How to Automate Marketing Project Creation with Duplication

February 18, 2021 - 3 min read

Lionel Valdellon

It's Friday afternoon and a new project has just landed in your lap: a new banner for SXSW must be submitted by Tuesday, and yet you're still dealing with your backlog of work from this week. To get the banner done quickly, you'll probably have to copy and paste all the information from the tasks you used in the most recent banner project, right? Wrong. With Wrike you have the power of templates and duplication at your fingertips.

What are Templates, and Why Use Duplication?

Quick Recap: Templates are easily duplicable projects that include all attachments, tasks and subtasks, text descriptions, assignees, time durations, and work dependancies — all of which can be included or removed.

If you find yourself constantly repeating the same multi-step projects over and over, then you will greatly benefit from creating a batch of project templates. This will mean you can easily pop into your 'Templates' folder in Wrike, bring up the banner design template, and quickly duplicate it for your 11th-hour project.

Beyond mere speed and convenience, templates also help your team be thorough in your work. Using an existing, tested template ensures you don't accidentally overlook crucial steps which could have led to delays, errors, revisions, and general confusion (e.g. who is working on which part of the process).

Easy Duplication Using Project Templates in Wrike

Here's the step-by-step process for quickly duplicating projects from templates:

FIND IT: Head into your template folder in Wrike and find the "Banner design template" folder/project that your team created in the past.
DUPLICATE IT: Right click on the "Banner design template" folder/project and choose "Duplicate." With Wrike's latest update, you can immediately select the destination folder for your duplicated project.
CUSTOMIZE IT: Name your duplicated project (e.g. "SXSW Banner Design"), and specify the appropriate prefix to include before the name of every task and subtask (e.g. "SXSW"). Prefixes will help you create Reports or Dashboards, and they'll keep your work organized and concise — instead of creating an ambiguous "Design draft 1" task every time you duplicate, using your prefix you'll create "SXSW - Design draft 1" for easy identification. You can also specify whether you want to copy tasks with or without their descriptions, attachments, assignees, custom fields' values, and more.

Once created, the new project will be highlighted within your folder tree.

Learn more about creating project templates in Wrike

Check out our blog post for more info on creating and duplicating project templates in Wrike. And as always, if you have any questions feel free to get in touch with our Support team.

Lionel Valdellon

Lionel is a former Content Marketing Manager of Wrike. He is also a blogger since 1997, a productivity enthusiast, a project management newbie, a musician and producer of electronic downtempo music, a father of three, and a husband of one.

