Marketing agencies that strive to provide the best for their clients often feel pressure to do everything, everywhere, all at once. With so many channels to manage, tools to master, and data points to turn into insights, agencies need a cost-effective way to scale and grow their business.
That is, in part, why so many agencies are looking to implement AI this year. In fact, we found in our 2025 outlook for marketing agencies report that 62% of agencies see implementing AI as a priority this year. But, like any tool, AI needs to be used strategically to see the maximum benefits.
Let’s take a look at three core strategies and tactics that your agency can take to the next level this year with AI.
Strategy 1: Better budgeting of your client’s marketing dollars
With AI evolving so quickly, it feels like there’s a major leap in marketing tech every month — from the tools you rely on to the channels you recommend to clients. If your agency hasn’t revisited the assumptions behind your budget strategy with clients in the past year, chances are you’re missing out on new opportunities and wasting spend in places that no longer perform.
In an article predicting the changes to paid media in 2025, Morgan Jarvis, the Director of Paid Media at Workshop Digital, noted that Google’s rapid rollout of AI-driven features — like Search Max (which enhances campaign performance through AI and automation) and AI Overviews (GenAI-powered search results now appearing in 47% of searches) — will significantly impact search marketing. While these tools have significant potential, they will also require careful testing and clear guidelines. Done right, they could be game-changers for maximizing your clients’ paid media budgets.
But there’s more to re-evaluate than just channels when it comes to retooling your client’s budgets. Buried in the heaps of unstructured data available to you are hidden insights — and thanks to AI, it’s easier than ever to uncover them.
Knowing where your client’s customers come from is critical to determining how to budget marketing spend efficiently. Using an AI-powered tool like CallRail’s self-reported attribution feature, you can automatically uncover the hidden conversation insights behind the highest intent and quality leads.
In a recent report analyzing 1.1 million de-identified leads, we found that 61.4% of customers self-reported discovering a business through channels often overlooked in standard reporting — including returning customers (39.6%), personal referrals (15.6%), and direct mail (6.2%).
These insights rarely appear in traditional attribution tools, which tend to focus on digital touchpoints, such as the last-clicked ad or search result. Without AI to capture what customers actually say during conversations, this critical data gets lost, and your budget strategy may end up guided by incomplete or misleading information.
The most helpful types of lead intelligence, according to agencies, are source attribution (79%), conversion funnel insights (59%), and repeat customer identification (55%).
All of this reinforces a key truth: your clients expect results — and they’re trusting you to spend their budgets wisely. When goals are missed or lead volume slows down, confidence fades. By using AI to surface insights that would otherwise be missed, your agency can make smarter decisions, demonstrate true impact, and build longer-lasting client relationships.
Strategy 2: Key into keywords faster to optimize PPC and SEO
In our 2025 outlook for marketing agencies report, 83% of surveyed agencies said they offer search engine marketing (SEM) or paid search advertising as a core service. Many of their clients — especially those with smaller marketing teams — don’t have the time or expertise to manage these channels effectively. But they can still tell when performance starts to slip or when content isn’t keeping up with the competition.
As we discussed above, AI is rapidly transforming how search and paid advertising work. To stay ahead of the curve, your agency needs to leverage AI to take keyword research to a new level.
The goal here is twofold: to understand the efficacy of your client’s campaigns and further uncover new trends and keywords as they emerge. With the help of AI, you can quickly key into both goals to validate strategies and optimize for what’s working. This, ultimately, will create more efficient ad spend and foster greater trust between your agency and your clients.
When Wit Digital, a US-based digital marketing agency, made AI-powered keyword optimization a goal, they were able to increase the number of well-qualified leads and decrease the budget-burning bad leads. As a result, they reduced their average cost per lead (CPL) by 64%.
With the help of AI-powered conversation intelligence, Wit Digital reduced the cost per lead by 64%.
– Rocco Romanelli, Co-owner, Romanelli & Son Pools
With CallRail’s Call Tracking and AI-powered Premium Conversation IntelligenceTM, Wit Digital uncovered the insights and efficiencies it needed by analyzing real customer conversations. Here's how applying AI to your keyword analysis can surface those same kinds of insights for your clients:
- AI-generated call transcripts help save time and money compared to humans while retaining accuracy.
- Using these transcripts, AI can generate helpful summaries for easy review and identify the overall sentiment of a call, giving you an at-a-glance view of how campaigns are being received.
- Conversation analytics can create reports like the Key Terms Spotted report, which provides a breakdown of targeted key terms and phrases being used on calls and correlates those keywords to lead qualification.
- Automation rules combined with AI can help automatically track self-reported attribution and analyze transcripts to surface buyer intent or identify sales automatically.
