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Marketing projects can be large, intensive and fast paced, with a lot of moving parts involving both internal and external people and resources. With such demands placed on the modern marketer a tool that can meet these challenges is a vital part of the modern marketing toolkit. Unlike other work management tools, Asana was originally designed with marketeers in mind and this heritage is clear throughout, striking a balance between ease of use and sophistication that other tools are able to achieve as well.
The following steps are a quick way to get you up and running if your organisation is already using or looking to evaluate Asana.
1. Set Up Your Project
- The first thing we’ll need is a project to keep all our work (tasks) organised. This may sound simple, however I do see this tripping clients up. It may sound obvious, but consider what work you are grouping. A good tip is to look at the marketing templates for inspiration. Common templates for marketing include campaign tracking, event planning, and product launches; there are currently eighteen templates to choose from.
2. Define Tasks, sub-tasks and Milestones
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Tasks are just that, the work you need to do. They should be clearly defined and measurable so team members understand what it is they are working on. Assign each task to a team member with clear deadlines, it’s important to understand that a task can only be assigned to a single individual; this is the same in all work management tools and a core fundamental. Sub-tasks live “within” a task and further break down work that needs to be done, these can be assigned to different people. Milestones are significant points or stages in your project, which are visible in different areas of Asana, such as portfolios, which act as a collection of projects.
3. Organize with Sections
- Sections can be used in one of two ways. Either to “group” tasks, such as by department that is responsible for the work, or to reflect an underlying workflow, i.e. “to do”, “in progress”, “done”. For marketing projects, you might organise tasks by channels (e.g., social media, email marketing), phases (planning, execution, analysis), or priority levels. As well as sections, you have the ability to filter and sort tasks by specific fields.
4. Utilise Custom Fields
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Asana allows you to add custom fields to tasks, which can be used to track specific data like budget, marketing campaign, geographic region, or ROI. This feature is particularly useful for monitoring key metrics in marketing projects. Custom fields are also very useful when it comes to building powerful dashboards to give you and your team insights.
5. Dependencies
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You can create relationships between tasks so people can see what tasks may be waiting on other tasks. Dependencies are visible in the timeline features and allow some powerful abilities, such as automatically changing dates on depend tasks.
6. Timelines and Calendars
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The Timeline view lets you visualize your project schedule over time, making it easier to see overlaps or gaps in your plan. The Calendar view helps with time management, showing when tasks and milestones are due. Asana allows you to apply different colour codes to help make these views more meaningful by providing visual context.
7. Dashboards (reports)
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Dashboards provide a high-level view of project metrics, helping you monitor progress at a glance. This is a feature that we find clients routinely neglect, however when configured properly dashboard provide insight into projects that may not have been obvious until far too late. In marketing especially, keeping a close eye on your projects can be mean the difference between success and failure.
8. Permissions
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It is important to make sure that the people in your project belong there. Marketing projects can contain sensitive data and this is further complicated if you’re involving external third parties. Permissions can be tricky and as such are beyond the scope of this article, though you need to think carefully about them.
There is much more to Asana and projects, however this should be enough to quickly get up and running. Other areas of Asana that you should consider looking into are Teams (help organise your projects, members and project templates), portfolios and work capacity management. More than just Asana’s features, consideration should be given to project archiving policies, maintenance, etc.
BDQ are Asana Solution Partners and have trained technical consultants on staff available to answer any questions or comments you may have. If you have a topic related to using Asana for managing Marketing tasks that you would like us to cover, please get in touch. Let's talk about what you need.
