At Digital Next, we use Asana to monitor project progress. At first, it started with just task management. Then, as both we and Asana evolved, we gradually shifted over to Asana to manage our entire production pipeline. As a digital marketing agency, each project comes with many moving parts. Of which, for every unique element to a campaign, there are also many identical workflows. By encompassing personal task management, holistic project workboards and the ability to add collaborators with ease, Asana provides great flexibility for each participant within a project alongside the wider project objectives. It also serves, to some degree, as a performance tracking tool for our internal teams.
Pros:
One of the biggest positives of using Asana for a digital marketing agency (in particular an SEO agency) is the ability to template project roadmaps. Although campaigns are unique, each campaign requires almost identical processes to achieve desired outcomes. As such, setting up a new project can be as simple as duplicating a pre-existing template and making small modifications. Within a matter of moments, you are up and running with clear objectives and a roadmap to a successful campaign.
Furthermore, with a variety of specialist skills within our agency, the moment our templated project board is duplicated, we can be confident in knowing that the right person is assigned a particular task. By assigning tasks to the right individuals within our template project board, these individuals are immediately assigned to complete any tasks that fall under their area of expertise without any brain power required to figure out who is going to complete key aspects of the campaign.
Another reason why we enjoy Asana so much is the ability to work with external contractors with ease. Asana is super simple to use and adding a collaborator to a particular task is as simple as adding an email address. This collaborator then only has access to the task assigned to them which keeps the privacy of the bigger picture project entact should that be required.
Cons:
Although there are many third party integrations available with Asana, the output of these integrations are actually quite limited. For example, we recently integrated Asana with Slack; our communications channel. However, while the promise of always being up to date with notifications from a single dashboard sounded great, the limited functionality of being notified when tasks have been completed or when tasks have been assigned within Slack actually just created more mess. Rather than keeping our teams up to date, it was just too much noise.
Additionally, it is very apparent at times that Asana was primarily a personal task management tool stepping into a project management world. For example, unlike Monday.com, Asana requires you to open new tabs to see different project visualisations. This can be super frustrating when you just want all the information within a single browser. However, it’s not such a big problem for well organised teams.
