With different team members covering various regions, multiple clients, and a host of KPIs, agencies today need to work smarter. Fortunately, there’s Agorapulse to help. Read this Agorapulse review and a snapshot of how the tool performs for my agency, Contentworks.
About Our Agency
Established in 2017, Contentworks Agency is a boutique content and social media marketing agency specializing in finance and fintech.
We work with international clients to provide insightful articles and education, whitepapers, public relations, video marketing, and social media. We provide hands-free content and social media solutions for busy banks, brokers, and fintechs. So, we hired the best finance writers and social media experts to help us.
The agency utilizes a myriad of paid tools to manage projects, create marketing materials, and communicate with clients. Agorapulse is the main tool we use for social media management.
So, let’s get into some specifics. What do we use Agorapulse for? The platform has an extensive suite of tools built into it, and we don’t use all of them. Here are my picks of our favorite five features and how they impact the agency.
1. Agorapulse Review: Creating International Content Calendars
Manually publishing posts to multiple social media platforms really isn’t an option for a busy marketing agency.
If each client has a minimum of three social media networks and you have 20+ clients, that’s 60 accounts to log into! Platforms like Facebook will detect different IPs accessing accounts, and that can create security blocks. Plus, you have no centralized overview of your content for the channels and clients.
You need a social media publishing tool that can handle multiple posts, social media channels, and accounts. Agorapulse allows us to easily select a social media platform, posting time and date, and add images and videos.
It also ensures we are all aligned with the client’s content strategy and upcoming campaigns.
Examples of how Agorapulse helps with content
Here’s why Agorapulse helps us as an agency.
- Our clients are international, so we need to be able to schedule content that hits social media feeds in their time zone, not ours.
- We can easily cover holiday and sick leave by working in the same shared calendar. This avoids complicated content handovers.
- Repeating evergreen content over a period of months is really simple and effective. An example of evergreen content might be a great ebook. It isn’t time-sensitive, won’t go out of style, and can fill content calendar gaps to drive web traffic, educate, or entertain.
- We can easily edit upcoming posts. That happens a lot in the finance space as risk warnings might change overnight and you need to update scheduled posts to remain compliant.
- We can choose which team members see each client calendar. That means we are streamlining our focus and not overloading team members with unnecessary information. It also means that, as an agency director, I can see all the calendars and discuss them with the right team members.
2. Agorapulse Review: Competitor Research
Clients expect more from their marketing agency than just posts on social media. In my experience, clients are always pleased to see a proactive approach. We work in a strategic way, so competitor research and listening can really add valuable insights into our planning and content creation.
Examples of how Agorapulse helps with competitive research
Here’s how we use Agorapulse for competitor listening.
- All Agorapulse plans include unlimited keyword and hashtag tracking. (On Facebook, there are some limitations set by the platform.)
- You can easily look at the times your clients’ competitors are posting and which posts get the most engagement. Which hashtags, keywords, and topics are performing best for them and on what days. That information is always interesting to clients and often shows that our social media posts are performing better.
- You can also set a competitor benchmark for your clients which will instantly produce a comparison chart. Here’s what that looks like for pizza giants Pizza Hut UK and Domino’s Pizza UK. As you can see Domino’s are ahead despite having fewer fans. Our clients love to see these benchmarks, and they only take a minute to produce.
- Don’t forget to listen to mentions and discussions around your own agency. By setting basic parameters you will receive notifications for your brand or website. (Like this great mention from Clutch, which we might have otherwise missed!) Seeing notifications and mentions allows you to decide in real time if you want to join the conversation!
3. Agorapulse Review: The Assign Feature
The assign feature is in our top 5 for this Agorapulse review. It simply means we can assign a post we have created or a fan comment/complaint to another person for review.
Often, it’s assumed that managing responses on social media is as simple as giving directions, prices, or links to products. But it can be much more complex—and in the financial services sector—it can also be dangerous!
Fans who claim to have lost money or have filed a complaint against a financial services company will also involve regulators. Fines from regulators can run into millions of dollars. So, it’s important to be very careful and compliant on social media.
We assign posts to clients for approval before publishing them. Once they are signed off by a compliance officer, we are free to post them. Similarly, if we receive a complaint on a client’s social media, we might assign it to them for comment or direction.
Constantly screenshotting fan comments and sending emails to clients or team members is a huge time drain. But it’s still something most social media managers end up doing.
Examples of how Agorapulse helps with assigning social media posts
Here are some of the times we will use the assign feature.
- A member of our team assigning a complaint to the client to respond. The client will usually provide the response, which we then post.
- Get post feedback before you publish. This isn’t something we do all the time, but for new clients or when handling a PR crisis we would.
