How Asana uses work management for content marketing

Content marketing is a juggling act. Often, you’re working on several projects at once where you’re simultaneously managing stakeholders, reviews, and approvals across the organization. In the process, it’s easy for things to get lost in the shuffle. 

But there’s a smarter way to work. With the right tools and systems, you can streamline your business’s content marketing into a smooth, efficient operation.

At Asana, we tackle this maze of information and workflows with the technology that was built for this level of speed and detail—our own. Here’s how Asana uses Asana for content marketing.

The challenges of content marketing

Content marketing is the backbone of many marketing programs. It’s the team’s responsibility to curate and create an endless supply of materials like blog posts, ebooks, and social posts, that the rest of the company can leverage to promote its product.

The result is a dizzying array of workflows and processes, with the added challenge of connecting outputs back to results and business priorities. There’s a lot to navigate.

According to Matt Maynard, the Head of Brand & Advertising at Asana, one of the biggest challenges his team faces is coordination. With content marketing, you’re not just coordinating the many deliverables you’re responsible for, but also the teams you rely on to bring them to life.

We’re constantly building new campaigns, collaborating with teams across the company, and managing a lot of deadlines. If we’re not on top of every detail of our content marketing process, and aligned across teams, it’s easy for even the most important elements to slip through the cracks.”

Which is why they don’t try to do it completely on their own.

6 ways Asana streamlines content marketing with Asana

Content marketing may be hard, but that doesn’t mean your teams have to struggle. There are tools and technology that can help you finish projects faster, collaborate more efficiently with other teams, and build processes for a more effective content marketing team.

To run our content marketing at Asana, we use—you guessed it—Asana. As a full enterprise work management platform, Asana has been pivotal in helping the content marketing team move faster and produce better work. 

Here’s how the team designs planning, production, and workflows in Asana to build a more effective program.

1. Connect the work to our highest priority goals

There’s a lot of reasons you might need to produce specific content. At Asana, the team tries to orient their work around shared goals. These goals all ladder up to higher-level initiatives set by the CMO. Likewise, editorial planning always starts with a goal. To connect this goal back to the team’s work, they publish their goals in Asana. The result—faster, easier decision-making for the team’s leader.

“Once we set goals in Asana, the team connects relevant work,” says Maynard. “This way I know we’re always working on the most important work, without me needing to reach out and ask directly.”

2. Structure and categorize work with relevant tags

Dumping a ton of information into a project won’t get you very far. At best, you have a repository for your work, at worst, you’re left with a messy jumble of thoughts and ideas no one can use.

In content marketing, it’s crucial to keep all the information relevant to your work organized and easily accessible. That’s where the calendar view comes in. 

In the calendar view, the content marketing team at Asana can use built-in features that quickly help the team tag and categorize information in almost any way they want. For example, they can tag which tasks or projects are relevant to a specific campaign or target audience. So if they’re creating a video for the campaigns team that’s targeting an executive marketing audience, they can label each of these items so it’s clearly defined.

Not only do these custom fields help simplify work and enable the team to move faster, but it also ensures their work is aligned with key priorities, audiences, and topics.

3. Build templates to standardize repetitive tasks and streamline processes

Content marketing involves endless reviews and approvals. From editing content to coordinating approvals from leadership, you’re always in a state of receiving or implementing feedback. It’s a lot of work to keep tabs on, but laying a foundational system enables projects to flow effortlessly. 

At Asana, the team uses customized templates to fully standardize their processes. For example, when creating content, their template automates a workflow that includes drafting, review, and approval tasks. What’s more, the template ensures team members and stakeholders are looped in on only the tasks they need to see.

So when a writer is creating a blog post, they can easily start a new workflow using the template. The tasks will auto-populate and tag in relevant team members. Instead of having to remember to loop in their editor, the task is created for them. All they have to focus on is their most important work—creating. Because it’s already pre-set and designed, nothing gets missed. 

This provides the team full autonomy in their work. As Maynard notes, “this allows my team to fully own their work, while giving me peace of mind knowing everything will get done.” 

4. Leverage calendar view to provide clarity and visibility to all stakeholders

Keeping track of all the deliverables on a content marketing team isn’t easy.

That’s why it’s so valuable for team members and leaders alike to be able to zoom out and view timelines and deadlines from a high level. For content, that often means relying on content calendars where you can track, review, and share past and upcoming work.

Here’s how Asana’s content team approaches it:

• Lay out the full content calendar in Asana. This makes it easy to see any gaps in their content plan. 

• Reference the calendar to quickly review the team’s workload and adjust timelines as needed.

• Share with stakeholders who can instantly see publishing timelines, the target audience, channel, format, and any other details.

For Maynard, this has been invaluable in helping protect his time and support the most important work.

If our campaigns team wants to know what content is lined up for an upcoming launch, they can access it on their own without having to ask for a status update or meet with me. Ultimately, our editorial plan in Asana isn't just about managing content; it's about driving our business goals forward. With a big-picture view of our full content plan, I can ensure that every piece of work contributes to our company's strategic objectives.”

5. Keep work in one central space with integrations

Once you have your work organized and structured, the last thing you want is to hop between tools to manage it all. Having one workspace means fewer distractions and a smoother workflow. In Asana, the content marketing team uses integrations with Microsoft Office and Google suite to attach ongoing work to the relevant tasks. 

This means the team lead, other writers, editors, and any other stakeholder can communicate with comments and questions around different pieces of content in one calendar.

6. Use AI to track results and give status updates

Leaders need to see how content marketing is advancing business goals. 

At Asana, writers attach content performance data directly to each task. Then, they use one of Asana’s AI features, Smart status, to summarize the progress and performance in the content calendar and automatically share it with stakeholders. This creates a feedback loop where everyone on the team, and key stakeholders, understand how work supports business goals.

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Fewer to-do lists, more creativity

Content marketing needs to be measured and structured just like every other aspect of marketing. But it’s also inherently creative.

When it comes to crafting truly engaging and innovative content that your audience will love, your team needs to have the space and energy to tap into their creative reserves. By using a platform that simplifies workflows and processes, Asana’s content marketing team has more capacity to focus on the truly human work that only they can do.

See marketing planning in action

With Asana, marketing teams can connect work, standardize processes, and automate workflows—all in one place.

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