Asana is a project management tool that has quickly become popular in a variety of industries. Your organization might already use Asana or a work management tool to streamline its workflow. The transition to new software and the onboarding of your team is a great undertaking, which might be the reason why you’re still hesitant to adopt Asana for your marketing efforts.
Many marketing teams have ditched their Google spreadsheets for Asana to save time and focus on the work that matters. Take it from Walter Gross, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Sony Music, “By moving our team onto Asana, we’ve been able to streamline our processes and reduce creative production time by 75%, saving us our average of 60 hours per month.” If it's good enough for Sony, it's certainly good enough for you.
In this blog post, we will explore how to optimize your workflow with Asana for marketing. We will cover tips and tricks for using Asana as well as how to integrate it into your existing marketing workflow. By the end of this post, you will have a better understanding of how to use Asana for marketing and how it can benefit your work.
How can Asana be used for marketing?
While many project management tools like Jira had traditionally been utilized by product teams, more departments started adopting software to streamline their workflows as more user-friendly tools were introduced to the market. Tools like monday.com, Click-Up and Asana have become favourites among teams of different disciplines, adapting these tools to suit their needs.
Asana has proven to be a powerful tool that can be used for marketing tasks big and small. From creating and managing campaigns to tracking leads and measuring results, you can use Asana to streamline your marketing efforts and get more done in less time.
A few ways you can use Asana for marketing include:
- Create and manage marketing campaigns,
- Create content calendars.
- Collaborate with your team and other departments.
- Track all your campaigns in one place.
- Receive and give quick approvals.
- Accelerate creative briefs and action them faster.
- Create and track your marketing goals.
In this blog post, we’ll focus on how to use Asana’s main features to facilitate the management of your marketing activities.
Creating marketing campaigns and social calendars with Templates.
Whether you are managing a small marketing team or an entire marketing agency, chances are you’re planning, managing and tracking multiple campaigns all at once. Performing these tasks with antiquated spreadsheets can not only be time-consuming but also counterproductive.
Asana offers a wide variety (over 50) of project templates that fits the needs of all project teams within an organization. With 15 customizable and ready-made marketing templates, Asana gives you a head-start in establishing your project within the correct framework, adapting them to your campaign as you go. You can save those templates or duplicate them for similar campaigns, which will help you cut down on planning time and standardize your processes.
Once your campaign concludes, you can archive the project on Asana for future reference. As time goes by, you’ll build a library of templates for every marketing event/activity that you can improve on them with every use.
Accelerating the creative process with Forms, Proofing and Approvals.
We can all agree that writing creative briefs and sending feedback back and forth is the most tedious process in marketing. This lack of alignment can lead to wasted time and missed deadlines that could easily impact your campaign’s launch date and cause an immense amount of stress to your team.
Three different features in Asana streamline and speed up this process. Let’s start with Forms. The Asana Forms feature standardizes the creative intake process by gathering the critical details teams need to centralize their work in one place. You can create one standard creative brief form on Asana for your team to use whenever the need for creative assets arises. Once the form is completed, the design team is automatically informed of the new task, asset details and due date to get started on the design immediately. This way, no form, email or request is lost in the mix.
Once the first draft of the design is ready, the marketing team is able to provide feedback directly on the images with the Proofing feature. A subtask is created for each piece of feedback so that the creator can track and implement it as needed. Even better, with Asana’s powerful integrations, these comments can be viewed directly on Adobe Creative Cloud files.
Finally, when all edits are implemented, the marketing team can give their final sign-off with Approvals. In Asana, Approvals help users quickly hear back about their requests and assets that need approval. It's easy for approvers to see what's needed of them, and they have a clear path to follow. If the design requires approvals from multiple team members, you can create a subtask to the main approval parent task and assign them to each member to track their approvals in one place.
Tracking campaign progress with Custom Fields and Portfolios.
One of Asana’s game-changing Premium features that will help you track your marketing campaign's progress is Custom Fields. Custom Fields let you add additional data to tasks in your Asana projects. You can create a field for stage, priority, cost, or anything else that’s important to your workflow, team, and company. This allows individuals to have clarity on work happening across their Organization.
You can also organize tasks in a particular project with custom fields. For example, if you want to learn which tasks are urgent, you can filter the project to only display high-priority tasks to focus on. This allows you to spot bottlenecks and quickly resolve them.
Another Premium feature that helps you monitor all your campaigns at a glance is Portfolios. Portfolios act like a dashboard that gives you a comprehensive overview of all your campaigns, including their status, the percentage of tasks completed, deadlines and priorities. If a campaign has tasks missing their deadlines, you can update the campaign status to “at risk” to notify everyone working on the campaign and have them prioritize their tasks.
Automate marketing workflows with Rules.
Process automation has become a staple in every future-forward company. Employees no longer want to spend time on manual tasks that take away from their focus, delegating these tasks to smart tools. For your marketing team especially, you want them to concentrate their time and effort on thinking creatively and coming up with out-of-the-box ideas.
Asana has made it easy for you to automate routine tasks and reduce bottlenecks with Rules. This feature allows you to automate where tasks can go when they are marked complete or assign people to a task if it reaches a certain stage in the process. For instance, if a copy is approved, you can use Rules to automatically assign post scheduling to the content team without having to send emails or messages to inform them of the approval. You will find your process moving smoothly from one individual to another, saving you and your team valuable time.
In conclusion, Asana is a great tool for marketing teams. It can help optimize your workflow by providing a centralized place to plan your campaigns, share files, and collaborate with team members.
Ready to get clarity? Book a call with us to get you and your team started with Asana.
