Teamwork Projects is a versatile platform.  We keep trying to think of a sector that wouldn’t find it useful but have yet to think of one. With intricately coded and thoughtfully integrated tools, our products excel at enabling effective communication, efficient collaboration, and all-compassing project management. That kind of thoroughness and flexibility means Teamwork Projects meets the needs and exceeds the expectations of many industry leaders. In September for  Industry of the Month, we’re focusing on our customers in the Marketing sector and how they use our products. For today’s post, we sat down with one of our support specialists, Julie, to ask her some of the top features of Teamwork Projects that appeal to our marketing customers. She said “our marketing and sales professionals enjoy file versioning, which is ideal for teams collaborating on graphics and the use of automatic versioning in Notebooks to work collectively on content and to track the activity. You can use the notebook itself for the content and the comments for discussion.” Julie also suggested exploring the Calendar feature, which allows users to:

  • Event privacy. You can have a central calendar to show all events, but people on the team will only see the events for the projects they have access to, as well as the general events that everyone can see (like vacation leave, etc).

  • Event categories. Set up your own custom event categories and pick your color because who doesn’t love color coding? Purple for vacation, blue for team meetings, yellow for training. Pick your own rainbow!

  • Tasks on the calendar. There’s a link for each day on the calendar showing how many tasks are due that day, and if you hover over it you get a list of the tasks and a link to each one. It’s a really quick way to see what work is coming up in a visual format without having to look at a Gantt chart.

Now you know a few of the insider tips, let’s go to our customers and see what they have to say. We interviewed two CEOs of leading marketing agencies to learn how they use Teamwork Projects: Jayne Burch, CEO and Founder of Marketing Monsoon, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA Dave Davies, CEO, Beanstalk Internet Marketing, Inc., Victoria, BC, Canada

Jayne Burch: Keeping my business on track. Dave Davies: The biggest issue for me and probably everyone else in the field is meetings and spontaneous issues. You can plan a day to the minute, but if Google deploys an update or a client has a technical issue or even just wants to chat, that’ll set the whole schedule off. This is probably my single biggest challenge in time management. Thanks to Teamwork Projects, however I can at least look back and see what I did and where the time went. 🙂

Jayne Burch: Making a plan and working my plan. I work a lot right now, but I make sure I have time carved out for family, self-care and personal development. Dave Davies: I simply take time.  I like my wife and kids and I like to get to the gym and I insist on doing these things and make sure there’s time to do them.  Some days I may not get as much as I’d like (see the point about a Google Update above), but there’s no real point to working hard if you’re not getting to enjoy the life you’re working to create.  I try to remember that.

Jayne Burch: Around May 2014. Dave Davies: We first signed up for Teamwork Projects in December of 2012.

Jayne Burch: I had been looking for a tool for project management. I’ve used Basecamp, and PayMo but those tools didn’t have everything I was looking for. Teamwork Projects has nearly everything I wanted. Job time tracking, flexibility, Gantt charts, messaging, files, and a lot more. I have only just recently tapped into everything Teamwork Projects has to offer. Dave Davies: We had been using Basecamp, but were continuously frustrated by their lackluster time tracking solutions and worse, their lack of interest in listening to their users.  Teamwork Projects had the same core look-and-feel which was nice for our clients, they had far more functionality and we could import all our Basecamp data over.  I gave it an internal trial before the switch and all my staff far preferred it.

Jayne Burch: My company is a small marketing firm and the entire team works from different locations. Teamwork Projects is the central location for my business where all communication about client projects goes on. Dave Davies: We use them globally across all staff and clients.  It provides us a great way to communicate with them that I can reference if necessary and it’s easy to use for our clients.

Jayne Burch: Every client has a project and within each client project, every work order or sub-contract has a Task List.  I also manage and track internal projects, planning, marketing activities. I’ve used it as a communication tool for closed business referral groups. Dave Davies: Generally speaking, they’re SEO and Internet marketing projects but we also use it for development projects and occasionally will set-up campaigns for 3rd parties that are dealing with our clients so we can monitor what they’re doing.

Jayne Burch: There are so many things to love about Teamwork Projects. I love the detail that is possible and that tasks and time logs can be moved. The Gantt chart is great. The reports feature allows me to see what is happening in my business. Dave Davies: Easily my favorite feature is the messaging system, followed closely by the time tracking.  The ability to go back through a campaign at the end of each month and review what got done by my staff and their communications with our clients is excellent.  It’s also nice that I can archive clients and pull them back out into active use should they come back.  I use this feature a lot, especially with seasonal sites.

Jayne Burch: We recently defined Teamwork Projects as client accounts and added our own internal tracking codes to the Task List titles for each contract or work order so we have traceability. Dave Davies: We honestly didn’t really have to customize anything outside the messaging categories.  It just worked right for our needs.

Jayne Burch: I would highly recommend Teamwork Projects to other businesses no matter the size. Teamwork Projects is scalable. It works very well for a small, one-person business and easily grows as the business grows. Dave Davies: I already have and will continue to do so.  If I couldn’t recommend it … I wouldn’t use it.

Jayne Burch: I am more and more in love with Teamwork Projects everyday and I discover more ways it can help me manage, track and monitor my business.  It’s flexible to the growing needs of my business, easy to use and helps me collaborate with my team and my clients.

Dave Davies: Teamwork Projects covers all the aspects of communications that we need from a simple messaging system that allows clients to respond as they would to an e-mail, to time tracking and chat functions.  While I’ve only once had to communicate with support, they responded quickly and professionally.  The short fact is, it just works the way it should so I don’t often think about it and what more can I ask? The elements of work involved for marketing professionals is fast-paced, results-driven, and focused on conveying the right message to the right people, so it is essential to be organized and collaborate effectively with all involved. When working on a team with copywriters, designers, project managers, and even the client, Teamwork Projects offers levels of privacy and file sharing options that go beyond normal task management to true project management to help your team be as creative and focused as possible without letting any element of your project slip through the cracks.

There you have it. Jayne and Dave have laid out numerous reasons why marketing agencies use Teamwork Projects. Time tracking, Gantt tracking, and messages are just some of the main reasons why they think Teamwork Projects is perfectly suited to help run their business. Take a 30-Day Free Trial of Teamwork Projects and see the results for yourself what Jayne and Dave are raving about!

We have a page on our website solely devoted to Agencies and Teamwork Projects. To learn more about Teamwork Projects, and how it can benefit your agency simply click here and find out.

Big shout out to Jayne Burch and Dave Davies for making this post possible and for helping us to learn all about Marketing Agencies!