Asana Together in Berlin: 3 takeaways for driving marketing effectiveness through teamwork

This week the Asana Together World Tour landed in Berlin where we hosted nearly one hundred customers for a night of learning and storytelling around managing modern marketing teams. While each attendee brought their own unique experiences to the table for discussion, the common theme we heard throughout was that there’s far too much “work about work” in marketing.

Modern day marketing teams are juggling a lot. They’re expanding reach across channels and geographies, adopting new technologies, and producing more compelling content faster and more cost-efficiently than ever before. To do so, they have to work effectively as a team. Read on to learn our top three teamwork takeaways from the event.

1. Reduce friction

Reducing work about work and organizational friction is a chief concern for many marketers, including Therese Sivertsson, a video producer at Blinkist. Often one of the greatest sources of friction in marketing is creative production, specifically the struggle to make the creative production process leaner and more agile. To accomplish this, Sivertsson and her team have adopted a three-tiered strategy for working together seamlessly.

• Briefing. A standard brief template is used for all content production and an Asana project is used as the central collection method. By standardizing the process, Sivertsson is able to ensure that all communication and content is centralized—and nothing is lost in translation.
• Production. All creative content is visualized using Boards view  and all feedback is centralized in an Asana project. This ensures transparency and allows all team members to understand the status of work.
• Delivery. All creative content is uploaded to a final delivery folder. This delivery folder functions as a central source of truth.

2. Empower teammates

While reducing the friction of the marketing production process is essential, it’s critical not to lose sight of the human element. Lena Steffen, an IT consultant at Cloudwürdig spoke of the importance of empowering team members to be effective from anywhere. She highlighted the fact that teamwork has become more complex in recent years-—and she’s right.

Teams are increasingly globally distributed and more diverse. 70% of global employees work remotely at least once a week and 50% work remotely half the week, which means effective teamwork can easily be stifled by a lack of responsibility, cultural friction, geographic silos, or lack of agency.

To overcome these challenges Steffen suggests providing guidance to team members on how to use the various tools at their disposal. For example, let them know which tools should be used for synchronous versus asynchronous communication, and establish codes of conduct and processes for effectively managing the inevitable misunderstandings that emerge in teamwork settings.

3. Facilitate continuous improvement

The people-focus that Steffen underscored is a flagship focus for Ryan Lott, the team manager of process excellence of campaign and content solutions at Zalando Lounge. Lott spoke of the importance of a continuous improvement process. In the context of marketing, continuous improvement helps teams achieve predictable and on-time content delivery. Lott also discussed the importance of looking beyond the tools and focusing on the mindset of the team. For example, it’s essential for teams to be crystal clear on the status of content, what the approval process entails, and who is directly responsible for each piece of work.

At the end of the day, a marketing team’s most effective tool for getting the job done isn’t technology at all, it’s teamwork. When people invest in removing friction, empowering each other, and continuously improving, they can achieve amazing results.

If you’d like to connect with our team and your local Asana Together community members, visit our events page to register for an Asana Together event near you!