for you, so the point of including it in this list is more to warn you to use it wisely. ChatGPT can be a tremendous time saver, but it’s worth learning how to train it to give you great content, and how search engines view AI generated content.

If you’re going to publish anything written by AI on your website or your clients’ websites, make sure to thoroughly review and edit the text, and try to give it a personal, human tweak. Google will flag your site if it detects content that violates it's AI-Generated Content Policy, so be careful, and make sure you understand the restrictions. Use ChatGPT for emails, YouTube video descriptions, social media captions, and idea generation. 

Cost

Ok that was a lot. Now let's break down how much all these business management software tools are going to cost you:

Email

Outlook: $2.99/mo

Google Workspace: $6/mo 

Payments

Stripe: FREE! (kinda)

Task Management Software

ClickUp: FREE!

Document Management

Google Drive: Free

Box.com: $20/mo

Appointments

Calendly: FREE!

Graphics and Stock Images

Canva: $14.99/mo

Email Automation

MailerLite: $9/mo

CRM

HighLevel: $97

Content

ChatGPT: FREE

That’s it! We may not have covered every business management software that every online agency needs, but these are our favorites; the ones that helped Lead Hounds scale our business and we still use every day.

Below is a summary of all the tools, how much they cost, and how important they are to have right at the start:

*Tools with an asterisk under "Importance" have more than one option for their intended use, so you only need to get one. For example, only sign up for SEMRush OR Ahrefs, not both.

So, the final question you might still be asking is: how much will it cost me all in to run my digital marketing agency? Well, as the summary list shows, that depends.

Like we said at the start, technically, it's possible to do it without using any of these tools, but we would not recommend that route. If you try to do this caveman-style, you'll most likely end up wasting a bunch of time and getting completely out-paced by your competitors.

So we're suggesting a low- and high-budget option, assuming you're not going into this flat broke. Compared to most start-up businesses, neither of these are too daunting.

The "low-budget" estimate assumes you'll pay for Elementor, a domain from GoDaddy, web hosting with Kinsta, Ahrefs, the basic Outlook plan purchased through your GoDaddy domain, and all the free tools. This comes to $236/mo on average.

The "high-budget" estimate assumes you get everything on this list, and go for the pricier option when you have choices (SEMRush over Ahrefs, Box.com over Google Drive). This one comes out to $439/mo.

One or two clients could easily cover your costs for either of these. And remember, these costs only include OPEX, i.e., those you'll incur before making any money. They'll also increase as you scale, but if you remain strategic, your growth in revenues will outpace your growth in costs.