- Nobody likes a micromanaging boss. But if we have new team members, we might encourage them to assign posts to us if they want reassurance. We can also add ourselves or an editor to their calendar to oversee upcoming posts, spelling, grammar, designs, and tone of voice. You can reply with suggestions or edits and only the assignee will see them. Like this one below:
4. Agorapulse Review: Scaling Our Business With Technology
I recently wrote about scaling your marketing agency and some tips on how to do it. Scaling up is one of the hardest parts of running an agency because you’re balancing current needs with available costs and potential resources. You’re also predicting your future needs and goals.
One thing’s for sure: Having the right tech is key to your success as an agency owner.
Doing everything manually is fine when you first start out, but soon, those manual tasks will drain your time and energy. (And don’t get me started on spreadsheets.) You need to put a price on your time as a director. And spending hours manually inputting figures for a report or formatting scheduling spreadsheets is not a good use of your time or expertise.
Examples of how Agorapulse helps with scaling a business
Investing in essential marketing tools like Agorapulse will help you to scale up while remaining in control. Some of the ways that the platform’s automation is helpful include:
- Automated rules for a well-managed social media inbox. You can also create templated replies to use for each client on frequently asked questions.
- Social media listening without really having to listen! Once you’ve set your listening parameters, Agorapulse does the heavy lifting for you.
- Obliterating the need for monthly content spreadsheets is a time saver. If you want to send a content schedule to your client, without adding them to the dashboard you can do that too. Hint – don’t add them to the dashboard!
- Social media reports that are generated automatically, and templates for replies. Those are huge time-savers and can help you to grow your agency. You can automate them to send each week or month in the same way as you would send invoices each month. Our clients really appreciate consistency with their reporting.
- Pricing. Agorapulse is one of the most competitive tools on the market price wise. Plus, they offer a range of options so you can start off small and grow as your agency grows. (That is what we, at my agency, did!)
5. Agorapulse Review: The Best-Looking Reports in the Business
Creating social media reports manually is tedious and inaccurate.
Downloading CSV files from each social network, trying to combine them, working out averages, and drawing conclusions is awful. It can take hours for each client and ends up in an ugly spreadsheet that nobody understands or reads. You could create your own agency PowerPoint and copy all the information into it, but that’s even more time.
Once that whole process is finally over, you would send the spreadsheet to the client and invariably get no response. (Probably because they didn’t understand them or didn’t have time to try.)
Social media reporting is essential, though. Without it, you will struggle to justify your worth as a social media management agency. You’re also lacking strategy if you don’t know what’s working, what isn’t, and what content is performing for your clients.
Examples of how Agorapulse helps with social media reports
Here are some of the key benefits we enjoy using expert reporting that make it a winner in this Agorapulse review.
- Proving our work and establishing trust
- Demonstrating social media ROI to our clients
- Recording key stats like account growth and engagement
- Understanding audience demographics and interests
- Getting inspiration for our future content
- Knowing the best times to publish for each client
- Providing colorful and visually impactful reports that our clients understand
- Reports can be scheduled to send automatically for consistency
With Agorapulse, we can choose from a variety of report types including Aggregated Report by Profile, Aggregated Report by Network, Label Report, Aggregated and Individual Report and Individual Report. We use all of them (except for the label report because that didn’t fit with our clients’ needs).
The diverse range of reporting types allows us to pick the right report for each client. Some clients simply want a quick overview of what you posted and what engagement it got. In which case a basic report is perfect.
We do have some clients who geek out on social media reports—and for these people, we have something extra special!
The Agorapulse Power Reports contain up to 12 channels and a ton of metrics and measurements. They are completely customizable, so you can untick social media metrics that don’t matter to your client.
Despite the overwhelming level of social media metrics, the reports still look colorful and engaging when you pull the report. These social media reports include all the social media metrics clients want to see, such as the ROI calculator as shown below.
Agorapulse Review: A Winning Platform
Those are the top platform features I would say are best in my Agorapulse review. But not everything is about the platform.
I also have to mention the client support that Agorapulse provides, which is stellar. If I have a question or feedback on the tool, their friendly support team is always ready to help. More than that, Customer Support will offer tips, hacks, and follow up to see how you’re doing. As a director of a busy agency, I find it critical to get quick support when we need it.
Additionally, the Agorapulse team is always innovating and adding more tools. They also keep up with the latest developments on the main social media channels to ensure they are in sync and delivering great tech.
Agorapulse is the top-rated social media management tool, and at Contentworks Agency, we understand why. Start your free trial now. It has all the features of the full subscription, so you can really give it a test drive!
