New technologies frequently bring change to agencies. Clients’ expectations of faster turnarounds, their experimentation with new platforms, and their pursuit of the latest trends constantly put pressure on them.
That’s precisely why agency teams must get comfortable with AI and machine learning and explore AI-powered marketing. With AI marketing software growing fast and making its way into every corner of marketing, it’s smart to stay a step ahead.
In this article, we will break down the different ways to automate a digital marketing agency with AI.
⭐ Featured Template
Whether you’re managing large campaigns or smaller projects, ’s Marketing Agency Template helps you move faster and deliver consistent results.
It is a fantastic starting point for agencies looking to stay organized by centralizing client projects, campaign tasks, and team collaboration in one place.
Benefits of AI Automation for Marketing Agencies
Most marketing agencies spend a good chunk of time handling repetitive tasks and understanding customer behavior before a campaign finally goes live. AI changes that.
As Christina Inge, author of Marketing Analytics: A Comprehensive Guide and an instructor at Harvard’s Professional and Executive Development program, puts it:
So, what exactly does AI bring to the table for agencies? Here are some of the real advantages:
- Automate marketing processes around social media posts, email marketing, and content creation so your marketing teams can focus on strategy and creative work
- Deliver personalized content by analyzing customer behavior to increase engagement and conversion rates
- Segment target audiences more precisely and enable real-time customer interactions with AI chatbots and automated messaging
- Analyze user data and gain actionable insights with predictive analytics, making your AI marketing strategy more data-driven and effective
- Optimize ad campaigns and social media marketing in real time to reduce marketing costs and maximize ROI across various marketing channels
- Provide better customer service with AI-powered chatbots that manage repetitive tasks and support customer journey management
Key Areas Where Agencies Can Use AI for Automation
Let’s get more specific and see how to automate a digital marketing agency with AI integration. We’ll walk through different departments, spotting exactly where AI marketing tools and AI-powered marketing automation can take over.
1. Content creation
From blog posts and social media captions to email copy, most marketing agencies have brought AI into their content creation process in some form. And it’s not just agencies.
A Forbes Advisor survey found that 42% of businesses already use AI for long-form content like website copy, while 46% rely on it for personalized advertising for their sales teams.
But with all these tools floating around, there’s a real risk of things getting messy. Teams frequently switch between platforms, resulting in dispersed customer data and disintegrating workflows. It’s challenging to scale content when your tools don’t talk to each other.
That’s exactly where Brain makes an impact. Instead of juggling multiple apps, you get a built-in AI assistant right inside your tasks.
Whether you need a content brief, a social post, a meta description, or an email draft, you can generate it without ever leaving . The AI Writer sits right inside tasks, comments, and docs, ready to help whenever you need it.
Use the ready-made prompts for everything from LinkedIn posts to blog outlines, or create your own to fit your agency’s style and workflow.
The best part? Brain actually understands the context of your task. If your task says “Summer Sale Campaign,” the AI knows you want campaign-specific content and generates ideas, captions, and briefs that fit right in.
And you’re never stuck with the first draft. You can refine, tweak, rephrase, or expand the AI-generated content as much as you like.
💡 Pro Tip: For ongoing campaigns, use Brain MAX to automatically track progress, update deadlines, assign follow-ups, and notify your team when tasks move forward.
Marketing teams using Brain have saved up to 1.1 days per week, cut busywork with up to 86% cost savings, and completed tasks up to three times faster. It keeps your content creation, agency project management, and collaboration flowing.
📮 Insight: A recent survey shows that 24 percent of workers feel stuck doing repetitive tasks, while another 24 percent believe their skills aren’t being fully used. This implies that nearly half of the workforce experiences a barrier to engaging in meaningful work.
helps shift that focus back to high-impact projects with AI agents that handle recurring tasks automatically. For example, when a task is marked complete, can assign the next step, send reminders, or update project statuses—no manual follow-ups needed.
💫 Real Results: STANLEY Security saw this in action when they cut their reporting time by over 50 percent using ’s customizable reports, giving their teams more time to forecast instead of format.
2. Campaign management and task tracking
When one of the world’s biggest consumer brands bets on AI, it says a lot about the impact automation can have. With over 400 brands, including Dove, Ben & Jerry’s, and Lipton, Unilever needed a more innovative way to run campaigns across different markets and audiences.
They built U-Studio, an AI-powered content intelligence hub developed with IBM Watson to make that happen. This platform helped Unilever analyze past campaigns, spot trends, fine-tune creatives, and even predict performance before launch.
The payoff was huge. They cut production costs by 30% and reduced campaign planning time by half in many cases.
Now, most agencies don’t operate on a global scale like Unilever, but the lesson still stands. AI-powered tools can simplify marketing campaign management, regardless of the number of clients you manage.
AI marketing tools like give marketing agencies a way to bring that same level of efficiency into daily marketing operations.
With Automations, you can set up task assignments, reminders, approvals, and status changes that happen automatically based on simple triggers.