#Templates #Wrike Features #Marketing Teams

Marketing 5 min read

7 Eye-Opening Tips to Stay on Top of Your Marketing Projects

Are you tired of having your project information spread out in disconnected files, e-mails and papers around you? Do you feel you are constantly missing something important? Do you believe you and your team can collaborate more productively? "Before Wrike, I had everything written down on multiple sheets of paper. At the end of every week, I spent hours on taking them all, consolidating, reprioritizing, and figuring out if these are the most recent notes or if there are some newer notes somewhere." After adopting Wrike project management software, Dave's entire marketing and sales department productivity increased by 25%! This story is a great example of how project management practices and a team's productivity can be improved with the help of an appropriate tool. Here's a list of 7 eye-opening things to do to help you boost efficiency in the management of marketing projects: 1.Don't get drowned in the data flow It's not uncommon for marketing departments to be overloaded with campaign plans, sales reports, stats and multiple document versions. What a relief to know that the latest piece of data is always at your fingertips! "We ended up with going with Wrike primarily because it had all of our projects in one screen, and we could easily manipulate back and forth between those projects," Dave says. "We just log notes to the tasks, and Wrike sorts it all for us, the most current ones." 2.Ensure you can descend with ease from the bird's-eye view to tiny project details To run a project successfully, you need to have the full overview of it with all completion dates, as well as the ability to drill down instantly to any particular task detail you are interested in right now. "In Wrike, I see everything that I need in one view, not way too much information or not enough information to estimate the progress. It actually ended up a perfect fit that way," Dave comments. 3.Take your office anywhere instantly Trade shows, meetings with customers and partners outside the office, business trips, and working from home in the evenings... Rather than having papers scattered everywhere, now Dave can take his office with him anytime, anywhere: "I can go home or pull up Wrike anywhere in the world and have all the project folders in the same place. On the road, I just pull out my iPhone and plug in new updates and check on the status updates from the team." 4.Collaboration is vital, so share smartly! Marketing hard skills are essential, of course, but soft skills, such as knowing how to collaborate and communicate effectively in a team, are just as important. Some tasks are to be done by a single team member, while others require collaboration. Wouldn't it be convenient to have all of the team's data stored in a central place, while the project view of other team members never gets cluttered? That's easy to do with Wrike's selective sharing! "The thing that I love about the system is that everyone can have their own unique environment within Wrike. Team members have their to-do lists within their own view, and if they are collaborating with other team members, they just easily add other people to these tasks," Dave says. Selective sharing also helps you create a common workspace for a distributed team: "Now with shared folders, remote employees don't feel as remote. They feel like they are a part of the organization," Dave adds. 5.Keep worthy ideas safe for tomorrow Quite often, you may not have enough resources to implement all of the great marketing ideas right away. Store them as "deferred" or "backlogged" in Wrike to get back to them at the right moment! "When we have brainstorming sessions, I add everything to Wrike. It's very easy for us to bring all those ideas right back to the forefront of our mind and to figure out whether now is the right time to implement them, now that we have some freed-up resources," Dave comments. 6.Time is precious, so make the most of every communication! For a busy head of a marketing department, it's important to be efficient in both downward and upward communications. At the meetings with your direct reports, you can instantly filter out the tasks in Wrike by assignee for any given time period and give them immediate feedback on their productivity. "I also have a folder specifically for the president's approval. This way, we are able to save a lot of time, as we don't necessarily need to meet on every single topic of discussion. If a resolution wasn't agreed on at a certain time, the task just stays there, and I don't have to write hundreds of reminder notes," Dave says. 7.Balance work and personal life No matter how busy you are, you shouldn't forget about your personal life. Wrike is as efficient for work projects as for birthday shopping and party planning! "I can mix my personal to-do lists and work in one workspace in Wrike. So whether I'm home or on the road, I find everything in one place from the personal perspective, as well," Dave says. ___ We enjoyed the podcast with Dave and believe it provides valuable, first-hand experience and useful examples of how the right technical solution can significantly improve planning and productivity in marketing teams. If you have helpful tips to share, too, we'd be happy to know about them!

Marketing 3 min read

Wrike's API Helps a Marketing Team Create Custom Reports Automatically

Northcutt’s team of inbound marketing experts takes care of several simultaneous projects for each of its multiple clients. No wonder they need to collect and analyze large amounts of data on a daily basis. But fortunately, Wrike's API made marketing efficiency much easier for them! 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. What the team was looking for was an easy way to track the status of each campaign and to report on the progress to the clients easily. Now, with Wrike’s help, they have a complete overview of tasks in the pipeline for each client. But the main key to success turned out to be Wrike’s API, which saved them more than five hours of work per week on creating reports. Since the team needed to get detailed information on the progress in each area of work, Wrike’s API helped them to retrieve this data from each folder automatically. Here are more details of how they achieved such great results. 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. Whenever the task is updated in Wrike, the new data automatically gets updated in the corresponding table cell. Since the updates are collected in real time, team members are always sure that the table data is up-to-date. This way, Northcutt's team creates detailed and accurate monthly reports for clients much faster than ever. Additionally, Corey Northcutt set up custom widgets with tasks of each stage on his dashboard. As a result, with every login, Corey Northcutt instantly sees all current marketing initiatives at each stage and the people who are responsible for them. If some of the assignments become overdue, they are highlighted in red at the top of the list, so it's easy to quickly track them and adjust the deadlines appropriately. 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

