How This Agency Slashes Busywork and Keeps Long-Term Clients with Agorapulse

Click Control Marketing is a digital marketing agency based in Grand Blanc, MI. The agency provides advertising, social media, and marketing management services to businesses of all sizes. It takes pride in driving growth and profitability for its clients.

The Challenge: Growing Beyond Spreadsheets

Back in 2015, Katie Saglimbene was managing director at Elevate Marketing Company, a different agency. As Elevate grew and added larger clients, it needed a social media management platform to plan content and send it to clients for approval. 

Going the DIY route, the agency used Excel to manage its social. Not surprisingly, planning and executing social from a spreadsheet took up way too much of the agency’s time. So, it brought in the social media management platform ContentCal but very quickly outgrew its limitations.

Katie and her team began looking for a more robust platform that could provide:

1. Google Business Profile support for managing the content of their local business clients
2. Better client collaboration, ensuring that clients approve scheduled posts before going live
3. Powerful reporting and analysis to identify what content tactics and campaigns are effective and what needs improvement
4. Community engagement functionality to respond to comments, reviews, and messages without visiting each native social media platform
5. An easy-to-use interface so new employees and clients can get up and running quickly.

The Search for a Solution: A Solid ContentCal Alternative

Katie’s team looked for alternatives to ContentCal. HubSpot was in the running, but it wasn’t geared toward agencies and didn’t support all the social networks they needed.

They also tested Sprout Social. They were impressed by Sprout’s analytics, but its pricing was too high for their agency’s size and potential growth.

Next up was Agorapulse. Indeed, the third time was the charm. The agency quickly saw how its capabilities and flexible pricing were perfect for its growing agency.  

Agorapulse’s user-friendly interface, deep publishing capabilities across multiple platforms (including Google Business Profiles), community-minded inbox, shared calendars, and insightful reporting features easily checked off the boxes on their wishlist.

The biggest factor in choosing Agorapulse, however, was its team collaboration features. From content planning to inbox assignments to reporting, Agorapulse’s collaborative features allowed the agency to work together on client accounts within a single platform. 

Transformation Upon Transformation: Agency Merger and Incredible Results

Katie and her team continued using Agorapulse for the next few years. When they joined forces with Click Control Marketing in 2023, bringing over Agorapulse to manage all social media work was a non-negotiable part of the deal. 

After using Agorapulse, work at Click Control Marketing became more efficient, collaborative, and successful.

Some of the benefits Click Control soon realized were:

1. Time savings. Through centralized content management of +/-50 profiles, Click Control soon cut their social media management time by a whopping 50 percent.
2. Improved client retention. With Agorapulse, Click Control was soon seen as a dependable partner to its clients by proactively creating content and seeking approval well before the publication date. The agency has incredibly retained six large clients for nine years.
3. Smoother teamwork. By allowing teams to add notes to a client’s social media channel about running campaigns, Click Control can connect social media data to overall campaign success.  A surprise bonus: The paid media team plans ads to coincide with upcoming social media content in the Agorapulse content calendar, resulting in more successful lead generation.
4. Easy-to-produce, customized reports that delight clients. Click Control soon heard rave reviews from clients who had, in the past, received “comprehensive” reports of up to 60 pages. These clients were delighted to receive now reports that spoke directly to their distinct goals and objectives. These reports also revealed the social ROI in the agency’s work on behalf of its clients.

A Great Partnership: Agorapulse’s Support of Click Control

One big reason Click Control Marketing has continued to use Agorapulse, even after merging with Click Control, is the high level of customer support provided by the social media management platform. 

Katie, now VP of Marketing Solutions of Click Control, expressed strong appreciation for this aspect, which has greatly influenced their loyalty to Agorapulse. 

“In all the years we have worked with Agorapulse, I never once felt like Agorapulse wasn’t listening to our ideas and feature requests. Even on a daily support basis, Agorapulse’s customer support team is quick to respond and help us troubleshoot if needed.” 

The team benefits from a dedicated account manager who conducts quarterly business reviews, and Katie is grateful for these 1:1 meetings. This level of support is essential for agencies like Click Control Marketing, which needs a true partner to help hit its growth goals.

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