Digital marketing freelancers and agencies must have the right tools in place before even starting their work. In a recent video, digital marketing expert S Rats shared some must-have tools for freelancers and agencies to consider. The first category of tools includes billing and invoicing solutions. For billing, using a bank transfer is the easiest way to receive client funds, but it requires an IBAN number and does not offer escrow protection. PayPal, Stripe, and other alternatives are also viable options for international payments, although they may charge a small commission. Invoicing solutions are also important for providing clients with proper documentation for their payments.
The second category of must-have tools includes screen recording software, such as TAA, SnagIt, or Loom. These tools are essential for creating personalized pitches and tutorials for clients, increasing engagement and conversion rates. Finally, having templates for onboarding clients and creating reports can streamline workflow and save time.
Choosing the right tools for the job is essential for digital marketing freelancers and agencies to operate efficiently and effectively. By having the necessary tools in place, they can provide a high level of service to their clients and set themselves up for success in the digital marketing industry.
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Video Transcript
Hello and welcome to another video of s rats and in this video we are going to discuss about must tools for any digital marketing freelancer or a digital marketing agency I want to give a quick disclaimer all the tools I have mentioned here are assuming that you whatever field of digital marketing you
Are in as a freelancer or you have an agency you already have the skills which are important to do your job okay the first category of the tools is billing and invoicing now billing and invoicing are essentially two different things but in certain tools you get to do both for
Billing if you the easiest way to get your funds from the clients is through a bank transfer but for that you need a bank account which at least has an iban number and accepts International payments it’s the most easiest way the benefit is that you do not pay
Commission to anything if the client pays you $100 and you that’s what you get you get $100 in your bank account but it comes with its problems the first problem with using bank accounts is that you will have to look for a SE separate solution for invoicing because you will
Need to provide invoices to most of your clients they sometimes ask you for it the second problem is there is no escrow which means that if you’re working with a client and they say okay once you finish the project we’ll pay you you finish the project and for any reason
The client doesn’t want to pay you there is nothing you can do about it now for any reason if you don’t want to use the bank account you don’t have a bank account the client does not want to do Bank transfers the most commonly used solution is Paypal because in my
Experience as well I have seen a lot of companies most of the companies accept Paypal as a mode of payment they are okay with transferring funds to your PayPal account then I would suggest if you are opening a PayPal account I would suggest to go for a business account
Because it comes with a lot of features but just keep in mind unlike the bank account PayPal will always charge a small Commission on all the payments you receive and when you send them to your bank account however escrow is also not available in PayPal if PayPal is not
Allowed in your country there are a lot of other op Alternatives let’s say Pioneer is a good solution as well stripe is a very good solution as well and using these tools you can generate links send it to your clients so that they can make payments and if you are
Specifically in UAE mammo pay is a good option as well these should be enough you can choose any of them they almost do the same things and all of them provide you the functionality of generating invoices for your client so that way you are sorted platforms like
Fiverr and freelancer make it very easy because what you can do is you can list your gig on any of these platforms and if you get a client outside Fiverr you can tell them can you make the payment can you go and buy this gig and make the
Payment there and we can manage the project there the good thing is Fiverr also has escrow so the client will have to already pay but it will remain with fivr once he agrees that okay the project is done then the money will be transferred to you the only problem I
See with platforms like Fiverr is if you outside of Fiverr you get a client sometimes they’ll be a bit reluctant some clients don’t even know about these platforms so they’ll be like a bit reluctant to make payments there open a profile they’ll have to do but a lot of
Uh the clients who generally work with Freelancers and small agencies they already have fivr accounts so I would suggest to have at least uh two or three options among these let’s say you have a bank transfer and PayPal and Fiverr and PayPal Fiverr and bank account it’s
Always good to have many options because anyways you don’t pay for any of these platforms now this leads us to our second category of tools which are very important in my opinion are screen recording tools now in my case I use ta which is one of my favorites I have been
Using other tools as well snagg it Loom but I finally settled with ta because of the price point because of the features they provide and the seamless workflow they have now to give you an example how these tools work and why they are important for example I’m a freelancer
And I want to reach out to Mr properties in Dubai and tell them I can handle your sem strategy the traditional way is to I write a long email and tell them what I observed and I’m sure nobody will ever read that but the other way is I can
Record a very tailored pitch for them using TAA and this is how it will look hello Ahmed my name is OES and I am a digital marketing freelancer I have worked with a lot of real estate clients in Dubai and I’m an expert in sem strategy I just wanted to share this
