Campaign Management

No matter what kind of campaign you're managing, you need a clear plan to make it a success. Read below to find out how to keep moving pieces on track, hit deadlines and launch your best campaign yet. 

What is a marketing campaign?

A campaign is a time-bound initiative that serves a clear goal and strategy and involves execution across either a single channel or multiple channels (e.g. TV, email, radio, social, etc.)

A marketing campaign is commonly used to describe the strategic planning and execution of activities for a specific objective (e.g. to raise awareness of a product, drive user engagement, generate leads, etc.) It includes a plan for which assets your team will create, how you’ll share them with your audience, and what your marketing goals are for the product or initiative that you’re launching. 

It should include a marketing brief, outlining the goal, timeline, budget, bill of materials, and channels you’ll be pursuing. You can use Asana to keep track of this work in one place.

Stage 1: Planning

Create an Asana project for your marketing campaign

Asana projects help you track progress, build schedules, map out channel strategies, and keep campaign assets together.

You can create a marketing campaign project in the following ways:

1. Get your work off to a quick start with our marketing campaign template. This can be customized to suit your team’s needs.
2. Import an existing spreadsheet which you currently use to track campaign work.
3. Create a brand new Asana project and start adding tasks.

Visit this article for tips on creating effective projects in Asana. If you’d prefer to build your own campaign project from scratch, or for general best practices when it comes to creating Asana projects, get started here.

Invite project stakeholders

For a smooth kickoff and effective campaign execution, consider inviting any agencies you’re working with to your project. We recommend adding these users as guests. Guests are free and do not count towards your seat limit.

Adding relevant agencies and stakeholders to the project allows them to see the overall campaign plan from the beginning, meaning you can set clear expectations about deadlines and deliverables.

Stage 2: Executing

Manage your marketing campaign

The goal of campaign management is to ensure that deliverables and results are achieved on time, within scope as well as budget. Now that you’ve built your marketing campaign project, these tips will help you manage the project as work gets underway.

Create a campaign brief and outline project roles

Users that are working on the campaign usually reference the brief constantly to ensure they're staying true to the overall goal and message. Putting the brief in the overview tab of the project makes it easily accessible to everyone involved. If you create your campaign brief in a Google doc, make sure to include the link in the project overview making it easy to locate.

Set project roles in the overview tab to ensure people know who to reach out to for approvals or questions.

Choose a default project view that best suits your needs

List view

List view allows you to view your project in the style of a to-do list. There are a variety of ways to sort and filter your list of tasks. Some people like to set the order manually, while others want tasks to be automatically sorted by a characteristic like due date or assignee.

Board view

Board view lets you organize your work like sticky notes that you can easily move work across sections. This view offers a clean, visual overview with the same power as a project in list view. You can add items to your board, then drag and drop to move tasks around or track it through multiple stages.

Timeline view

Marketing campaigns have many critical deadlines leading up to launch day. Timeline view can help you map these out before you start to ensure everything runs smoothly. Dependencies help to clearly indicate work that is impacting or being impacted by another task. Timeline helps you create realistic deadlines, spot timing conflicts and make adjustments as work progresses. You can also use timeline for a more visual view of task priority by setting colors for custom fields to help you better visualize plans and spot blockers based on those colors.

Calendar view

View your project's calendar to keep track of important deadlines and milestones. It’s important to note that only tasks and subtasks with added due dates that are associated with the project will show on the project calendar view. Subtasks will need to be manually added to the project in order for them to appear on its calendar view.

Gantt view

Gantt view equips project managers with the tools to visualize and manage project plans effectively, offering insight into task durations, delivery dates, dependencies, and baseline of your project plan.

Capture brief details using forms

Creative briefs help marketing teams capture important details about the campaign goals, audience, and requirements. To avoid delays and to help keep information in one place, create a creative brief form that’s directly connected to your campaign project.

Forms can be submitted by anyone—even if they don’t use Asana—by sending the form link. Once submitted, the form becomes a task in your campaign project so it can be prioritized and triaged accordingly.

Prevent duplicate work with multi-homing

Campaign work often ties into other marketing activities—maybe as part of a product launch or recruiting efforts. Without Asana, teams may not see the work happening in other projects or initiatives, leading to duplicate work. Prevent duplicate work by tracking campaign tasks in more than one project using multi-homing. Multi-homing avoids duplication by centralizing work; keeping various teams in the loop without providing individual updates. 