For example, you can assign a task the moment it’s created or send a reminder when it’s a day away from the deadline. You can even move a task to the next stage when all checklist items are complete.
Here’s a detailed visual diary of how automates your day-to-day work:
3. Lead generation and outreach
It can be tough to find leads consistently and nurture them through the pipeline without consuming your team’s entire week. That’s precisely where AI-powered prospecting tools come in.
Platforms like Instantly.ai, Smartlead, and Apollo help agencies automate prospect research, contact discovery, and outreach. These tools scan verified databases, enrich contact information, and even run automated email sequences.
However, identifying leads is only half the task. Many agencies struggle to manage them effectively, especially when client interactions and follow-ups happen across different platforms. That’s why using a centralized system like CRM makes a real difference.
With , you can track every stage of your pipeline using custom statuses, fields, and views like lists, boards, or tables. Each lead becomes a task that moves through your sales process.
For example, when a lead moves to “Proposal Sent,” can assign it to your sales manager and create a follow-up task for three days later. Or when a lead gets marked as “Won,” can move it into a client list and alert your onboarding team instantly.
Plus, with integrations for email, calendars, and other CRM tools, keeps your outreach organized without switching between platforms.
Of course, templates like ’s Marketing Agency Template also help agencies stay organized and on track.
Here’s how:
- Centralize client projects, campaign tasks, and team collaboration for better visibility and control
- Simplify complex workflows and improve coordination across teams
- Deliver consistent results by streamlining planning, tracking, and execution
4. Client reporting
Google has launched AI-powered measurement tools to connect every ad dollar to business results. Their cross-channel insights and Data Manager tool let marketers track customer journeys across platforms.
Similarly, Meta’s AI reporting tools provide real-time insights into ad performance and creative diagnostics so that marketers can make real-time adjustments to their campaigns.
However, agencies often encounter a challenge in this area. With data coming from Google Ads, Meta, search engine optimization tools, and CRMs, reporting can be scattered and time-consuming.
Dashboards help agencies pull everything together into one centralized view.
lets you create customizable dashboards that automatically pull data from your projects, tasks, and time tracking. You can visualize KPIs using charts, graphs, and widgets, and even automate reporting with scheduled PDF exports that go straight to your team or clients.
💡 Pro Tip: Agencies can create dedicated Dashboards for each client. You can securely share a live dashboard with clients so they can track progress, view deliverables, and get updates without waiting for reports. It keeps everything transparent, builds trust, and cuts down on endless email follow-ups.
For example, you can build an executive dashboard that shows campaign performance, client project status, and key KPIs like leads generated or ad spend efficiency. You can also set up recurring reports that update automatically, saving your team from manual reporting tasks.
You can tailor reports with drill-down features, filters, and customizable views to show exactly what your client needs.
👀 Fun Fact: The earliest known example of a programmable machine is the Jacquard loom, invented in 1804, which used punch cards to automate textile patterns.
5. Internal documentation and SOPs
Every agency knows the chaos that comes from missing steps or unclear processes. The problem is, most teams don’t have time to write SOPs from scratch…or keep them updated.
That’s exactly where Docs, paired with AI, steps in. You can create structured SOPs inside , organize them by teams or workflows, and link them directly to tasks. This way, everyone knows exactly what to do and how to do it.
Brain makes this process even easier by utilizing natural language processing. You can generate step-by-step instructions from a simple prompt.
Here are some practical ways creative agencies use :
- Create blog publishing workflows with AI to include SEO research, brief creation, writing and editing processes, pre-publish checklists, and more
- Build ad campaign setup workflows covering briefs, audience research, ad copy, approvals, and tracking, with AI-generated SOPs for different platforms
- Set up client onboarding workflows with welcome emails, checklists, assigned tasks, and AI-generated onboarding SOPs for consistent execution
The best part is how easy it becomes to scale. You can reuse SOP templates for new clients or projects, maintaining consistency in your processes without having to start from the beginning. Plus, you can instruct Brain to remind you whenever an SOP needs updating.
6. Social media scheduling
Keeping up with social media posts across different platforms and clients can get overwhelming fast. From figuring out the right time to post to ensuring every caption fits the brand voice, it’s a lot for any team to handle daily.
That’s where social media AI tools like Buffer, , and Hootsuite help, using AI to pick the best posting times and even suggest captions based on platform trends. These tools simplify the scheduling process, facilitating consistency and efficiency.
But to keep your entire content pipeline organized, you still need a clear system: something like ’s Calendar View.
With ’s Calendar View, you can visualize every piece of content by its due date. Whether it’s a blog post, a newsletter, or a social media update, map it on the calendar and see exactly what’s scheduled, what’s pending, and where there might be overlaps.
It allows you to assign tasks to team members directly from the calendar and easily move tasks to new dates if deadlines change.
💡 Pro Tip: also lets you automate publishing workflows. For example, you can set a rule automatically assigning a task to your social media manager when it moves to “Ready to Publish.” You can trigger this automation based on task status, content type, or even specific dates.