Quick one minute video where I explain to you what I am proposing usually I have seen the behavior of people who want to buy properties in Dubai and specifically they are interested in MMA properties because of the Mr reputation and they generally what they do is they
Go to Google and they search for Mr properties now if I go here and I search for Mr properties and I’m based in Dubai at the moment I see that even on Mr keywords theak properties and soba reality even danoob is appearing on the top they are taking a lot of your
Traffic where users were actually interested to see what kind of Apartments you have to offer if I am a prospect buyer and I have seen that you already do sem but then on keywords like M properties you should should be on the top and I see that there’s a lot of lost
Opportunity there if you agree with me I would love to have a call with you where I explain to you even more analysis and research I have done and I can show you what I can offer for Mr now did you feel the difference if the marketing manager
At Mr will read this personalized we go through the video personalized video it’s engaging and in a very short time I will explain what I want to say I’ll provide kind of a proof of concept and it has a huge conversion rate and all the good Freelancers and small agencies
Use these kind of tools for business pictures and just not for business pictures using TAA you can create onetoone tutorials let’s say for example for a client I just created a reporting dashboard and I recorded a message with ta where I actually show them how to use this particular dashboard even when when
I sell digital products like my media plan template I generally include a video where I actually show them step by step how you can use this particular template you can actually do a lot more with these tools but I hope I made my point now also I’m an affiliate for ta
If you’re interested in subscribing to TA I’ll put a link in the description below which you can use to register and start using I’ll also put some resources which will help you get started with ta now this leads us to our third category of tools which is templates now once you
Have billing sorted once you have a screen recording tool to pitch for the new clients then what matters after onboarding the clients is the workflow how you manage work with them and templates is a very very important part of that let me give you an example when
You’re on board a new client you generally give them an estimation of the forecast in a media plan or you request them about the campaign details in a form where you ask them details the start date end date objective and a lot of other things now the way you ask them
Is very important generally all the professional free Freelancers and even agencies what they do is they have templates for everything and all of the information is kind of Consolidated there and it looks professional now when you send a media plan to the your client or an end campaign report rep you don’t
Just want to put all that information in that Google doc or Excel sheet and send it because it does not look professional now all of these things like there are six to seven things how you interact with the clients ranging from you ask them for a creative brief you ask them
For a campaign brief you provide them a media plan you send them a campaign end report and a lot of other things all of this should be managed in templates now I have a set of templates which I use for my projects and all of them are for
Sale on my website but if you don’t want to buy them you can just go through the videos which I have relevant videos for all of those templates how I create them and you can create a template of your own just keep one thing in mind no
Matter how technically strong you are no matter how much skilled you are if you don’t use the right templates you will never come across as a professional freelancer or an agency now this leads us to our fourth category which is also important which is your own branding
Whether it is your website whether the email you’re using to communicate with the clients these are very important that they should reflect your brand for examp example having a custom domain and your website as well as an email with your custom domain is very important because I have seen a lot of clients
When emails come from Gmail IDs they don’t take it seriously whether it’s a business pitch or you start working with them getting a custom domain is not very expensive you just get it for minimal prices for a year I think it starts with $10 you can get a website you can get a
Email address and that is what you should always look for even before starting your freelancing or agency business and at the same time having your own website is very important for your branding and you can summarize all the information in there it’s easier for clients to find you and to understand
About you how you work for example you can have a look at my website senan ads and you can go through the different sections I have there you can kind of create a similar website generally your website should have about you what is your experience what is your portfolio
What are the projects you have worked on and maybe some testimonials and reviews if you have already done certain projects and a contact form and the information about you how to contact you now this leads us to our next section which is AD account setup and research
Tools now before you start pitching to your first Prospect client I would always suggest to have all the major ad account setups done let’s say Facebook business manager and AD accounts Google uh ad accounts this is important for two reasons because whenever you are pitching to a new client you always in
Your business pitch you always include the numbers you competitor analysis and a lot of things let’s say estimated cpcs cost per leads and a lot of things now this kind of research you can easily do in ad accounts and the good thing is creating ad accounts is free you don’t
Need to pay anything even if you don’t have a credit card you can still create ad accounts on all major platforms let’s say meta Tik Tok and Google the second reason having these ad accounts is important because if you get a new client you don’t ask them to wait to for
