How to Use Asana to Plan Your Marketing Calendar

Whether you’re handling your company’s marketing yourself or you’re collaborating with a team to make it happen, one thing is for certain: having an organized system of planning your marketing activities, noting who’s responsible for them, and including any important information is crucial for ensuring you hit your marketing goals and stay consistent.

Although there are a variety of tools out there, the one that we’ve enjoyed the most, especially because of its user experience and collaboration features, is Asana.

If you’re considering making a change to a new system, get an inside look at how we plan our internal marketing calendar and activities at Dash of Social®.

Create a Separate Project for Each Marketing Activity

Within Asana, you’ll want to create a separate project for each marketing activity and color code them so when you look at the calendar view, you know what each task is for. We have the following projects set up:

• One-Time Projects: random business or marketing tasks that need to get done
• Sales: lead generation reminders, including following up with leads, reaching out to ideal clients, etc.
• PR: pitch reminders, including responding to HARO requests, pitching for podcasts or publications, etc.
• Blogging: new blogs that need to be written or old blogs that need to be updated
• Social Media: social media post ideas
• Email Marketing: newsletters that need to get sent or lead magnets that need to get created
• Podcast: podcast episode and guest planning (we are potentially launching a podcast here at Dash of Social®… stay tuned!)
• Internal Development + Growth: tasks that involve business development, such as taking courses, building networks, etc.

SEE MORE: Build Your Content Marketing Bank

When planning your marketing activities, make sure your default view under “My Tasks” is set to “Calendar,” as that makes it remarkably easy to see what you have coming up and when. Leaving it as “List” doesn’t give you the best visuals.

Have a Brainstorm Session

You’ve got your projects set up… but now what is your content going to be? That’s the hard part! We recommend having one big brainstorm session where you can identify overall topics that would be a good fit to include in your marketing activities, whether it’s for social media, your blog, your email list, PR, or even a mix of all of them.

Think about:

• Upcoming events you’re planning / attending
• Conversations you frequently have with your clients or customers
• Tips you’d like to share
• Resources or blogs you’ve previously published and can reshare
• Press features that are coming up

These will help you to identify consistent pillars that you can then refer to when creating your content.

Plot Ideas, Tasks, and Notes on the Calendar

Once you have an idea of what’s in the pipeline, you can start building out your marketing calendar. You’ll want to create some type of cadence to understand how often you’re completing certain tasks or creating specific content. Examples may be:

• Posting on social media daily, Monday-Friday
• Publishing new blog posts every other week
• Sending newsletters once per month
• Pitching publications every other day

This allows you to have a better sense of the days you should be planning these tasks for. Asana’s recurring task feature is incredibly helpful, too! Another great feature with the calendar view is you can easily drag and drop tasks from one day to another. We’re constantly moving social media post ideas around, so this makes it really easy for us to bump things down in order to make room for something coming up that’s more timely.

You’ll also want to loop in any key players who will be working on this marketing calendar with you. Whether it’s a VA or your marketing department colleagues, working within one marketing system makes it easy to collaborate and generate some high-quality ideas.

Stay Consistent

Consistency is key. If you find yourself pushing off your tasks, you’ll be left with a bunch of tasks with red due dates screaming at you that they’re overdue (yikes!). Staying on top of things ensures you’re building a rock solid online presence and hitting your marketing, development, and sales goals.

If it’s helpful, consider blocking off a few hours during one day each week (we do this every Friday) or one day each month where you go through Asana and start mapping things out. Getting into the habit of planning things in advance prevents projects and tasks from slipping through the cracks.

Do you use Asana or a similar project management system to track your marketing activities? Share it with us below in the comments, we’re always looking for new processes to implement!