A damped Timoshenko beam element is introduced for the DOF-efficient forced vibration analysis of beam-like structures coated with viscoelastic damping layers. The rotary inertia as well as the shear deformation is considered, and the damping effect of viscoelastic layers is modeled as an imaginary loss factor in the complex shear modulus. A complex composite cross-section of structures is replaced with a homogeneous one by means of the transformed section approach in order to construct an equivalent single-layer finite element model capable of employing the standard $C^{0}$-continuity basis functions. The numerical reliability and the DOF-efficiency are explored through the comparative numerical experiments.