How eyevolution is Revolutionizing Online Marketing in Germany with Taskworld

For decades, marketing agencies have followed a standard template – the black-box model. Regardless of the team’s level of transparency, they always had a wall between them and their clients. The best agencies update the clients frequently. But for one agency, that wasn’t enough.

Founded by Marcel Portofoé, eyevolution is an innovation-leading digital marketing agency based in Hamburg, Germany. It’s renowned for offering unparalleled access to its projects to clients. And it does so with the help of Taskworld.

To say that Marcel has a killer skill set is an understatement. A media computer science graduate who also deep-dived into data-driven online marketing, web-tracking, and eCommerce, Marcel started his career at one of Germany’s biggest eCommerce platforms – Otto. He gradually acquired deep expertise in multi-channel marketing, controlling, and data warehousing.

John sat down with Marcel to learn more about him, eyevolution, and how Taskworld has helped them achieve their goals.

1. What led you to create eyevolution?

Back in 2012, customer journey and data-driven online marketing primarily captured big companies’ interest and not small or medium businesses. I saw a gap in the longtail markets and decided to provide small, medium businesses with the same quality of online marketing as bigger enterprises.

That’s how eyevolution was born in 2014. We have been growing constantly and sustainable ever since. Unlike most agencies that specialize in a specific aspect of online marketing such as SEO, Google Ads, Tag Management, Facebook or Amazon ads, eyevolution offers a holistic strategy following the idea of customer journey mappings. That’s how we have been able to create success stories and cultivate strong relationships with our clients. Instead of juggling 5-6 agencies, they can rely on one partner and have connected multi-channel strategies. We dedicate teams of employees to each client on demand. Our clients can have their own online marketing team with just a missing expert or even no digital team at all. We see ourselves as a team that completes our clients’ teams.

Another benefit of being a holistic agency is that if an approach or a channel isn’t working, clients can rely on our honesty and make adjustments. This is harder for channel-specific agencies who’ll do everything to defend their channel even if it isn’t working.

2. What is Cloud Connect by eyevolution?

Cloud Connect is our new product. The single biggest problem with our clients is that their data is all over the place – from their own intranet to third-party tools. Cloud Connect is a single point of data for our clients. It’s a secure data-warehouse that consolidates all the critical marketing data of our clients. As we have a long history of API development and integration, we started working on it because it provides great value to our clients and helps them make better data-driven decisions.

3. What were the challenges that eyevolution was facing?

We have always had a strong focus on internal documentation. Every new team member is expected to learn how to work with the clients and embrace the company’s strategic vision. This wasn’t easy for new joiners, especially if they came from companies that lacked a similar system.

We tried building a transparent information system and organizing projects on cloud tools like WorkFlowy. However, we needed something more. We needed a project management software that could also reduce emails for internal and external communication.

So we wanted one platform that could provide project management, transparent project documentation, and a communication channel that wasn’t spammy but structured and centralized.

4. What made you pick Taskworld?

We made a list of features that we needed and also noted other requirements such as GVO/GDPR conformity, data security, and potential customization. We then tested 3-4 project management tools including MeisterTask and Wunderlist. It was a comprehensive process as we even looked at the technology behind the tools.

We were also in touch with the customer success managers of all the tools under evaluation. With Taskworld, we had an experience that left an imprint. We had suggested a feature to the Taskworld team that the application lacked at that time but was very important for us. We are not a big company, so didn’t expect much from it.

The Taskworld team told us that the feature looked interesting and that they’ll put it in their roadmap. I thought it was just a standard response that companies give to feature requests from potential clients. Instead, in a couple of weeks, Taskworld shared the timeline for the release of that feature with us. This experience captured our interest.

5. Which feature was that?

The guest feature; it’s the ability to invite external parties to your workspace with limited visibility without using up your licensed seats. This was truly a killer feature for us because we didn’t want to use a project management tool solely for internal purposes. We wanted it to interact with our clients too, and the guest feature is perfect for that.

We also had another request – integration of Google tag manager with the Dedicated Cloud deployment of Taskworld. At first, I didn’t imagine Taskworld would do something like that, but they were completely open to it. In the end, Taskworld provided us a solution that completely fulfilled our needs.

Taskworld gave us a way to explore white-label features. This allowed us to make certain adjustments to the front-end interface and present our login page to the clients with our own branding by integrating a small JavaScript code.

We were happy because Taskworld is a bigger company than us with bigger clients, but they still listened to us.

6. What would you have missed out on without Taskworld?

Without Taskworld, we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish our vision of how to work as a company. We are constantly evolving and scrutinizing our own processes. I can’t imagine how it will be like without Taskworld because after 2,5 years it became such an integral part of how we work with our clients.

I’d like to thank Taskworld and especially our customer success manager – Mandy, who is always in touch with us. If there is a problem, we get an immediate response from Taskworld. If something takes longer to resolve, we still get feedback when it’s resolved. This is not common in most software companies.

7. What is it like onboarding clients to Taskworld? Is there any friction?

We use monthly and weekly iterations to work with our clients. We show them what we are working on and how we are working on any specific task.

All our client meetings start on Taskworld with a recap of what we have finished. We then again consolidate new client ideas on Taskworld and show them the process so that they too get familiar with the platform. This is important because just giving them access isn’t enough. When clients understand our workflow on Taskworld, they get curious and see the advantages of working together on it.

Getting feedback on Taskworld is much faster than emails because you can see who’s online and who has read your message. eyevolution is a digital company. We have only one printer in the office, and whoever uses it gets angry looks in a fun way. Sharing our workflow on Taskworld also serves as an inspiration for our clients who themselves want to embrace digital collaboration practices.

So it takes some time, but our clients see the advantages of collaboration on Taskworld. And did I say that working with the last few email stacks for client conversation feels like slow motion and stone age now?

8. Has Taskworld helped with client retention?

Yes, because it became a central part to fulfill a key value of our company culture: transparency.

And that helps us build trust with our clients. They haven’t experienced such a level of transparency with their previous agencies. Most agencies have a black-box model to build dependencies. For example, if they are successful, they don’t offer much insight into how they did that in order to maintain client dependency.

We share our project management and know-how on Taskworld openly with our clients, and this helps build loyalty, trust and provide know-how transfer as a unique service proposition. Such transparency brings credibility to our invoicing system.

For example, our monthly invoice logs all the work done during that period. And each action item links back to a task on Taskworld. If a client wants, they can access the task and see the work done in it, along with who worked on it and for how long. They can see the complexity of each task. This also helps us in giving better estimates for upcoming tasks to the clients.

Wrapping up

Thanks again Marcel for taking the time to have such a wonderful conversation.

It’s exciting to see the level of transparency that eyevolution is bringing in working with its clients. We are ecstatic that Taskworld is playing a small part in it 🙂