Graphite Customer Story

Company overview

Graphite is a technology-enabled growth agency that helps build premium content and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies for consumer and enterprise companies like MasterClass, Medium, and Robinhood.

Industry
Marketing
Employees
200
Use Case
Content Management

The challenge

Tools with limited functionality hindered the content creation process

Graphite has grown significantly in recent years, expanding its content services to include article writing and increasing its client roster to serve customers around the globe. The company needed a user-friendly software solution to help keep track of its complete content pipeline, so that all stakeholders could engage in the process with ease.

As Graphite grew, the company’s existing tools made it difficult to manage tasks that required information to flow to stakeholders who needed different levels of visibility into project work.

The tools also did not provide enough flexibility to add critical project information to tasks. The Content Team needed a tool that would allow them to add as many dates, reviewers, or text boxes as necessary.

Finally, team members could not receive notifications and historical updates from the existing tools, which hindered their ability to ensure every task was being handled. The need for these updates was critical to provide accountability for stakeholders’ work on articles.

“We recognized that this deficiency was limiting our collaboration and productivity,” says Ethan Smith, CEO at Graphite.

To manage growth and address its challenges, Graphite needed a platform that could help the company manage content creation seamlessly.

Cristina WillsonDirector of Content at Graphite

“We not only started writing articles, but we decided to do so at scale, so we needed a robust platform that could easily adapt to our increasing number of deliverables. ClickUp was the best choice.”

Solutions with ClickUp

Improving content pipeline efficiency, visibility, and output

On its quest to find a user-friendly solution, Graphite tried several tools like Airtable and Monday. Then the company found ClickUp, which worked best for managing its article pipeline. Today, Graphite leverages ClickUp to run its entire content creation engine.

Since adopting ClickUp, Graphite has been able to automate processes, streamline workflows, and enhance collaboration with clients. ClickUp’s user-friendly interface and automation capabilities allow Graphite’s teams to track project timelines, assign tasks, and generate reports, ensuring that the company delivers high-quality services that exceed clients’ expectations.

The team can now execute 300 articles per month and have produced 2,000 articles in total by leveraging ClickUp. In addition, they save two hours per week that used to be spent in meetings, and send 20 times fewer Slack messages (2 as opposed to 40).

Improved content production with greater workflow visibility

Graphite leverages robust features like ClickUp Custom Statuses to track the status of articles the team is writing, which provides the company with much needed flexibility. The writing process sometimes entails two revisions or different types of approvals on articles, and ClickUp gives the team the options they need to communicate pertinent details related to each stage of every project.

Content Marketing Task view

Graphite also uses ClickUp Task Templates to keep content brief files and assets organized in a centralized location so they’re easy to find and review. The team can now access historical data on task movements, as well, so they never lose any historical information on project progress.

Saved 3 hours weekly with more efficient content workflows

Since implementing ClickUp, Graphite has eliminated almost all back-and-forth communication in external tools like Slack.

“Our article production pipeline for each client has at least six stakeholders, and thanks to ClickUp, just by sending one to two messages in Slack, this group of people can produce up to six articles every week,” says Cristina.

Graphite also eliminated a 30-minute meeting the team used to hold to assign weekly tasks. Now, the head of the department assigns tasks in ClickUp on Fridays without the need to meet.

Automations

The entire article pipeline process has been shortened. Before ClickUp, team members had to wait to receive confirmation that content was approved. With ClickUp Automations, they immediately receive notifications regarding approvals and can move articles along to the next stage of production.

Simplify client collaboration and drive efficiency with Doc permission controls

With ClickUp, Graphite no longer struggles to manage content permissions at different stages of the article pipeline. The company can now easily create lists and folders for client content projects. The team has the ability to move articles between folders with different permissions thanks to ClickUp’s Advanced Sharing & Permissions.

private share

“We can change the permissions and have different clients use the same template without sharing unnecessary information,” says Cristina Willson, Director of Content at Graphite.

Now clients do not see articles while they’re still in creation, which eliminates the problem of Graphite starting to receive feedback too early in the process. Using separate internal and client-facing folders means clients only receive an article when it’s ready for their approval. This makes the entire content creation process more efficient.

Ethan SmithCEO at Graphite

“ClickUp allows our team to do their best work by optimizing processes to ensure on-time delivery, driving impact.”

What’s next for Graphite

Delivering content at scale for clients worldwide

By leveraging innovative tools like ClickUp, Graphite can better drive growth and success for its clients. As a company that prides itself on delivering premium solutions, Graphite is committed to continuing to make a significant impact on its clients’ success.

Graphite now has the powerful content management platform it needs to scale operations and serve global clients more effectively, paving the way for continued growth in the future.

Graphite scales content production by 12x with ClickUp

Results with ClickUp

12x increase

2,000 articles

3 hours saved