SMM Platform for a Marketing Agency

The platform is a social media marketing tool aimed to streamline everyday tasks in a marketing agency.

Country:

Australia

Industry:

Marketing & Advertising

Time frame:

October 2020 – In Progress

Project background

A leading Australian social media marketing agency, Attention Experts, used a number of SaaS tools over the years to organize their workflow. During all that time, they had to adjust their internal processes to accommodate limited software functionality. Yet they still faced challenges: a laborious process for creating marketing campaigns, a lack of data analytics, and a complex content approval process. To simplify their everyday tasks, the agency’s founder decided to build software with custom functionality and came to us with this request.

The initial idea was to build an all-in-one solution for marketers and their clients, aimed at handling the above-mentioned challenges. With such a tool at hand, Attention Experts owners could be sure that the content created on their behalf would attract a loyal community, foster brand awareness, and lead to increased profits.

While our client’s tool was initially created for internal use, it can later be improved to become a commercial product that meets the needs of SMM companies.

We started work on the project with a kick-off meeting.

The Attention Experts founder shared their needs and ideas, and together, we defined two critical goals:

Meet internal needs of the Attention Experts team by improving the content approval process for the agency’s projects as well as for clients
Create a SaaS product that will help other SMM agencies solve similar problems

Challenges & Solutions

With these requirements, we started working on software design and development.

Challenge

Short time to market. Our client wanted to release the internal version of the software as soon as possible. They looked for feedback of first adopters to validate their idea and proceed with MVP development of a SaaS product.

Solution

Conducted a discovery phase. We started the project with a discovery phase that allowed us to clearly understand end users’ requirements and prioritize features. By focusing on crucial functionality, we managed to reduce the time to market.

Challenge

Complexity of social network APIs. Our client and his team constantly work with major social networks including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn and need to manage them all from one place. However, each social network API has specific rules of implementation, so we needed to make sure the APIs put no limitations on implementing the desired functionality.

Solution

Integrated APIs. To make it possible for our client and their customers to work effortlessly with all needed social media channels, we integrated official Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter APIs.

Challenge

Dedicated budget. Our client wanted to stick to a fixed budget.

Solution

Used cost-effective technologies. To stick to the budget, we used a monolithic backend architecture instead of microservices. While microservices could have been an ideal way to integrate the APIs, it would have been a costly solution. Thus, we emulated the microservice structure inside a monolithic architecture and managed to wisely use the allocated budget.

Challenge

Complicated content approval process. Before our client asked us for help, internal content approval and further acceptance by the agency customer was time- and effort-consuming, harming client satisfaction.

Solution

Implemented approval functionality. To simplify the content approval process, we made it possible to send ready-made publications to a manager or directly to a client for comments and approval.

Challenge

Lack of analytics tools. It was difficult to analyze how content performs in four different social media channels. To assess performance metrics, the team had to analyze each social media channel separately — a rather tedious approach that could be optimized.

Solution

Implemented cross-channel analytics functionality. This was necessary to help marketing teams conveniently track content performance on different social media channels. It’s possible to track such metrics as subscribers inflow/outflow, reach, engagement rate (ER), and engagement rate by reach (ERR) from all four social platforms in one place.

Challenge

Complicated visuals creation involving multiple software tools. Our client used Canva to prepare visuals for marketing campaigns but had to download them from Canva and upload them to different social media channels manually every time.

Solution

Integrated the Canva API. Thanks to integration with Canva, the process of creating visuals was simplified, and now platform users can upload and edit custom designs through the internal editor.

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High-Level Architecture

As the marketing tool processes data from corporate social media accounts of multiple clients and has access to sensitive information, data security was a high priority. In this diagram, you can see how we used technology to solve our client’s business needs.

This is how we protected data on the platform:

All user accounts are secured by 2FA and accessed with security tokens

Separate IAM users are applied to CI/CD and application servers to ensure granular access to required resources

Each token used is related to a specific IAM user that has no access to the AWS website

MySQL and Redis databases are not publicly available and can be accessed only from application clusters they belong to

User files are stored in Amazon S3 so they aren’t publicly accessible and can be viewed only with short-living access tokens

Environment variables and builds are stored in separate private S3 buckets

All tokens of users’ social accounts are encrypted before storing them in the database so that nobody can obtain sensitive information even in the event of a data dump

The development environment is deployed on spot instances that are regularly revoked once a week or more frequently

The computing cluster is built to self-restore by launching new application servers to replace those that have stopped or failed health checks

Technologies we used

React

Laravel

Redux

Amazon
Web Services

Team

Business
Analyst

Project
Manager

4 Software Engineers

2 Manual
QA Engineer

UX/UI
Designer

Project outcome

The social media marketing tool is now used within the client’s company. It allows SMM specialists to painlessly schedule posts for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn at once, publish stories on Instagram through the internal editor, work with Canva visuals inside the platform, and effortlessly approve content.

With the platform version developed by the Clockwise team, the Attention Experts founder was able to attract investors who are ready to support further product development.

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