How I Used Asana to Create a Dream Marketing Management System
It’s well known that Asana can save you and your team a shed load of time when used effectively. With a B2B client I recently focussed on developing a working project management suite using Asana’s automation capability. This streamlined their internal processes, ensured that the wider team used the same system and did lots of the legwork of chasing things up.
First, I created a company-wide calendar with all publication dates - this was so everyone had a single source of truth for all external marketing communications.
Secondly, I created a production calendar with repetitive tasks: weekly, monthly and annual. This also included things like special occasions, industry events and celebratory dates. For any dates that were not 100% accurate like events that may vary depending on how the calendar and days of the week sync up annually, I created reminders to double-check several months ahead.
Then I created various workflow automations such a repetitive events marketing prep and a content form to capture ideas from the team of specialists.
How I automated the marketing of a quarterly event in Asana:
This particular client ran their own webinars four times per year as a way to generate leads and so the pattern and cadence of this became easy to repeat. These are the subtasks I created under a quarterly, repeating master task.
Three months ahead: 1) Choose topic, event name, host, date, time and outline. 2) Create landing page for webinar sign-ups 3) Create email footer sign up link and circulate to the team.
Two months ahead: 1) Develop and schedule a series of social media posts highlighting the topic’s outline and what the audience will learn, 2) Add event landing page to industry discussion boards, 3) Create a LinkedIn event page.
One month ahead: 1) Work with host to design slides in line with brand guidelines, 2) increase the frequency of social media, 3) Add paid social media advertising, if required.
One week before: 1) Send reminders to participants with link to access the webinar
One day after the event: 1) Upload recording to YouTube, 2) Thank you email to all signups and include recording link. 3) Transcribe the webinar and edit into a blog to repurpose the content, 4) Schedule webinar recording on social media for following week.
How I created a form to capture content ideas in Asana:
When you have an engaged team of specialist, content ideas can come from anyone at any time. I created a workflow in Asana to capture content ideas that requested the following from submitters:
Topic, outline and key message
Who would be writing the piece - them or marketing team
How urgent was the piece - today, this week, month, or quarter
What type of content might this be (if they have an idea)
What external links are suggested for research
Did they have an idea in mind for imagery to accompany the piece
This was then automatically put into my to do list as an action to work out which of the core content themes and pillars this piece would fit into, and schedule the task if approved.
It’s easy for marketing to work in a silo and so finding creative and clever routes to integrate marketing communications across the company is vital to breed engagement with internal and external communications.
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