Murray Dare Saw 25% Increase in Productivity (& Cut Costs by 18%) with Process Street

Murray Dare is a multi-award-winning marketing consultant based in Norwich, England. With his remote team drawn from across the UK, he delivers first-class marketing strategies, content and processes to a wide range of clients.

The team at Murray Dare use Process Street to streamline their content marketing operations.

Armed with process documentation solutions and process automation, Process Street has empowered Murray Dare to cut costs, increase productivity, improve content quality, improve scalability, and more!

In this case study we’ll look at:

• The challenge
• The solution
• The results
• The future

Let’s jump right in!

“As we took on more work, we quickly realised that we were becoming overloaded with smaller tasks which were tedious, yet time-consuming. We needed a way to streamline and outsource these tasks, whilst maintaining quality.”

They analyzed all their tasks to see what could be automated, and realized that around 25% of their copywriters’ time was spent uploading work. This amounted to around 420 hours per year per copywriter which was focused on admin-related tasks – pretty stark when expressed like that!

This one area was dragging down their overall content productivity and often meant content was ready, but sat waiting to be uploaded.

On top of that, before they began using Process Street, Murray Dare used an eclectic mix of tools to keep track of their tasks. Between Trello, Google Drive and spreadsheets, information was spread far and wide.

Murray wanted to streamline, and where possible, outsource. After doing some market research, he realized that with its flexibility and range of features, Process Street provided the perfect solution.

It wasn’t just a desire for internal smart processes that prompted this, either. Murray’s own research had found that over 50% of B2B businesses cited their processes, or lack of them, as a key barrier to growth, and for new businesses that figure rose to 60%.

“This means that for small businesses, a lack of processes are clogging everything up, leading to reduced performance and stalling their growth plans. In short, most small businesses have marketing processes slowing them down. If we can crack it, so can they.”

Many of Murray’s clients needed blogs and landing pages written, edited, and uploaded on a regular basis. While the first two points were fair game, the third was a drain on copywriters’ time and energy.

So, Murray set out to build a process that could incorporate an outsourced uploading team, allowing his copywriters to automate their work as much as possible. They’d still have to write and edit their work, but after that, they could drop it into a process and stop worrying about it.

The uploading team worked different hours to Murray’s main team, so keeping things simple was important. After all, they’d be uploading in bulk where possible; ensuring that this process could run smoothly while the main team was out of contact was vital.

On this point, Murray especially liked the ability to leave notes on an individual workflow, which allowed for clarifications between team members to be left attached to the work to be completed. This ensured there were no delays when the workflow was particularly tricky or required something different.

And because Murray Dare works with a variety of clients, they would sometimes outsource the writing of blogs, guides and landing pages to external firms. This added an extra layer of complexity: the external firms needed to be able to access the workflow without seeing anything confidential.

Fortunately, Process Street’s conditional logic saved the day. As Murray said:

“I was able to use the conditional logic to build a highly targeted workflow. With a simple email entry form at the top of the workflow, the workflow would then display the client information appropriate to the person who had accessed it. This flexible system was a life-saver.”

Because there were a lot of moving parts and handovers between different teams, the stop tasks and Approvals were especially useful in ensuring that a member of Murray’s team had an eye on things at every step of the way. Each time, they were notified via email, reducing the need for unnecessary communication.

While Murray Dare found that outsourcing and automating the content upload process was the most immediate benefit, the experiment proved so successful that the company began using it widely.

The key benefits were:

• 25% increase in content production;
• They even cleared their entire backlog of content (in one case, by uploading 15 articles in one day for one client);
• Cost savings of 18% due to outsourcing;
• Improved content quality and accountability;
• Increased ability to scale and take on more work;
• A happier team doing less of the things they hate.

Today, Process Street allows the Murray Dare team to outsource and automate many of their unwanted tasks. In fact, they’ve found that they’ve halved their content upload delivery time. As Murray said:

“Process Street has allowed us to really identify the areas that could be sped up. More than just offering a useful tool through which to outsource/automate our delivery, it’s also helped us change our thinking. Every week, the team is coming up with new things to develop a workflow for, and we love putting our heads together to find the best way to implement it.”

For Murray, the most exciting thing about Process Street is the way it allows him to focus on his core goals of growth and scalability without new hires or wasted resources.

“At the core of my business is helping other people develop systems and processes that allow them to stay lean while getting the most out of their day. Process Street has allowed me to practise what I preach. From just a small core of a couple of team members, we can keep track of content upload across a whole group of firms.”

Much of Murray Dare’s day-to-day process is now centered around Process Street, and their next task is to integrate employee onboarding and offboarding and performance reporting.