Are you running a successful Joomla agency, but looking to take it to the next level? 

Are you looking for ways to empower your team and boost productivity to improve your outputs? 

Check out this list of totally free tools to boost your agency's performance!

Marketing Score

Don't worry - just because it has "Marketing" in the title doesn't mean this tool isn't useful for web-specific agencies.

Think about the discovery process you go through when your agency takes on a new client: you check out their current site, maybe cruise through their social profiles, and set up a few meetings to learn what they're looking for.

Do you really feel that this phase fully reveals the client's goals? Do you think you could build better sites if you had a better discovery?

The Marketing Score is a free assessment that you can have new clients take to help you understand their business on a much deeper level. Sure, some of it may be overkill - but you can skip the less important areas and focus on the questions that help you do your job better. 

Armed with this knowledge, you can get to work creating the absolute best website possible to surpass your client's goals.

Sqwiggle

The Joomla (and development) world is no stranger to telecommuting and remote office locations. If you're like most Joomla agencies, you've got team members and contractors all over the world. 

All that diversity is great... until some members begin to feel isolated. Enter one of my favorite team-enhancing services: Sqwiggle.

Image via CrunchBase

This service uses webcams on each team members computer to capture a screenshot of them every few seconds. It also has a nice built in chat, and allows for video calls at the click of a button (with much better connectivity than Skype).

Sqwiggle is an easy way to streamline communication, but it also incorporates the team element that many decentralized companies tend to lack. When your employees can actually see and interact with each other, it will do wonders for morale and cohesiveness. 

Note: Sqwiggle is only free for the first 14 days to groups larger than 3.

I know, how rude! But trust me, once you try the 14-day trial you'll be lining up to purchase your team's monthly access.

IFTTT

Between blogging, social media, email, and all the other channels you use to promote your agency, it's easy to get overwhelmed. 

What if you could simplify the steps that connect some of those mediums, and create short cuts that help save you time?

If that sounds promising, If This Then That (IFTT) is worth checking out.

The free service allows you to connect "channels" (think Facebook, LinkedIn, email, RSS) to triggers (like being tagged in a photo, uploading a status, or sending an email) to actions (Ie. "If I send a Tweet, share it as a Facebook status".) To see a step by step breakdown of how the service works, check out this page. 

The possibilities for IFTTT use in an agency are vast - from sending updates to clients, to streamlining social media, to automatically storing files in specific locations. 

Blog Topic Generator

As an agency, you need to be blogging frequently both for SEO and positioning purposes. If you're spending hours thinking up topics, or your creativity is dwindling, HubSpot's Blog Topic Generator is a neat little tool.

Just pop in some keywords, click the button, and get inspired!

As the page states, the tool isn't 100% perfect.

When I entered "joomla", "agency", and "marketing" I got: The History Of Joomla, 10 Quick Tips About Agency, 314 Common Misconceptions About Marketing, The Worst Advice We've Ever Heard About Joomla, Miley Cyrus And Agency: 10 Surprising Things They Have In Common.

Still, there are some great gems in there that could be explored to write some killer articles. This tool is a useful (and fun) quick fix to try next time your designated blogger is battling writer's block.

HootSuite

As a company that creates online presences for clients, having a strong social media presence is imperative for your Joomla agency. But keeping your social media accounts active, consistent, and under control is a job in itself!

If you don't exactly have the budget or need for a full time social media employee, services like HootSuite can help.

HootSuite centralizes your social efforts by synching all of your accounts in one place, and allowing you to interact on multiple networks at once. Use cases include posting to Facebook and X / Twitter at the same time, monitoring conversations on any network about a given topic, or simply engaging with followers. 

On top of all that, you can see reports about your most engaging posts, schedule out posts to automatically publish at high volume times, and shorten links to track their performance. 

If you're not into HootSuite, Buffer also offers the same services for free. I'm a HootSuite lifer, so I can't speak to Buffer's service - but I know plenty of marketing folks who swear by it. Both are free, so you could even try both and see which suits your needs.

Trello

Image via Trello

Smart agencies know that the key to effective (and engaging) blogging is keeping it diverse. Whenever possible, you should have different members of your team contributing articles to your agency's blog.

When when you have 3, or 4, or 10 people all publishing on the same site, there's the possibility of overlap and conflicting messages or repeat posts.

Even worse, what do you do when everyone on your team seems to be out of content ideas?

Trello is a nifty service that allows you to centralize and visualize your group's blogging strategy. Think of it as a hybrid of Pinterest and a traditional content calendar. 

Trello users create boards and then categorize related tasks on each board. Your team can create a board for blog topics and organize them by potential ideas for anyone to write, topics they're already writing about, and topics that have performed well in the past. Each of these items (called cards) can be commented on, given checklists, and even subscribed to by users. 

Whichever of the tools above you try out, I hope they help bring your team closer and your productivity higher.

I'd advise against incorporating them all at once, since all those changes can be disruptive to productivity and process. Try one at a time, stick with what you like, and let us know how it goes!