Digital agencies require exceptional organization. In order to manage your clients and successfully work together, it's pivotal to have a reliable system and tools that makes it easier to manage your business processes. Google products can help streamline your client work to make it less stressful and more profitable, but it is often necessary to "glue it together" to make it a business system rather than a set of disconnected tools.
We put together a list of the most impactful and useful Google tools for digital agencies to use, as well as insight into how you can bring them together to form an automated and streamlined business system.
Your inbox is a crucial way to stay connected and maintain communications with your clients, with 1.5 billion active users on Gmail alone. With smartphones always within arms reach, it's no surprise that people spend around 2.5 hours a day engaging in emails. While many of us of grow tired of the constant inbox notifications, email is a powerful tool that we can't live without. The secret is to make it more efficient by making it easier to get your work done from your inbox.
Connecting your Gmail to a business system is the missing link for many professionals, and the good news is that there's two primary ways - through Gmail Sync and the Gmail Add-on.
Gmail Sync means using Google's powerful APIs to automatically import emails to and from clients (as well as those related to projects and retainers you're working on) into the business system. This ensures your colleagues are in the loop with what's going on with clients, sales, projects, tickets and retainers you're working on together, and ensures that don't have to copy and paste from an email into your business systems ever again. An added bonus is that this sync magic can also automatically fill in your timesheet; saving you from trying to recall what you did last week.
Screenshot of Accelo's activity stream
The Gmail Add-On is the ability to bring your business system information into the Gmail interface. Avoid bouncing back and forth from your Gmail and your business system Accelo tabs to locate and compile important information. With the Add-on, create and manage your tasks, receive all client and colleague inquiries automatically - to avoid doubling up on responses - and view all the messages related to the thread without needing to be CC-ed or BCC-ed all from your inbox. This will help save ample time, avoid grunt work, and answer client correspondence in a timely fashion.
Gif of Accelo's Gmail Add-On
While we spend a lot of time in our email, the designated place we plan out our days is our calendar. The Google Calendar product is powerful and easy to use; it's essential for planning meetings with colleagues, clients and even organizing your own work day.
Without connecting your calendar to your business system, you and your team end up with all this critical information for tracking work, but are completely disconnected from the business. By synchronizing your Calendar with your business systems, you can make it much easier for project managers, account directors and other people responsible for planning and scheduling work to do their jobs well. This helps makes sure you're not overloaded and working to meet an unreasonable deadline. Synchronizing your calendar also has the added benefit of automating timesheet entry, making it that much easier to complete one of your necessary tasks.
For digital agencies who focus on helping their clients succeed online, Google Analytics (GA) is a tool that helps understand the breakdown of the online performance and opportunities for their clients. When your client's business grows yours grows along with them, and it's important to be able to meet that demand. This can be challenging when having to oversee many clients' GA accounts.
One way that you can handle this growth, save time, avoid errors and frustration is to connect your business system with your client's Google Analytics accounts. This way, your team members can be tasked on a recurring basis to do their client work (reviewing traffic patterns, reporting on performance and recommending improvements) from the business system. And with a single link from the business system, be dropped into the specific GA account and profile.
Take the next steps - sign up for a trial with Accelo to unite your system and Google technology to form a powerful, automated and efficient business system to help your company prosper.
