Content Calendar

Using an effective content calendar in Asana can streamline your content creation process, enhance collaboration across teams and ensure your marketing efforts are organized and impactful. Below are some tips on how to get started, including useful strategies, features and best practices exemplified through Content Manager Michelle’s role. 

Getting started

Project templates and tasks templates in Asana are pre-designed frameworks that you can use as starting points, saving time and ensuring consistent task structures. For example, Michelle creates a project template with standard tasks, deadlines and instructions allowing her to easily replicate the structure for each new project without starting from scratch. Michelle also creates a task template which she will use for adding each individual piece of content to her content calendar. Using this template ensures that every piece of content added is standardized to include all the right information from the beginning, helping to avoid duplicate work.  

1. Create a project and name it: Content Calendar [XXX]. Then use sections to distinguish the types of content. 
2. Within the project create individual tasks for each piece of content you and your team will create. Create a task template with each individual step, including task dependencies, to tie all these tasks together and determine the order tasks need to be completed. This will also help to keep all tasks consistent throughout the project. 
3. Add stakeholders and individuals as collaborators to tasks where you may want input or if someone should stay informed.  

Asana has some ready-made project planning templates, to choose from depending on the content you are planning to produce. You can customize these to suit your organization, content type and preferences. Choose from editorial calendar, social media calendar, email marketing calendar or browse through our library of options. 

Best Practices

A content calendar centralizes deliverable planning, making it a crucial tool for understanding launch timelines and managing content, avoiding the need to sift through emails, spreadsheets, or documents.

Provide clarity and visualize progress 

Michelle creates a project dashboard and sets team goals around campaigns with automatic progress roll-ups for real-time metric visibility to stakeholders. She also uses custom fields to add additional and colorful data to tasks in her Asana projects. She creates a field for stage, priority, brand and cost and then uses these data fields to categorize, search, sort and filter. Michelle multi-homes tasks related to campaigns, brands and individual projects for cross-team visibility, encouraging collaboration, and keeping tasks connected. 

Coordination and collaboration 

Scheduling and coordinating key dates, including product launches and partner contributions, is important to ensure timely content preparation. Michelle’s team plans evergreen and ad-hoc posts to engage audiences and uses task comments for team collaboration and idea generation with cross-functional teams. Sometimes the team want to store new topics or creative for long-term use and reference, so they create a separate project to act as a repository. Now they can multi-home important pieces and @ mention different versions for context. 

Report and update

To keep track of efforts and maintain metrics Michelle uses project dashboards to zoom out from the day-to-day and quickly understand project progress. Through a variety of charts, the team can see the mix of content against audiences, channels and stages, which will reduce the amount of time spent pulling together updates for stakeholders. Michelle created portfolios to track the progress of other projects that are dependent on her content calendar project. This allows her to leverage workload to get a holistic view of the individual and collective capacity of her team. She can also use this portfolio to organize her team's work and create a central destination for stakeholders to understand what is launching and when. 

Utilize integrations

Michelle centralizes her content planning with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 integrations making content easy to find and review. She can track the same piece of content in multiple projects so that there is only one record needed. The content team turns ideas, work requests, and action items from Slack into trackable tasks and comments in Asana. The designers add creative and mock-ups to their tasks, and Michelle uses proofing to leave specific actionable feedback on images. Check out our current integrations to ensure all your relevant work is connected and accessible. 

Streamline progress

When Michelle created her team’s first content calendar, she set up a form to collect content requests ensuring all necessary information is captured up front. When a writer’s content is ready for review, they set up an approval task, as an actionable item. Approvals provide clarity on the status of a task, this shows the team if the content is ready or if changes have been requested.

Michelle uses Asana Intelligence to organize content requests, prioritize tasks and streamline the review process, as well as draft status updates for stakeholders and smart digests to see the latest activity from her content writers. Asana Intelligence features save the team time and provide insights into project progress.