With AI helping you focus on improving keyword research for PPC and SEO campaigns, you’re not only going to lower the cost per click and lead, your agency will also be able to give clients a deeper understanding of what’s happening in their customer conversations, like which campaigns are driving the most value and which channels are leading to lower sentiment scores.
With the right approach, solving the PPC and SEO keyword challenge can translate into broader insights and more time to focus on making your agency indispensable to clients. "One of my favorite features,” said Erin Wilder, Lead Strategist & Co-Founder, 81 & Sunny, “is the [Premium] Conversation Intelligence tool that recognizes the keywords, looks at all of your calls in aggregate and tells you if there's a different sentiment, but all those things added up can easily help us qualify or disqualify a call without having human intervention."
Strategy 3: Optimize your agency’s lead management and reporting capabilities
For your agency, the bottom line is your client’s bottom line. If you’re not able to drive leads that actually convert and prove that the value you provide outweighs the expense, then you’ll have trouble creating long-term client relationships.
That’s why using AI to improve your agency’s ability to convert leads and tell the story of your impact is one of our top suggestions.
There are several ways you can do this:
- Ensure the data is where your clients need it — specifically, their CRM — by using automations to integrate insights from disparate tools, such as call tracking and conversation analytics.
- Incorporate AI-powered assistance to go beyond lead generation and support lead conversion.
- Focus intensely on the goals that matter most to your clients, and then find the insights you need to optimize campaigns according to those desired outcomes.
- Stay on top of your benchmarks, such as cost per lead or click, to ensure your strategy remains aligned with the client’s budget and goals as channels and consumer preferences rapidly change.
One simple way you can use AI to go beyond lead management and support your client’s lead conversion goals is already available with CallRail. Convert Assist lets your agency provide clients with:
- Action plans that are automatically generated to ensure every next step from a conversation is documented.
- Smart follow-ups that use AI to quickly draft a personalized response based on a conversation, letting your clients respond quickly and confidently to every lead.
- Conversation coaching that leverages AI to provide real-time, personalized feedback for each call and text, including a summary of the positives and areas to improve.
Bonus tip: Minimize missed opportunities with AI-powered, automated responses
Advances in automation and AI make it easier than ever to support your clients’ customer goals beyond the KPIs by being able to identify and address the patterns impacting their bottom lines.
One area that has often been overlooked as a source of value is missed calls — which our insights revealed account for up to 32% of all calls, depending on the industry. Those calls are often leads your agency helped generate. And, with 85% of those callers choosing not to call back, that means you’re wasting good leads.
Identifying leaks in the conversion funnel — like missed calls — is key to helping your clients close more business. If missed calls are a recurring issue, the latest generation of agentic AI assistants can make a measurable difference.
CallRail’s Voice Assist is one such solution. It uses advanced generative AI to hold natural, conversations with callers when no one from your client’s team is available to answer. Whether it’s after hours, during a rush, or on weekends, Voice Assist can engage the caller, collect essential information, qualify the lead, and route the request — all without human intervention.
For agencies, this means more value delivered to clients without requiring more client-side effort. You’re helping clients capture leads they’d otherwise lose and reinforcing the ROI of the campaigns you're running. For clients, it means fewer missed opportunities, a better customer experience, and a stronger chance of turning every call into booked business — day or night.
Early adopters are already seeing the value of Voice Assist to deliver more results quickly to clients. “We have been testing Voice Assist for our own calls – and have been really impressed,” said CJ Keepes, VP of Client Services at Logical Position. We can see its potential for our clients to use this as a smarter way to capture every opportunity, day or night."
See how CallRail can help deliver high-impact AI strategies to scale your agency
The pace of AI’s development can feel overwhelming. But, rather than chasing every iteration, your agency should focus on the use cases that deliver the most value to your clients.
With CallRail’s commitment to delivering cutting-edge, impactful AI tools through CallRail Labs — a benefit available to Premium Conversation Intelligence customers — you can remain focused on your client's goals while incorporating the benefits of emerging AI capabilities into a familiar platform.
See how CallRail and AI can help your agency scale up in 2025 with a free 14-day trial.
Disclaimer: The report referenced in this content is based on aggregated and deidentified data and is provided for informational purposes only. To ensure the privacy of our business customers and comply with applicable data protection regulations, the analysis and insights presented herein are derived solely from deidentified data, excluding any sensitive or protected information as defined by privacy laws and regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. This report aims to provide a comprehensive overview of market trends without compromising individual privacy. Any reliance on the information presented in this report is at the user’s own risk, and we disclaim any liability for decisions made based on this report.
