Building a shared platform to track marketing projects in minutes

The Marketing Centre

The Marketing Centre is the UK’s number one provider of part-time proven Marketing Directors to ambitious businesses, with a proven track record of growth.

The Marketing Centre has over 80 proven Marketing Directors who work for ambitious small and mid-size businesses across the UK, providing a whole new means of acquiring marketing expertise into businesses – an experienced professional plugged-into the business on a long-term part-time basis.

The Marketing Centre prides itself on excelling marketing processes, approaches and strategies and found that Gridfox is the perfect tool to help support this.

Project Background

As part of The Marketing Centre’s proposition is helping companies to systemise their marketing, ensuring that there is a consistency in both approach and activity to create an consistent and effective engine, one of their key areas are the tools needed to help support this.

As The Marketing Centre works to improve marketing activities across teams, visibility is a key requirement, across both what each team member is doing, and activities that need to happen at specific points, in order to build an effective and consistent marketing engine.

Prior to finding Gridfox, Marketing Centre Director, Tamsin, and her client, were struggling to manage marketing processes across a combination of spreadsheets and various disparate software tools, such as Trello – having failed to find a marketing solution that could provide the visibility of a big picture marketing plan, as well as the granular detail associated with campaigns and activities, all in one place.

Gridfox provided a perfect alternative in being able to create something that is specific to how they work , with the ability to adapt and scale as they need, whilst managing all marketing activity in one central location.

The Build

Starting with a “blank sheet of paper” Tamsin was willing to overcome a slight learning curve so that she could begin creating useful tools that would enable her team to work smarter. 

The learning process in itself became an exciting part of the build. Embarking on a “journey of discovery”, Tamsin quickly picked up the basic principles of the app and was able to effectively develop her platform. 

Tamsin found very quickly that there were some very simple principles to learn to know about Gridfox, from which she could build what she needed quickly. Using Gridfox, she created a project management application that has allowed her to gain valuable oversight over tasks and follow the progress of this work in real-time. 

Once in use, users of the app can be managed, to ensure optimal visibility across colleagues and teams. The ability to manage permissions enables Tamsin to authorise tasks quickly and efficiently, keeping team members informed and productivity high.

For Tamsin, a standout benefit of Gridfox was its highly customisable interface. With the ability to edit and monitor a wide variety of fields — including number, date and text — she could analyse data relevant to her project and uphold progress at a granular level. 

The flexibility to quickly add more features to her app allowed Tamsin and her team to adapt applications in line with their requirements. Tamsin and her team could use Gridfox without changing their work process. This flexibility is in contrast to working with off-the-shelf software packages which often come with features that teams do not require. 

Within a few hours, they created a very basic app, which they could keep adding functionality to. The ability to scale apps prevents users from being faced with too much, too soon and, instead, allows them to tailor features to their needs.

Results

Tamsin has built an app that has all the functionality that her team needs, enabling them to build as they go. What’s more is that her team were really excited about building something from scratch that didn’t take any longer than adapting other software products based on templates. 

They were able to build something that has exactly what they needed, nothing more and nothing less. Benefiting from an app that was clean without any clutter in additional features they didn’t require, or didn’t require at that moment in time, the team had the ability to adapt and change this app as requirements evolved.

The system continues to improve efficiency for Tamsin and her team, who benefit from a flexible, highly customisable tool like Gridfox when completing projects. As responsibilities develop, teams grow and projects expand, Gridfox has consistently provided a flexible platform to ensure that work is completed on time and to a high standard. 

Gridfox has enabled her to gain valuable oversight over projects, teams and tasks — improving productivity in the long run. 

Key Features

• Used a gantt chart to gain visibility of a 100 day marketing plan.
• Dashboards for an overview of tasks, events and workloads.
• Workflows to ensure team was updated in real-time on tasks assigned to them.