Marketing Automation for Agencies: 5 Ways to Save Time with AI

AI can not only automate all the busywork and save you time, but also become a strategic partner to level up client strategies.

And it’s not just theory—the numbers speak for themselves:

At Catalyst Marketing, CEO Robin Emiliani cut 80–90% of the time spent on responding to Request for Proposals (RFPs) using AI, allowing her agency to take on more opportunities and win more business. Ryan Anderson, founder of Markiserv, automated meeting transcription and note-taking, increasing meeting attentiveness by 70%—his team is now more present, engaged, and producing higher-quality work. At Linkedist, Project Manager Goda Aukštikalnytė reduced research time by 90% and content creation time by 70%, freeing up her time for more strategic tasks.

All this proves that agencies aren’t just saving time, but they’re also scaling without burnout. 

In this article, we’ll break down the top ways agencies are automating their day-to-day—and the AI tools making it happen.

1. Crafting Better Client Strategies in Less Time

Most agencies think AI is just for automating processes. But actually, AI can become a trusted thinking partner (a second voice if you will) to test out your theories and level up client strategy. 

For instance, at Catalyst Marketing, founder Robin Emiliani uses Claude to brainstorm campaign strategies, test hypotheses, and uncover blind spots. 

“I use Claude 20 times a day for just about anything I’m doing,” she says. “It’s great for discerning what’s the BS and what are some good nuggets of information—whether it’s for SEO, content strategy, or competitive intelligence.”

When Robin has a theory about a client’s strategy, or even her agency’s own positioning, she’ll run it through Claude to see what she might be missing. It helps her look at a challenge from multiple angles and make stronger decisions, faster.

But a strong strategy starts with solid research, and that’s where Perplexity comes in. It’s fast, factual, and designed to avoid hallucinations. 

Agencies use it for research: pulling in competitor data, surfacing SEO insights, and turning all that into content briefs or strategy decks with citations baked in.

Want to go even one step deeper?

You can pit Perplexity and Claude against each other to come up with the best, most-sound ideas and strategies. For instance, when Perplexity gives you an answer, challenge it with Claude with a prompt like:

“This doesn’t feel right. Here are the reasons why I think this approach is not quite accurate. What do you think?”

This is the approach Robin uses at her agency. She says, “It’s wild. It feels like I have a whole forum of people sitting in front of me—almost like a panel. We have this healthy debate back and forth until we feel like we’ve arrived at the right conclusion.”

This combination of AI tools can help you come up with better client strategies, faster. 

2. Speeding Up RFPs and Proposals

Responding to RFPs is one of those “high effort, high reward” parts of agency life, but the time cost can be brutal. 

Drafting a proposal from scratch can take you days, and by then, the opportunity might already be lost. 

AI can help you speed up the process.

At Catalyst Marketing, CEO Robin Emiliani cut 80–90% of the time spent on responding to RFPs with Perplexity. 

She trained Perplexity on past proposals, the agency’s brand voice, and positioning. Then, when a new RFP comes in, Perplexity pulls from that knowledge to draft relevant responses, already tailored to the opportunity. 

“We’ve responded to quite a few RFPs in the past 9 years of business,” Robin explains. “So we built a system where we loaded this information into Perplexity. It then draws on this information and creates a new response in literally a tenth of the time. This helps us respond to more RFPs in a shorter period of time.”

3. Organizing (important) Internal Knowledge

If you’re an agency, you probably have an endless flood of meeting notes, proposals, and strategy docs. 

Keeping everything organized, and extracting the most useful information from them, is a full-time job in itself. 

For this, Robin Emiliani at Catalyst Marketing swears by Airtable.

“Airtable has been fascinating for our agency,” she says. “Our Head of Operations has implemented it to aggregate data from our project management tool and gather the important information that we need to see, like utilization rates, and how that is allocated to specific clients and profitability.”

Another useful tool is Google’s NotebookLM. It automatically summarizes long documents, pulls key insights, and makes it easy to reference past conversations—all while integrating seamlessly with Google Drive. 

