5 Tools for Managing Advertising Agency

The key to operating a successful agency is to utilise related instruments and software to handle and automate as many areas of the enterprise as potential, enabling you to concentrate on the wants of every of your clients. Having great tools in place that will help you and your senior staff handle areas similar to operations, resourcing, CRM and reporting will liberate your staff to concentrate on adding worth on your clients.

In this post, I’ve put collectively an inventory of tools and technology that will help you out in areas which are essential in making certain your company runs easily, so as to stay targeted on your clients.

1. File Storage.

There are a number of methods of managing files within an company, however the priorities for any company owner should be ease of access, safety and easy file syncing choices.

With Google Drive, companies can depend on a cloud-based methodology of storing files. Google Drive permits employees to simply sync files saved on numerous machines through Google Drive File Stream.

Google Drive (and Docs) is constructed for collaboration, which makes it the perfect match for company working. Whenever a change is made to a file on Google Drive, the earlier version is automatically up to date, so everyone is accessing the newest model irrespective of whether or not you’re accessing it from your iPhone or PC:

With Google Drive, your entire company also can share folders internally or with external clients or contacts whereas maintaining administrative management themselves:

Of course, you’ll want to make sure you contemplate including an additional layer of security as there’ll little doubt be client-sensitive info contained inside a few of the files. Google has this lined via a variety of options including:

• 2-Step Verification
• Advanced protection via bodily security keys

What if something will get modified or deleted by accident?

If you need to revert to an earlier model or undelete a file, you’ll be able to simply do that in Google Drive or in any Google doc:

You also can restore deleted files via the Google Drive admin console.

2. CRM & ERP for advertising agency

Customer relationship administration is essential to running a successful agency. As your company grows, you’ll want a robust system that can assist you to handle data relating to earlier, present and potential clients.

As an agency, you need to be trying to implement a CRM system that provides the following features:

• Ability to easily store and keep correct client data
• Ability to track and handle client communication
• Tracking billing information, managing billing, invoicing and contacts
• The capability for folks across the company to view updated client information and data associated to client-specific projects

At Apagen, we now have utilised a project administration software called Odoo to construct a customized CRM & Project Management workspace that our entire company can access. This space allows us to handle client data, contacts at every organisation we have on record, monitor client projects, billable and non-billable hours, request resources from a number of areas of the enterprise and create mailing lists from the information we’ve on file to hook up with Mailchimp.

As a digital agency, you have to maintain an in-depth eye on the way you and your staff spend, invoice, and manage time. Odoo permits you to construct customized apps to track this data and affiliate it to different apps via using relationship fields and automatic workflows. For example, all of our shopper projects link up with apps similar to billable hours, non-billable hours and monetary forecasts. This ensures we’ve everything associated to every project accessible in a single place:

Like loads of companies, we began with an Excel spreadsheet to track hours, which may clearly be fairly time-consuming (and sometimes painful) to take care of correct data, particularly as we now have grown. For anybody nonetheless utilizing this method, I might strongly encourage you to check out customisable instruments similar to Odoo which can allow you to mould a system to the needs of your enterprise.

3. Project Management

Every company must handle client projects, and there is a selection of straightforward project administration instruments that may considerably improve your staff’ ability to get work carried out rapidly.

Odoo is a wonderful project administration software that makes cross-functional collaboration very easy each internally and with clients. Odoo revolves around a couple of easy capabilities:

• To-do lists — These needs to be time sure and allotted to members of every Odoo project. Odoo additionally allows customers to connect files to to-do gadgets and ship lists to clients for updates and approval
• File sharing — Having all files associated to a project referenced in a project workspace is massively helpful and avoids having to dig around in file storage platforms to seek out what you’re looking for. Odoo permits customers to hyperlink to files and paperwork on Google Drive.
• Chatting (campfire) — This possibility needs to be used for casual chats around client projects.
• Message board — Updates on initiatives will be posted right here instead of being despatched through e-mail, keeping an audit path inside the project workspace as an alternative to information being lost within emails.
• Scheduling — Odoo has a calendar perform which syncs up with most main third-party calendars similar to Outlook, iCal and Google Calendar. To-do’s with dates are robotically added to schedules, which means they will seem in your calendar of selection if synced.
• Automatic check-in requests — Automatic check-ins permit you to set milestones for every shopper challenge and ping reminders to everybody concerned at key milestones.

Odoo(erp for advertising agency) offers you full transparency, working away from e-mail and in clearly seen workspaces to which shoppers will be added to. That being mentioned, there generally is a clear separation between “agency side” and “client-side” in Basecamp which allows seamless but protected communication that’s seen to company managers.

One of the huge advantages of Odoo is that it’s vastly easier than most different project management systems. We trialled utilizing Odoo for clients by creating individual client workspaces and nearly all clients discovered it hard to understand, together with those that are tech-savvy. Odoo primarily implies that shoppers simply have to reply to an e-mail for everybody to get visibility over the dialogue.

In my expertise, it’s a wonderful software for collaborating with clients, getting sign-off on varied duties and monitoring shopper communication. You may even hook Odoo up with CRM solutions enabling companies to take care of a single customer view.

4. Resource Planning:

Knowing the capability of your workforce is on the core of managing your projects and enabling your gross sales staff to efficiently bring in new clients.

Beyond simply having visibility into initiatives and their related billable hours, it’s vital for company homeowners to grasp:

• Employee utilisation by individual, staff, and department
• Non-billable hours spent on shopper projects (over-servicing)
• Non-billable hours put into pre-sales exercise and conversion rate of that activity

Your staff and their time are your most important assets, so it’s up to you and your project managers to make sure they’re focusing their consideration on the best projects and duties. Finding software that lets you have a transparent view of employees availability and utilisation might help manage workloads and empower recruitment choices.

In my opinion this info needs to be captured in any company CRM system, which for us means it’s captured within Odoo. There are then numerous third-party software that may also help extract and visualise data from the most popular CRM or company administration systems.

5. Client Reporting with Odoo ERP for Advertising agency

We have previously used Google sheets for all of our client reporting by hooking it as much as extract and show our client’s Google Analytics data.

This solution delivered big time savings vs. pulling guide reviews, whereas permitting us to arrange extremely customisable analytics dashboards for every of our clients, offering them with a concise overview of their efficiency always which is mechanically up to date every month.