Customer story written by Roman Davydov, content writer at Kraftblick
Hi! My name is Roman Davydov, and I’m a content writer at Kraftblick, a digital marketing agency for SaaS companies and startups. Our team consists of cool guys and gals who are also professional marketers and experts in their fields.
Since our company provides a wide range of services (we do SEO, PPC, and content marketing), the choice of a convenient collaboration tool has always been very important for us. We wanted a system that would allow us to manage many projects simultaneously.
Earlier on, we used Trello, and this program suited us for a long time, it was quite simple to use and had a pleasant and intuitive interface. However, we faced one problem - it turned out that Trello had a rather inconsistent reporting feature. Every time we analyzed our team’s working time for the previous months, we found discrepancies in reports with regard to working hours. This prevented us from optimizing the workflow of our company, as we could not understand what was absorbing a remarkable number of working hours and what we were doing inefficiently.
Then we learned about ActiveCollab and decided to give it a try. Spoiler alert: We had no regrets!
ActiveCollab’s interface immediately seemed convenient to us and we quickly got used to it. We were captivated by one feature in particular: the ability to create detailed and intuitive monthly reports.
We started using these reports during our monthly briefings. They helped us discover what our team members were spending a lot of time on.
For example, earlier our editors sometimes missed deadlines because of time spent on edits. Editors could spend four, and even more, hours editing an article. We saw this problem in a report and took immediate action. We managed to reduce the time on editing from more than four hours to just one hour! If editors can’t make it till the deadline, our Editor-in-Chief comes to help. Now we are able to finish our articles on time.
How we organize our projects with ActiveCollab
Over time, we transferred all of our projects into ActiveCollab. We really like it and hope that our cooperation lasts a long time.
Our project managers and SEO, PPC, promotion, and content specialists manage their projects in ActiveCollab. The tool’s functionality suits all our silos. We organize all our projects by company silos and clients.
We create a separate project for each client. Furthermore, we also create projects for internal company processes and attach various members of our departments to them.
How we manage content marketing projects with ActiveCollab
Here is the project for our company’s content marketing efforts, called “Kraftblick content marketing.”
We created separate columns for each activity of our content team. At the very top, there is a column with templates. In each card with a template, there are many subtasks. Together, these act as checklists for us. The checklists help us ensure that each article measures up to a certain quality standard. They also simplify our work, as the requirements are always at hand.
When content writers get a new task, they simply open one of the template cards and duplicate it. When it’s renamed, we place it into the appropriate column (e.g. “writing-design”). This system is very convenient. It means our specialists don’t have to create a new card each time they pick up a new task, nor re-do the list of subtasks.
Once the article is written, our designer, Violetta, illustrates the text if necessary. Then I move the card to the next column for editing. I also assign another team member to that task, namely, our editor, Tanya. She leaves her rigorous editorial comments, I correct the errors in the article, and we move the card further down the line. Now, the card with the article falls into the domain of our promotion specialist, Anya.
After the post has passed all the stages of promotion, the article is considered complete. We mark the task as “done” and, with great pride and satisfaction, move the card into the "completed" column, where it stands as a monument to our collaborative efforts.
In the future, we plan to make more detailed monthly reports (using both with ActiveCollab's reporting features and on our own). We want to optimize more work processes, including all content marketing, SEO, and PPC efforts, to work faster and increase our productivity. This way we will be able to work with a larger number of customers, grow profits without increasing the number of working hours and the workload of our team.