FootSteps Marketing— a digital marketing agency that specializes in providing websites and services to retailers in the hardware, outdoor, or archery industries — took time to share their experience using the integrations between Wrike and Google for Work.
Their main focus as a company is partnering with larger organizations to provide affordable marketing solutions for their members and retailers, so they need the right tools in place to help their team work efficiently. This how Google for Work and Wrike have helped them reach success:
1. Tell us about your team and the role it plays in your company.
Our initial need for Wrike stemmed from our Marketing Services (MS) department. They work as an external digital marketing agency for many retailers. Currently, we have 5 people on the production team for the MS department. Day-to-day, this team creates email marketing campaigns, social media posts and campaigns, and website landing pages. They also update websites on behalf of our clients. There is a high level of interaction that has to take place between them, as well as a high volume of tasks that need to be filtered through the team.
2. What were the goals that led you to connect Wrike and Google for Work?
We work with many retailers in hardware, the outdoor industry, etc., and much of the content we use is repeated in our campaigns. Since not all of our clients participate in the same promotions at the same time, we needed a system that would allow us to keep track of a large volume of similar tasks. Due to the crossover, we needed the ability to segment our tasks by activity, and mass-edit tasks (such as rescheduling, etc.). All of our marketing requests are sent to us via email, so the Wrike Gmail gadget was a critical feature for us to efficiently get these requests into a tasking system.
3. How have Wrike and Google for Work helped your team reach its goals?
Since implementing Wrike + Google Apps, we've become much more efficient in our workflows. The ability to create tasks directly from email is the biggest time-saver.
To make work easier to track, we have now created a digital marketing plantemplate for our clients to make selections. Their selections are sent to us in a spreadsheet, which we then directly import into Wrike, rather than manually logging every marketing plan (as we did before).
Our web development team is also able to use Wrike to keep track of our web development whiteboard, completely eliminating our prior system of passing around a document. This helps with efficiency, as everything for our teams can be kept in one place.
4. What improvements have you seen since implementing Wrike + Google for Work?
Our overall collaboration, organization, and management of tasks has improved drastically. Wrike and Google Apps have helped each department gain transparency into other departments, alleviating the need for more emails or lengthy discussions.
Share your story in the comments. How are you using Wrike + Google for Work to gain transparency into your projects?
If you're a lover of Wrike + Google for Work, join our Wrike Google Apps Partner Program. You can learn everything you need to know about the program here.
Brianna Hansen
Brianna is a former Content Marketing Manager of Wrike. When she’s not writing about collaboration and team building games, you’ll find her in the kitchen testing out the latest recipes, sharing her favorite wine with friends, or playing with her two cats.
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We're excited to announce our latest Customer Success Story with our friendly owls over at Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a leading social media and brand management solution with more than 10 million users around the world. We visited their HQ in Vancouver, Canada to ask their Marketing Operations team how they use Wrike.
Before Wrike, Hootsuite's marketing ops team was overwhelmed by endless tasks with no way to organize or prioritize them. After implementing Wrike, the team saw immense improvement in the handling of tasks, as well as improved visibility into quarterly productivity levels. Check out the short interview video below to hear why they love using Wrike.
Read the Hootsuite Case Study
To read more about how Hootsuite uses Wrike to power their productivity, check out the Hootsuite customer success story. The full case study covers:
What problems drove them to search for a collaboration tool
How they initially implemented Wrike across their team
Their favorite Wrike features and how they use them
Do you have a favorite Wrike feature that helps power your productivity? Let us know in the comments!
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Before adopting Wrike, Northcutt used Base?amp without much success. According to Corey Northcutt, the team’s project manager, it seemed to slow the team down even more, instead of making it easier to work on several ongoing projects at the same time.
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Pulling custom data with Wrike’s API. First, Corey Northcutt created folders to indicate each area of inbound marketing: Building external links, creating social media content, website optimization, etc. The integration they built with Wrike’s API automatically pulls the data from each folder into the special Google Drive spreadsheets. By looking at the spreadsheets, the project manager instantly sees the number of tasks assigned to each team member in each area of work, as well as the percentage of completed goals and the number of days left until the end of the current project. There are separate tables for active, backlogged, completed and deferred tasks.
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What about your team? Have you considered using Wrike’s API to integrate it with your favorite tools and optimize your work? Then let us know in comments!
“Wrike succeeded at simplifying some of our really complex problems. It allowed me to manage tasks via simple task lists and a Gantt chart while letting all the complex organization happen in our reports. We also now use the Wrike API to help generate our monthly digest summaries for reporting, which is a better alternative than paying for a solution that wasted someone's time by forcing them to manually re-compile data by hand each month.” —Corey Northcutt, CEO at Northcutt
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