Multi-homing means adding the same task to multiple projects in Asana. Every change made to the task, such as comments, attachments, changes to due dates, etc., will be reflected across all projects, eliminating the need to update the task in each project individually. You can read more about a task's associated projects here.

To add tasks to multiple projects:

1. Use the shortcut  Tab + P and then type the name of any additional projects you want to add a task to.
2. You can also click the three dot icon and select Add to another project.

Hit deadlines with clear reviews and approvals

You can use Asana to provide and incorporate campaign feedback. Make use of the features below to create a workflow for your campaign management project and help move the approval process forward clearly and quickly.

Rules and custom fields

Add rules to your project so that tasks automatically get assigned to the right people, completed, or moved to different project sections as they progress. Rules can be used to automatically update work, notify teams, request changes, streamline routine tasks, etc. 

Use custom field notifications to keep stakeholders in the loop about progress. They’ll get notified when fields are updated from Feedback needed to Approved, for example. Adding a priority custom field to your campaign project allows you to prioritize each task so teammates are clear on where they should focus their attention. You can sort your project by priority to see highest priority tasks at the top, making sure they’re on track.

Approvals and proofing

Use approvals to make it clear when assets are ready for final sign-off. If an asset requires approval from multiple stakeholders, consider adding approval subtasks to a parent task containing the asset. Proofing allows reviewers to directly leave feedback on images. Each piece of feedback creates an actionable subtask so the creator can track and implement feedback as needed.

Our integration with Adobe Creative Cloud allows creators to pull up feedback directly in the Adobe app, saving time on context and tool switching.

Save time by planning future campaigns with project templates

Though each campaign can vary, there are usually core tasks that come up every time, or for each campaign type. Instead of spending time recreating the plan for each campaign or keeping a template in a document that’s disconnected from work files and instructions, you can build and save your campaign templates in Asana.

1. Build out your core campaign work as tasks in a project. Unless the same person completes the same task every time, do not assign tasks or add due dates at this stage.
2. Click the drop-down arrow beside the project name and choose Save as template.
3. If you want to restrict who can modify the template, you can edit the project permissions.
4. You can use your template for every campaign. To use your template, click the orange + Create button, select Project, then Use a template to search through your template library.
5. As you continue to refine your campaign activities, you can update your template as needed.

Stage 3: Tracking and reporting

Reporting on campaign work and progress

Use reporting to measure campaign performance and make data-informed decisions.

Creating charts on your campaign management projects will allow you to understand, track, and compare important data.

When creating projects, you should think about helpful custom fields, as these customfields will then power your dashboards and allow you to easily report on custom fields throughout your project.

Post regular status updates

As your campaign work progresses, you can head to the overview tab to post status updates and see a running list of project activity. You can drag and drop highlights into your status updates to share charts or milestones. Asana will save your status update template if you want to follow the same format every time.

Avoid blockers using Smart answers

Use natural language to ask Asana questions, and get timely answers and insights about your project, helping you to identify blockers, and determine next steps. Smart answers can help you to spot risks in the campaign, helping clients stay on track.

Use your project as a meeting agenda

Regular team meetings help you check in on progress and cohesion. Using your campaign project as a meeting agenda on calls with your agency or cross-functional partners makes it easier to see where work stands, and what topics should be covered. This allows you to focus on discussing strategies and ideas instead of doing general updates around the room.

During the meeting, create tasks for action items as they come up so they don’t get forgotten. Assign them directly to the person responsible for taking action.

Manage staffing across campaigns using portfolios and workload

Team leads often use meetings, emails, or spreadsheets, to request status updates or get a sense of team bandwidth which can be time consuming and inaccurate. 

Use portfolios to monitor the health of projects holistically. Creating a portfolio with your content calendar and other relevant campaign projects means you can see the status of included projects, important deadlines, priorities, project owners and connected goals at a glance.

Use the workload tab to visualize your team’s capacity across these projects based on tasks already assigned to them in Asana, helping to make informed staffing decisions and keep workloads balanced. You can add effort custom fieldsacross portfolio projects to get a better sense of the total hours or effort level going into each task.