How to Start Automating Your Agency With AI (Step-by-Step)
If you want to bring artificial intelligence into your agency’s daily work, the best approach is to start small and build from there. Here’s a simple way to get started.
Step 1: Map out your current workflows
Start by visualizing how work flows through your agency, using Whiteboards to diagram client onboarding, campaign planning, or creative approvals. These visual maps help you pinpoint where delays, handoffs, and repeatable tasks show up.
For example, you might notice your team spends too much time coordinating timelines, following up for approvals, or formatting reports. Once identified, these bottlenecks become prime candidates for automation.
👀 Fun Fact: Isaac Asimov coined the term “Robotics” in a 1941 short story, long before robots became a part of industrial automation.
Step 2: Define your automation goals and owners
Before you jump into tools, be clear about what you want to improve. That might be faster client responses, fewer missed deadlines, or simply more time for strategy. Assign ownership so someone is responsible for setting up and maintaining these workflows.
Involve your operations lead, client managers, or project leads to co-own the process. Even simple RACI charts in can help define who sets rules, who approves changes, and who monitors performance.
Step 3: Set your baseline metrics and guardrails
You need a benchmark to measure the impact of automation. Start by tracking how long tasks take now, how many client requests are delayed, or how much time is spent on manual reporting.
Add guardrails to make sure quality doesn’t drop. For example, if you automate social posts, build in a manual approval step for campaigns with paid spend or sensitive messaging. Good automation should feel like support, not a loss of control.
💡 Pro Tip: Use Milestones to mark major workflow checkpoints so you can catch issues early and measure real progress.
Step 4: Choose a starter stack of AI tools
Don’t try to automate everything at once. Pick one or two tools that solve real bottlenecks.
Start with tools your team already uses or that integrate easily with your workspace. Adding fewer tools with broader functionality works better than stitching together too many disconnected ones.
For example, Brain MAX is great for generating content briefs, crunching data for insights, drafting client updates, or summarising meetings. It gives you access to all leading LLMs, all your connected tools, and your entire Workspace in one screen, so you don’t need to deal with the pain of AI tool sprawl.
Step 5: Create your pilot workflows
Choose one workflow to automate end-to-end. For example, set up a system where client feedback collected through Forms triggers a task, assigns it to the right editor, and notifies the account lead.
Start with something repeatable but low risk, like internal meeting summaries or post-campaign reports. Pilot it for a few weeks, gather feedback, and make changes before rolling it out more widely.
Step 6: Document everything
Every automation needs documentation. This includes what triggers it, who is responsible, what actions it performs, and what to do when it fails.
Think of it as your agency’s automation playbook. If your ops lead is out or a new team member joins, they should be able to understand the system without guessing.
💡 Pro Tip: Use Docs to store all of this in one shared space. With version control and secure sharing links, your work is safe.
Step 7: Train your team
Your automation is only as good as your team’s ability to use it. Walk them through how it works, what it automates, and what still needs human input.
For example, you can show them how to use Brain for everyday tasks like SOP creation or task updates. Make the training a part of the onboarding process, so every new hire learns how to work with automation from day one.
💡 Pro Tip: Besides creating shareable training documents in Docs, you can also record walkthroughs with Clips. Then, ask Brain to transcribe the videos and translate the transcripts into multiple languages for multilingual teams.
Step 8: Measure the impact and scale what works
Revisit your baseline metrics and compare them to current performance. Are projects moving faster? Are team members spending more time on strategy? Use Dashboards to visualize improvements and gaps.
Data-driven insights help you fine-tune your campaigns efficiently. What works can be rolled out to more teams or workflows, and what doesn’t can be paused or refined. Automating is not a one-time task; it’s an ongoing strategy that evolves with your agency.
Mistakes to Avoid When Automating Your Agency
Only when used correctly can automation make life easier. Many agencies rush into it expecting instant results, only to face setbacks. Here are a few common mistakes worth avoiding:
- Relying on AI for everything and expecting it to replace strategy or creativity. AI works best as a support tool that still needs human input to select relevant goals, guide campaigns, and refine messaging
- Jumping into automation without a clear plan or defined goals. This often leads to a messy stack of disconnected marketing software and workflows that actually slow your team down
- Using poor-quality data for automation leads to unreliable results and flawed insights. This is especially concerning when customer data isn’t cleaned, verified, or kept up to date
- Automating too much and removing the human touch entirely. This can make your campaigns feel robotic and risk disengagement from your audience (who still expect a personal connection)
Your Agency’s Growth Is Just a Click(Up) Away
Running a marketing agency is demanding. You’re managing clients, launching campaigns, handling content, overseeing finances, and keeping everything moving—often at once.
When you automate, you immediately feel the relief of being able to focus on work that actually grows your agency.
This is why makes a difference. It brings content creation, task management, CRM, reporting, and automation into one workspace. Instead of hopping between apps, your team can manage everything—from creative briefs to client updates—inside .
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