How ClickUp Makes Our Norwegian Digital Marketing Agency Perform Better

Imagine forgetting your phone at home and having to get by without it the rest of the day. That should give you an idea about how a workday without ClickUp could feel to us. ClickUp’s task management features get us safely through the jungle of daily marketing tasks – and with a smile on our face.

Three reasons why a great task management tool is an absolute must

For a company working in the digital marketing business with remote teams, task management is everything.

Every single day a jungle of new and absorbing tasks awaits us. Finding the best path through that jungle is part of the fun. That is, if we have the right survival tools at hand (read: tasks management tools). Without them, there is a danger of getting stuck or lost.

Now, enough with the metaphors. Instead, I’ll give you 3 concrete reasons why we at Mikalsen Utvikling couldn’t operate without a reliable task management tool like ClickUp.

1. A place to organize all our work

As a digital marketing agency, our job is to generate website traffic to help our clients reach out to more potential customers.

This includes (but is far from limited to):

creating innovative strategies
website setup and design
planning and implementing campaigns
content production
client communication

Our marketing agency is blessed with a large client base that keeps on growing, so filling our calendars has never been an issue. As much as our team loves getting busy with all the different tasks this job involves, it could easily turn into chaos without good task management.

Not only do we need to register all current and upcoming tasks somewhere – but we also need to prioritize them.

Trust me when I say, writing down the tasks on a piece of paper isn’t enough.

2. One task – multiple team members

Our radiant team consists of people with a range of different skills and specialties. To get a job done, tasks need to be divided between the right people within the team.

Setting up a Facebook Ad Campaign is an example of a task that more than one person will need to work on:

Person A chooses the campaign type together with the customer
Person B writes the text
Person C designs the add
Person B makes the ad ready for publishing
Person A looks over the ad and pushes it live

This requires clear task distribution and management.

Communicating who needs to do what and when in an old-fashioned way just wouldn’t get us anywhere.

3. Working remotely (and yet collaborate closely)

Did I mention that we work remotely?

At Mikalsen Utvikling we have always worked from the comfort of our homes. Not just as a temporal Covid-19 measure, but as our permanent and preferred arrangement. No precious time wasted commuting, more flexibility 🙌

Needless to say, a good management tool is an absolute necessity when the whole team works remotely.

You can’t just wave at our colleague across the room to remind her of a pending task. Or invite another colleague to the meeting room to plan how to divide the responsibilities for an upcoming project.

Luckily, we have experienced that collaboration can be just as easy (if not easier) using digital tools.

How ClickUp Tasks saves our day – every day

ClickUp is one of those essential apps that all of our team members keep open at all times. When the workday starts, tasks are what most of us consult with first, even before checking our emails.

There are several good reasons for that.

We see that using ClickUp increases our productivity, both on an individual and group level. Collaboration is made easier, and it helps us deliver our projects on time.

Here’s how we use ClickUp on a daily basis.

1. Creating (and breaking) down tasks

When someone in our team is entrusted with a new task, breaking it down into more manageable subtasks is made easy.

Because, even though “Create search engine ranking strategy” might seem rather straightforward, it involves numerous minor tasks that need to be done before the whole task can be marked as complete.

This way, each and every one of us stay on top of our tasks. We know what’s awaiting us, not just today, but also in the upcoming period. In our experience, this gives us all an inner drive and motivation to give our best.

So if you see us staring into space at some point during the workday, it is surely not because we are wondering how to fill our working hours. Perhaps we have just taken a moment to dream about an upcoming trip! 😎

2. Adding multiple assignees

In 1624 the English poet John Donne wrote that: “no man is an island.” That is certainly still true for us in the digital marketing business, as we depend on each other’s skills to get the job done.

Therefore, we couldn’t have done without ClickUp’s multiple assignees feature. We use it all the time, either to assign the same task to several team members or to divide subtasks among the team.

This feature allows us to see who needs to do what and at what time to complete a task. No need to send emails back and forth to remind colleagues to finish up a task so that we can get started. It’s all there in the app.

This allows our team to keep the progress up and deliver our projects on time.

3. Prioritizing tasks

I previously mentioned the jungle of tasks we need to find our way through on a daily basis. With ClickUp, every day is an enriching adventure as we cut our way through the tasks.

By adding info about the start date, due date, time estimation, priority, etc. to our tasks, prioritizing them couldn’t be more straightforward. With a simple click, tasks can be filtered according to our needs, revealing what needs to be done when. 👌

This allows us to maintain a highly agile workflow and stay ahead in the game. Our clients see results because we always perform the tasks at the right time.

While we’re talking about helpful features – task dependencies is another highly appreciated function. It makes it easy to mark a task that shouldn’t be started until another one is completed. This helps us complete tasks in the proper order and keep steady progress.

A typical example of task management from our workday

I’ve explained how ClickUp tasks help us at Mikalsen Utvikling perform better. Now I would like to give you a concrete example that shows how.

Among our clients is lanfordeg.no, a portal that helps Norwegians receive offers from various lenders to choose the best loan option.

The company contacted us telling us they want to add a new lender to their list. For us, this meant that a series of tasks needed to be distributed among the team.

Within a few minutes, the task with its subtasks had been registered and distributed among the team. Since none of these tasks required much time, yet was important for our client, we made them a high priority. Therefore, just a couple of hours after we had received the request from lanfordeg.no, the new lender was registered on the website and integrated into the system.