Céline is a digital strategy consultant, she created the company LANE Digital Consulting based in Lausanne, Switzerland. Its goal is to help companies digitalize their internal processes and promote themselves on the web. With a mathematician background, she brings her Cartesian side and her rigor to all her clients’ projects. Passionated with learning, she constantly enjoys learning new things and passing on her knowledge.
The life of a marketing solopreneur is far from easy. If you are one, you know what I’m talking about! Yes, you, the modern-day orchestra man, the professional juggler who manages to fit a 30-hour day into 24. It’s time to make your life easier by optimizing the way you’re used to working. One of the keys is to surround yourself with the right tools so that you can concentrate on your core business.
As a marketing entrepreneur, ClickUp helps me on a daily basis in this sense and I thought I would share with you the four features that I use the most.
Today we will see how you can:
Summarize this article for me please4 key ClickUp features for marketing solopreneurs
1. Managing projects at scale with Lists
Whether you are an agency, a freelancer, or a solopreneur in the marketing field, you certainly have a large number of projects to manage at the same time. Having an overview of these projects is crucial as it allows you not to miss any important elements.
ClickUp’s Lists and statuses make it easy to categorize projects. I like to organize projects in a structured way according to the following phases: initialization, execution, and closing.
Each of these phases corresponds to a status in ClickUp, which allows me to know at any time which project is in progress, which project has not yet been started, and which project has to be closed.
The 5 stages of project management from the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) which is a reference in the field.
Each List view in ClickUp consists of different “tasks” that are represented by the lines that you can see on the table above. Tasks can represent anything really, not necessarily a task per se but also a project, client, partner, etc…
I name the project and the associated client for each task.
- For each of the projects, I create Custom Fields for every column
- These fields are data associated with each of my projects. For example, I can see who has the lead on the project and which partner is staffed on it.
- Because I bill my clients hourly, I also need to record how much time is spent on the project.
- The last column helps me make sure that I do not go over the defined number of hours.
Going back to my phases of project management, you’ll see that I can change the status from initialization to execution and then closure.
But where is the planning phase?
This is where ClickUp’s various views come in handy. The Gantt chart view allows me to plan my projects and make sure I do not accept too many projects at the same time.
For the performance and control stages of project management, you can simply use Dashboards to track given KPIs, we will see later how.
2. Never forget anything thanks to the Templates
When you work alone, every second of your time is precious. It’s important to define procedures early on that will save you time and effort. List templates and checklists are ideal for this.
In the initialization phase, there are a number of things I need to check before starting the project. Here are a few examples:
Remembering all the things that needed to be checked each time is overwhelming. My checklists are simple and effective and relieve me of the fear of having forgotten something.
I use checklists every time there is a repetitive pattern of actions for a given task or project.
List templates can also be very useful when starting a mandate. I use a List to get an overview of my client projects. I also create a list by client in which you can find in detail the tasks that need to be done week by week for the project.
For my digital marketing projects, I know in advance that there are repetitive tasks that I will do for most of my projects like a social network audit, a competitive analysis, an SEO analysis, etc…
So instead of starting from scratch a new list every time I have a new project, I simply use a List template where I have previously stored all of these tasks.
3. Plan your content and social media campaigns with the Calendar view
A big part of the time allocated to social network management consists of content creation. This part is not only time-consuming but also a source of errors if several people are working on it.
I include at least the following steps to validate a social post with a client:
- Choosing the theme of the post
- Validation of the theme of the post
- Creation of a visual
- Creating a caption
- Visual validation
- Caption Validation
- Plan the content
Imagine how many unnecessary emails or messages can be generated with such a process.😱 Not to mention the errors that can occur on the way because we didn’t read the last email from the client or because it got lost in the meanders of our mailbox.
Before ClickUp, I was doing all my content planning on a Google Sheet. The problem is that it is really not practical to comment on the content and make changes. Furthermore, you can’t see the graphical content, let alone view it on a calendar.
With ClickUp I not only have an overview of my posts on the Calendar view, but I also know at all times where we are in the validation process. To do so, I create sub-tasks corresponding to the different validation steps I mentioned earlier and I update them as I go along.
I can even give access to the list to the client in guest mode so that he can tell me if he wants changes and note them directly in the task card. Finally, I add custom fields in which I add the percentage of progress in relation to the subtasks, the file attached to the post, the platforms on which we are going to post, and the selected theme.
4. Accomplish the work of two people with Automations and Recurring Tasks
Most of the tasks in digital marketing are recurring, i.e. from month to month, I will do reportings and assess the following elements:
- engagement statistics
- audience statistics
- campaigns’ performance
- SEO improvements
Since these items are repetitive, I don’t want to have to create a task every month to remember to do them. Fortunately, in the due date field, I have the possibility to set a recurrence for the task. By choosing a repetition frequency, I can “reset” the task and put it back to its initial state or create a new one. I recommend the second option to keep track of what has been previously done.
Do you know Tim Ferris’ famous book: The 4-hour week? This reference book explains how it is possible to work only 4 hours a week while earning enough income to be financially independent.Tim explains how he has automated many of his daily tasks by delegating them to people living on the other side of the world. Well here, your personal assistant on the other side of the world is ClickUp and it will help you save more than 20% of your time on low value-added tasks.
The possibilities with Automations are endless. However I prefer to focus on automating the administrative part of my business, which is often the most tedious. For example, when I sign a contract and I change the status of a task in my sales list to “completed,” a new task is automatically created in my accounting list to send the deposit invoice. This prevents me from forgetting to create the task by myself. Similarly, in my accounting list, when the invoice is due, it is automatically transferred to the status “to be resent” so that I can contact the customer again to get paid.
Summarize this article for me pleaseConclusion
The power of ClickUp means that all your activity as a marketing solopreneur can be centralized in one place. I have shared with you some of my advice on specific aspects of the job but you can extend this to your entire business.
- a CRM
- a dashboard with all your partners and their competencies
- a place to store and follow up your invoicing
You can do all of this in ClickUp, but now it’s up to you to explore in practice which features will best support your business processes.
Thank you for reading 👋
If you want to implement ClickUp in your company and need help incorporating your processes in this amazing tool, feel free to reach out to me at: celine@lane-digital.ch
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