Why Ad-Rank Chose Redbooth to Support their Rapid Growth

Ad-Rank Media is an award-winning digital content agency made up of content marketing, SEO, and digital PR professionals. Founded in 2011, Ad-Rank has earned a reputation of proven return for our clients, including Expedia, City Bank, and Virgin Media.
At Ad-Rank, content is very much the focus of what we do. This year alone we are expecting to publish more than 4,000 pages of copy, along with a fleet of press releases, reports and other written material as part of our PR and SEO campaigns.

Yet, with a growing list of clients and a cross-functional team, we saw a dire need to streamline the way we collaborate internally and with our clientele. A hurdle that all agencies must cross.

Ideally, we were in search of a tool that could handle the slew of tasks that this approach would entail, all the while providing transparency across all teams and offices.

Previously we used several different tools to control this process. At one end was Bitrix24, a package that offered project, time and document management systems. We found individual task management poor though, which meant that increasingly we relied on simple to-do lists such as Wunderlist.

We found that approach distracted us from focusing on the overall view of our projects. While individual tasks make up the delivery of our work, it is important that everyone understands the bigger picture. This segmented approach made this message more difficult to get across.

As the team grew rapidly, this quickly became extremely unwieldy, as did the setting up of client-specific areas. As we try to be as transparent as possible, this was a significant issue.

As the team grew rapidly, this quickly became extremely unwieldy, as did the setting up of client-specific areas. As we try to be as transparent as possible, this was a significant issue.

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In September 2015, Ad-Rank Media made the decision to relocate its delivery team from London to Norwich. Along with the usual issues of logistics, this meant scaling up a core team from three to 15 in a matter of months, all while managing a large bank of freelancers, clients, and the general bustle of a busy digital agency. This quick expansion both in people and office location forced us to find a solution for organizing and defining these workflows as an agency.

To do this quickly and efficiently, we needed a project management tool that was easy to implement, flexible and scaleable.

With this entire transition, we felt this was the right opportunity to find a solution that would align all of our needs to help us maintain our quality of work and internal workflow.

This next step can cause a great deal of apprehension as a PM or agency lead. There is an entire landscape of tools to evaluate but very few offer a set of features that collectively address our direct needs.

As part of our overhaul, we decided to trial 12 different products, including Mavenlink, Targetprocess, ActivCollab and various Kanban-style tools, as well as implementing a content delivery platform, Beegit. Each package had good and bad points, ranging from accessible interfaces and simple user management to a lack of subtasks (a surprisingly common theme) or excessively high per-user charges.

Of course being easy to use was important, but it wasn’t our sole concern. There were several key factors that we looked for, including:

• Reliability – no significant downtime, lost files or tasks
• Quick assigning of tasks and subtasks
• Clear and easy to manage client areas
• Instant messaging
• Quick reporting views
• Price

With time limited, the ease of implementation was very important too.

Here, Redbooth performed the best out of the 12 packages tested. During our trial period, we were impressed by the speed we were able to create projects and tasks, view reports and comment on tasks.

After coming to understand our internal pain points and identifying which features helped us truly become more productive as an organization, Redbooth was ultimately the one platform that provided the needed overarching transparency as well as the detailed task management at the minute level. Redbooth is incredibly straightforward to use, meaning that little training was needed for our various team members.

As we expanded across multiple locations throughout the UK, Redbooth held us to even higher quality work and a more efficient internal system of collaboration.