Marketing Strategic Planning

Marketing teams are constantly challenged with creating and executing effective strategies that drive business growth. In this article, we'll illustrate how a marketing agency can harness the power of Asana for their strategic planning needs.

Setting clear objectives with Asana Goals

The agency’s mission is to empower businesses with data-driven marketing strategies that drive growth and exceed client expectations. One of their company goals is to improve client retention rate to 90% by the end of the year.

They use Asana Goals to connect their work to their client retention goal. To create a company goal, navigate to Goals on the sidebar and click the Company goals tab. From here, you can create a new company goal and choose a progress source such as sub-goals, projects or tasks. Learn more here.

Organizing and tracking work with portfolios and projects

The agency will launch a campaign for a client that includes social media advertising and an event. They create a portfolio with two projects; one for social media and the other for event planning. These two projects will be a progress source for the agency’s retention rate goal. Having both projects in a portfolio will allow the agency to see how they’re progressing in a single view and drill-down for a more detailed view.

To ensure they stay on track, the team sets milestones within their project. They establish milestones for campaign launch dates and major content releases. The agency also uses timeline view to ensure they meet critical deadlines.

Using custom fields for budgeting

Custom fields allow you to effectively manage your budgeting process. The agency can create an Estimated Cost and Actual Cost custom field for both projects and view the spend for each task, enabling them to allocate and track budget resources for the various activities.

By using these custom fields, you can maintain a detailed and organized overview of your expenses, ensuring that you stay within budget and make informed financial decisions throughout the execution of the marketing plan. This data can be easily accessed and used for budget reporting and analysis.

Forms and rules

You can use forms to streamline communication with clients and gather project-specific information. Forms allow the agency to collect structured information from clients, team members, or stakeholders when initiating new projects or campaign requests. This ensures that all necessary details are captured right from the start, reducing the risk of miscommunication or missing information.

Furthermore, rules can automate repetitive tasks and enforce specific workflows. For example, the agency can set up rules to automatically assign tasks to the appropriate team members when a new request is submitted via the form. This saves time and ensures that tasks are distributed efficiently, aligning with the agency's mission of exceeding client expectations and improving client retention.

Managing your team’s workload

Balancing workload is essential to prevent burnout and maximize productivity. It ensures that tasks are distributed effectively and team members are not overwhelmed.

Workload allows team leads to see the capacity and workload of team members across multiple projects. This view helps with workload distribution, ensuring that no team member is overburdened while working towards the company’s objectives. By efficiently managing workloads in Asana, the agency can enhance productivity, meet deadlines, and achieve its strategic goals.

Reporting

Dashboards can help you visualize data and report on progress. For example, the marketing agency can build a chart specifically dedicated to budget reporting for each marketing initiative, as well as create charts to compare estimated vs. actual expenses. Remember, custom fields power reporting, so be sure to add custom fields to your projects.

Integrating with Power BI

To make data-driven decisions, the agency integrates Asana with Power BI. This allows them to analyze campaign performance, track KPIs, and adjust strategies accordingly. They can visualize data within Asana for a holistic view of their marketing efforts.

Integrating Asana with Power BI allows the agency to pull data directly from Asana into Power BI for advanced reporting and visualization. This means that the agency can consolidate data on client retention rates, budget tracking, task completion, and more, and transform it into interactive dashboards and reports.