All you need to do is upload your sources like:

Meeting transcripts and notes Project plans Past proposals Past project documents 

And then you can ask Notebook LM to:

Get action items and next steps Generate recaps for emails and proposals Track commitments across multiple meetings Generate FAQs for team members Extract learnings from previous campaigns 

With tools like Airtable and NotebookLM, no knowledge gets lost and is always accessible by anyone on your team. 

4. Automating Client Follow-ups and Internal Updates

When we say “automate client followups”, we don’t mean let AI talk to clients. In fact, we advise against it because it’s a sure-fire way to break trust between you and your client. 

We mean automating the tedious part of what happens after client calls. 

Writing follow-up emails, summarizing long meetings, and keeping CRMs up to date is repetitive work that doesn’t always need a human.

At Hop Skip Media, a PPC agency, CEO and Founder Ameet Khabra swears by Fathom. It automatically records and summarizes calls, highlights key action items, and pushes them to Slack or your CRM.

Ameet says, “We love Fathom for client meetings. It captures the conversations and automatically generates actionable to-do lists, making sure nothing falls through the cracks.”

If looking at your inbox gives you a headache, Fyxer AI can help. You can use it to: 

Automatically sort emails into different categories Draft emails in your tone for faster communication Summarize meetings and send follow-up emails immediately after calls Optimize scheduling by analyzing calendars and suggesting the best meeting times

And for quick, polished email responses, Gemini (free for Google Workspace users) writes drafts directly in Gmail—perfect for short updates that still sound human.

All this not only saves you time but also keeps your inbox, documents, and client calls organized. 

5. Creating Content Faster

From blog posts to email campaigns to ad copy, content is still one of the biggest outputs for most agencies. And it’s often the slowest.

That’s why teams are turning to AI—not to replace copywriters, but to help them move faster without burning out or compromising on quality.

At The CRO Guys, founder Mauricio Acuna says they use ChatGPT and ContentShake AI by Semrush to draft blog content and structure ideas. It helps the team overcome writers’ block and come up with more comprehensive ideas. 

When the tone needs to shift or the message needs polishing, Claude is the go-to. It’s especially strong at long-form content—handling everything from email nurture copy to whitepapers—and keeping the voice consistent throughout. Because it understands context better, it requires fewer edits to get it client-ready.

For PPC campaigns, ChatGPT is great at creating different versions of headlines. It can generate 10 options in seconds, giving your team more to work with and test.

“We’re doing content experimentation with AI that no human could ever have the time to execute. Suppose we want to test 20 versions of a LinkedIn Ad headline; in seconds, AI can write those, and we run them all at once,” says Peter Lewis, Founder and CEO at Strategic Pete, a marketing consultancy agency. 

But the quality of your prompts matter here. As Braveen Kumar writes in the article in the article, How to Use ChatGPT for Facebook Ads, the key to getting high-quality output is to:

Give specific copy parameters Ask for multiple generations to chooseRunning a marketing agency isn’t just about delivering great campaigns. It’s also about juggling projects, managing teams, jumping on client calls, writing emails, and handling a million other ad-hoc tasks that pop up every day.  It’s easy to get buried in administrative work while high-value tasks—like strategy, client relationships, and growth—get pushed to the backburner.  This is where AI makes a real impact.  from Provide context via custom instructions or in the prompt itself

It’s also important to note that AI writes to the algorithm, not to your specific audience. This is where your copywriters should take over and refine the best-performing versions to sound like a person—not a bot. 

James Targett, Creative Project Manager at StackAdapt also shares the same sentiment in the article, “How Generative AI Is Reshaping Ad Creative Workflows”. in this article. “We can produce 50 headlines as quickly as we could historically produce one,” he says. “That’s really beneficial, but we always want a human involved to curate and refine the best ones.”

Final Tip: Don’t Let AI Run Wild

AI is here to help but it’s not meant to be a catch-all or a replacement for human judgement.

As Whatagraph CTO Artūras Lazejevas puts it, “You can’t overuse it because you’re going to push clients away. But you also can’t ignore it and become a dinosaur.” 

The key is using automation to scale the parts of your agency that already work—without losing the human relationships that make it all matter.

—

Want more actionable strategies and AI tool recommendations? Grab our AI Playbook for Agencies in 2025.