You to create new business manager account or Add accounts and then you ask them for the access and sometimes your add accounts will be rejected and you’ll have to wait for a very long time sometimes your ad accounts cannot scale because they are just recently created and it’s always good whenever you are
Thinking about becoming a freelancer in near future it’s always good to already create these business accounts now apart from our accounts you should always have access or get used to the research tools for example there are certain very important research tools let’s say Google ads transparency Center where you
Can check all the computers for example if you want to know you you’re pitching for a new client you want to know what kind of ads are their computers running what ads are working for them what ads are not working for them it’s very important to have access and also be
Used to how to use these uh let’s say Google ads transparency Center or Facebook ads Library they are very important resarch tools when you are going to start uh working with a new client and apart from there that there are certain paid tools which have free versions as well let’s say sem Rush
Statista similar web and a lot of other tools even in free versions you get a lot lot of data there I see they make a difference when you include the data from these tools in your business pitch they make a huge difference in changing the mind of your prospect customer that
Why they should work with you and not with someone else now this leads us to our next category which is the sixth category that is design tools now if you have been in digital marketing space for a while you would know that few years ago having a designer to adapt the
Creative or to create a creative was a huge task it was bottleneck for most of the projects because you are always dependent on someone who knows design and creative and it’s a very slope it used to be a very slow process but with the recent um I think last 5 years we
Have seen there a lot of tools that came in the market like Cana photop which changed the market alog together even Adobe spark now they changed everything even if you don’t know ABC of design you can go ahead and you can create very professional looking and decent looking
Uh creative an artwork for your campaigns or uh publishing on your social media sites it became very accessible because they are just drag and drop tools why I’m saying you need to know design because when you work as a freelancer or a small agency you generally work with small clients and
They do not have additional resources to hire designers so they will always ask you and at least they will have a master or key visual which they will ask you to adapt now in obviously as a paid media specialist you will charge for these services but they will always prefer to
Work with someone who can do this for them as well and it’s not a huge uh skill set you need to know for example canva or adobe spark if you just work on it for few hours you will understand how things work and it’s very easy you just
Choose a template I need a Facebook ad I need a carousel ad you choose a template how you want you change the text you change the image and or you are done the good thing is most of these tools also have free versions where you can just
Create the basic designs I would say can Y is very good but it has a learning curve Adobe spark is a bit straightforward but it does not have as many features Microsoft design is good as well and honestly my Fe my my favorite is uh photo.com but the thing
Is it is uh it has a huge learning curve you need some time to spend on it and it does not have a lot of templates you basically need to create everything from scratch now this leads us to our last tool category which is project management tools now project management
Tools actually help you it makes your life very easy it helps you to document everything because I have seen instances when the client will come back after a month and say we never approved this one this creative why why is it live now the other benefit of using project
Management tools is everything is documented it makes your life easy and as well as the collaboration part becomes very easy whether you’re collaborating with your teammates let’s say you have a small agency or you’re collaborating with your uh client let’s say you go to them and tell them okay
For this search uh sem ad can you please write a headline now it’s easy you add a comment there and now add on top of this let’s say there are multiple stakeholders on the client side as well you’re working with marketing manager they internally have a Content team who
Needs to add on emails it becomes very U complicated so these collaboration tools and project management tools make it all easy now when I say project management tools it looks like a fancy word but if you just use Google Cloud it’s good enough it’s my favorite I have been
Using Cloud Google Cloud on most of my projects which includes Google Slides Google Docs Google Sheets and it’s free for everyone and you can provide access to anyone they don’t need to install any application or any software and every it’s quite intuitive so everyone will understand how to use it even if they
Have not used it before but apart from if you want to go to fancy versions then there is notion there is Asana there is monday.com there are paid tools but honestly they uh visually they are better they have better collaboration but I don’t think there is any feature
Available in these paid softwares which you cannot do in Google Cloud but you just need to know how to use that particular feature there now these were some very important tools every freelancer or small agency should have but if you want to know all the tools I
Use in my day-to-day work uh in all the projects I do I will put a link in the description below where you can visit my blog and see all the tools with descriptions what I use them for as well as you can visit this particular video
Where I have discussed 30 tools I use in my day-to-day life and I hope this video was helpful for you thank you so much I will see you in the next one
Video “Digital Marketing FREELANCER & AGENCY must have tools (Before even starting)” was uploaded on 01/29/2024 to Youtube Channel Senator We Run Ads