Digital Agency Marketing Department

The marketing department in an IT company is always a task with an asterisk. We have at least 7 customers: owner, development director, operating director, sales department, project department, development department and accounting department. The chaotic flow of burning tasks that are important to do “right now” hardens for the time being, and then quickly burns out the team, sprinkling ashes on all deadlines and the quality of work. In this article, I will show why we are still alive and how we organized the marketing department in the Asana platform.

I am the head of Portland digital agency. In the photo I am on the left. We work at the intersection of commerce and IT, implement amoCRM, Asana and other cloud solutions, without which, in a pandemic and overheated markets, it is generally not clear how to survive, let alone grow.

Tasks

We have a lot of tasks (I was surprised too), there are only 8 hands, and even fewer heads. Marketers are more likely to become universal soldiers, whose goal is to ensure the flow of quality leads and increase the company’s revenue. To do this, you need to package the site, record a video for the YouTube channel, and develop commercial proposals, do not forget about social networks, about cool stickers for internal marketing, and, of course, do not stop the production of selling auto funnels with bots, retargeting and catch-up offers in e-mail newsletters.

We in the company are also responsible for training courses, external events, corporate culture. In general, we guys are multifunctional, but still alive. And if we are pulled in different directions, then we will inevitably burst.

Why are we still whole and quite happy

For project and task management more than 5 years ago, the company chose the Asana platform. All divisions work there, including sales, manufacturing, development and accounting. The general director of the company, Konstantin Kuznetsov, even manages personal affairs there. But the focus of attention today is the marketing department. And how we manage projects and tasks in it.

All activities of the department are divided into global directions or Portfolios:

• GrowthHacking
• Moneymaking
• Team
• Content and Packaging
• Courses
• General and internal marketing
• Lead generation
• Events
• Founder’s personal brand

Until I tell you what these statuses and multi-colored dice are. We look at the structure of the department.

Inside the Portfolio there are Projects corresponding to the line of business. That is, the Portfolio is divided into specific blocks of work. Each block has its own responsible person. For example, the portfolio Content and Packaging includes 8 projects:

Service development Quality control

• CRM support service
• Website development (for interaction with a design and layout contractor)
• Websites and Landings (for internal tasks of page packing)
• Content and SMM
• Video content
• Packing everything
• 100 Ideas for CRM (Product Book)

Each project has a responsible person who writes a weekly report on what was done within the project, but more on that later.

The project consists of sections with tasks. We tried different methodologies, but most of all the work with sprints, one calendar month long, stuck.
There are tasks with general information on the project. Ideas for articles, useful links, results of brainstorms are what we regularly use in tasks in this area.

Next is the Task Queue. I think it’s understandable. Tasks that we will take to work, but not today.

Next is the current month. Towards the end of this month, we will start planning the load for the next one and a new section will appear called August 2021. So far there is July 2021 with completed and unfulfilled tasks. June, May and so on underneath.

And finally, within each Project there are Tasks. And here I will tell you a little more.

What is a task in RocketSales

For example, there is a task “Write 3 articles on Asana”. We bother a lot with time spent on tasks. Not because we want to control employees, but because

there are bonus tasks for the performance of which employees receive additional motivation,
so we can analyze which directions we spent time on in the past month and how they grew,
You can estimate the time and cost of a new task by looking at how long it took to complete a similar task last time. At the top of the task card there is the project she belongs to the total time of all employees spent on the tasks of this project, time worked on this particular task, employees who took part in the tasks of the project and in the specific task.

If you hover over time on the field, a plate opens with detailed information on the time worked by each participant and on the bonus motivation that everyone earned by completing the task.
We decompose large tasks into subtasks. Different people can be responsible for them, the system separates the time and those responsible, and also allows you to set separate deadlines for each subtask. The number in the circle shows the number of hours spent, the color of the circle changes from green to red as the actual number of hours worked approaches the planned one. I can just look at the list of subtasks and see that they have not even begun to write an article about onboarding (there is no circle with time, so the time for this task has not yet been written off).

Communication

We conduct all communication on the task directly in Asana. Not in corporate and personal chats, but in the comments to the problem. There is a strict rule “If something is not fixed in Asana, it does not exist.”

The screenshot shows that the employee himself makes the assessment by the hour. The manager may not agree on the declared time for execution, but this happens extremely rarely, because everyone in the team takes into account their working time and knows roughly how quickly they will cope with a specific task.

Daily work with tasks
Four of them have more than 20 active projects in our department. Of course, it would be inconvenient to open all 20 projects every day and collect a list of your tasks from there. Therefore, each employee has personal task lists.
This is a separate project named after an employee. When an employee receives a task, he must add it to the lists.

Personal Task List

General list of tasks of the marketing department – list of project tasks within which this task is set. Tasks in Asana can be attached to multiple projects at the same time, so, for example, we have the ability to select specific contractors’ tasks from the general list of marketing tasks and create separate boards for them, focusing on what they have to do.

Every morning we start not with coffee, but with viewing our tasks in Asana. We update statuses, deadlines, push tasks in which we are observers, unsubscribe comments in tasks where feedback is required.

General list of tasks of the marketing department

Of course, as a leader, I need to see how many tasks are currently in the department’s work. And plan tasks in advance for the next month. In addition, you need to record requests from other departments (as you remember, we have seven regular internal customers), evaluate them in terms of time and put them in a queue.

Neither personal boards of employees, nor individual projects provide an opportunity to quickly analyze the status of projects and department tasks. Therefore, we came up with the General List of Tasks for the Marketing Department.

All tasks of marketers from all projects of the company are collected here. In order not to shock you immediately, we have temporarily collapsed all sections.

Inbox

The Inbox section contains all tasks from other departments, which we will have to evaluate in terms of deadlines. Once a week at the planning meeting of the department, we analyze this section, set deadlines. We take on burning tasks and tasks that significantly affect the financial result immediately.

The Objectives section is our motivation. There are 7 global goals for the marketing department for 2021.

The July Goals section are the key challenges we are focusing on this month.

Then there are the sprints corresponding to the calendar months. You can see how many tasks were closed in the past or any other month we need.