Project Management 7 min read

How to Create Project Templates in Wrike

Are you a marketing manager making a daily SEO campaign for each new client you take on? Or are you a project manager who has a complex product development workflow that takes hours to set up? You know there has to be an easier way to manage all these repeating projects without banging your head on walls. And we have the answer: project templates. Project templates are a great way to easily replicate work within Wrike, and can be set up in just a few minutes. But before we jump too far into Template Babylon, let's really make sure a template is what you should use. How to Decide If You Should Use Project Templates Step 1: Determine the complexity of the project on a scale of 1-4, with 1 being very simple, and 4 being very complex. Step 2: Determine the frequency of the project on a scale of 1-4, with 1 being very infrequent, and 4 being a constantly recurring project. If your score is over 3 in each category, you should definitely use templates. If your score is over 3 in frequency, but is less than 3 in complexity, you could benefit from a template. If your score is under 1 or 2 in both categories, then you're better off using tasks, subtasks, and custom workflows to manage your work. Still unsure? Here is a list of common use cases for creating templates. It's just a few examples, and not meant to box you in. If your situation lies outside of these examples, but you think you could benefit from templates, we encourage you to try it out and see if it works for your team! Common Use Cases for Creating Templates: Purchase Orders Implementations Marketing Campaigns Product Development Workflows Application processes (applying for patents, etc.) Any repeating projects with multiple steps Decided you need templates in your life? We're here to help! Read on. How to Create Project Templates in Wrike Now that you know you need a template, let's get started actually building them out. Step 1: Create a folder and call it "Templates". You can create this folder under your root folder, or if you have multiple teams from different departments in Wrike, create this folder in your specific department folder (e.g. create the Marketing Templates folder inside your main Marketing folder). Step 2: Inside this Templates folder you've just created, create a subfolder for a project you are constantly repeating. Start building out the tasks within this folder from your project's inception all the way through completion. Be sure to put a lot of detail into each task description so that anyone receiving this task for the first time will know exactly what to do. Once you're done with this step, you should have tasks for each necessary step in your project, including all relevant subtasks. Step 3: Go though all of the tasks you've just created and set the proper duration for each task. (e.g. Task X will take 2 days to complete.) You don't need to set a specific date yet — that comes later. Step 4: Determine if you have any dependencies within your project. If your tasks can all happen at the same time, you won't need dependencies, and can move on to the next step. But most likely, your tasks will need to be accomplished in a specific order, which means you will need to set up dependencies. To start with dependencies, assign the dates of each task to today's date. From there, switch over to the Timeline View, and begin dragging and dropping tasks to reschedule them and set dependencies between them. For more info about how to set up specific dependencies, check our help page. Once everything is rescheduled and dependencies are set, you should have something that looks like this: Step 5 (optional): If you choose, you can make the last task in your template a milestone, as it will serve as a firm deadline for your project. You can also add assignees to your tasks if it will always be the same person repeating those tasks. But we don't recommend this, as you could easily overload someone's workload by forgetting to reassign those tasks after duplicating the template. Step 6: Now that you've set up all the dependencies for your template's workflow, the last step is to change each of the tasks statuses to "Deferred." This ensures that a task residing in the template folder won't be confused with any duplicate tasks holding the same title. You can do this by jumping back to the List View, selecting all tasks, and changing the task status to "Deferred" on the right-hand panel of the page. And voilá, you've now created a project template in Wrike! How to Start a Project from a Template Now that we've created your template, let's talk about how to use it when a project lands on your desk. Step 1: Duplicate the template. Go to your templates folder and right-click on the template you want to use. Click "Duplicate Folder." When prompted, you'll want to copy the folder with the task descriptions, assignees (if applicable), custom field values, and then reschedule the new project. If you used a milestone as your last task in the template, schedule the end date as the final completion date for the project. If you did not use a milestone, schedule the start date for whenever you want your project to begin. You should also rename the folder to accurately depict the name of the client, project, or process that you will be repeating. Step 2: Drag and drop the template into its appropriate folder. You should then move this folder to where you have previously stored projects of this same nature (e.g. a duplicated marketing campaign should live in the active campaigns folder). Step 3: Assign the tasks. Go through each task in the template and assign it to team members with available bandwidth to complete the tasks. The Workload View is great for this function, as you can see who is available to take on another project, and who is already booked. You're done! Go through this process for all other repeatable projects. No banging head on walls required! Have questions about creating project templates in Wrike? Ask us in the comments, or contact our Support team — we're here to help!

For Teams

Use cases

Apps & Integrations

Explore Wrike

Learn and connect

Become Wrike Pro

How to Automate Marketing Project Creation with Duplication

What are Templates, and Why Use Duplication?

Easy Duplication Using Project Templates in Wrike

Learn more about creating project templates in Wrike

Lionel Valdellon

How to Automate Marketing Project Creation with Duplication

What are Templates, and Why Use Duplication?

Easy Duplication Using Project Templates in Wrike

Learn more about creating project templates in Wrike

Lionel Valdellon

Related articles

7 Eye-Opening Tips to Stay on Top of Your Marketing Projects

Wrike's API Helps a Marketing Team Create Custom Reports Automatically

How to Create Project Templates in Wrike

Get weekly updates in your inbox!

You are now subscribed to Wrike news and updates