Blog Post

Back to Basics with Asana

Francesca Alexander • Mar 23, 2022


In this blog, we discover how to use Asana to make social media consistent and easy.

Asana is a free tool that you can use for your business and it’s absolutely what we use for your clients in our agency side of socialglobalgrind.com. 


I’m really excited about this one, kind of nerdy-excited because it’s doing what I love. I’ve been teaching online for quite a while now, I’d taken a pause in 2014 then I started teaching on a university level here in New Zealand with social media and marketing, and then went client-side and had a series of directorships in different companies, startups, bigger global companies and even in the film industry doing social media, so this is everything I know that has been very successful. 


I’m very excited so in this blog we’re going to go over how I use Asana from an agency perspective and as a small business owner. These tips will help you organise a campaign and asana; the first things we do with a new client is we go over goals and we go over particular content pillars that will support those goals. 

 

GOALS

We will look at those goals and then we’ll strategize and introduce different concepts to the client and really introduce what collaboration feels like. This includes getting their perspective and also, depending on the company, if they have a frontline sales team, we will get their perspective as well because usually they are the goldmine. The frontliners are the goldmine to any company when it comes to marketing so definitely involve them to see what’s going on and then we really start to see what the strategy should evolve into. 


We start our board for clients using asana and we use the board method not the list method so visually they can see where we’re at in the progress of the campaign. There are tons of different programmes to use like trello, monday etc but Asana is something I keep on coming back to, I think I’ve been using for 10 years because it’s so reliable; yes the pro version is amazing but the free version is also great and I always start all my clients on a free version and depending on their needs, we can upgrade it accordingly. 


BOARD METHOD

We create new board in the projects section and basically there is a little column on the left hand side, where you can create all the different projects within your business: 

 

  1. Social media calendar 
  2. Production (this is for the internal teams that we use at the agency)
  3. Content Pillars 
  4. Image library 
  5. Comms (where we store all of the incoming emails from a client)
  6. Published 



SETTING THE TONE WITH IMAGERY 

On the board method you’re able to view all the social media that you’re going to create and you can start pulling images and creating an image bank that you can use as inspiration and to influence the tone of the campaign. It is really important for brands that the tone is set in advance to imagery being created and here’s some ways to help the creative team: 


  1. Share examples of competitors brands 
  2. Insert inspiration from brands you do like and want to emulate
  3. Include key brand guidance on colours, fonts, imagery 


We share all of this information with our internal team on the agency side and we also relay all the client goals and then we start the production phase. 


PRODUCTION

This is where production typically gets a little tricky especially with multiple stakeholders, but this is also why asana is so great as a tool: 


  1. It sets clear timelines 
  2. Clear communication 
  3. Timestamps everything! (Super useful for clarifying feedback and order of production)
  4. Avoids multiple revisions as feedback is done in one go
  5. Keeps everyone (agency and client) accountable 


CAMPAIGN ANALYTICS

After about 3 months we can really dive into the analytics of a campaign, and using Asana will really help you go back to those content pillars and review how they are working against the content you’ve posted. One of the things that will help you focus on a campaign is consistency and the positive results this will bring. Asana can help you with that as you can assign owners for tasks, send automated emails chasing due dates etc. We like to produce work two weeks in advance so that if a client is off sick or another project takes precedence at that time, we can continue with scheduling posts so that there is no impact on the campaign. 


PRODUCED CONTENT

At the end of month I will go ahead and move all of the previously posted content down to the produced content library so that our clients can reflect on the content and review it in line with their goals and analytics. 


If you are a small business owner that needs a system that delivers an easy campaign consistently, speak to francesca@socialglobalgrind.com to learn more about how we work with Asana.



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