Running a Facebook advertising campaign is a busy time for your business, and there are so many deliverables and communications that take place within your team to make a campaign a successful one. Not only that but navigating the Facebook Ad Manager is tricky enough as it is!
All of this can lead to the perfect storm of feeling overwhelmed with your ad campaigns. Sound familiar?
But we’re here to help! Below, we have compiled a list of our five favorite tools you can utilize to stay organized with your tasks and team communications when you are in the weeds with your ad campaigns.
We hope you find these tools valuable for your business — and we would love to hear if you have any favorites that we didn’t include in this list! Let’s dive in…
Asana
Without Asana, our Intentional Spark team would be up the river without a paddle! We used to just use Asana for task management, but Asana has upgraded many of their features that we now use Asana for virtually ALL of our business communications with our team (and for staying organized with our various clients’ ad campaigns).
Asana basically does it all. You can set up Teams where you can host different Projects. Within those, you can create task Sections, Tasks, and Subtasks where you can assign team members with deliverables and set timelines.
Photo Credit: Asana.com
At Intentional Spark, we create a Project for each client, and Sections within that Project for the different ad campaigns they run. But you could also set it up so you could have a different Project for each of your ad campaigns… The possibilities are endless!
Within each Task, you also have a Chat feature so you can easily communicate with team members about a particular high-level or granular task (fun tip: Team members can manage all their messages in their personal Asana Inbox). This chat feature has actually allowed our team to most almost entirely out of Slack (see below), which is where we originally would host all of our team communications for our clients’ ad campaigns.
Asana also has really great Timeline features that allow you to view your Projects (ex: an ad campaign timeline) in a Gantt chart format. You can also set dependencies within tasks in Asana to help you stay even more organized with your ad campaign deliverables and timelines.
FUN SPOILER ALERT: Our team loves Asana SO much for campaign management that next week Tony will be sharing with you a video tutorial on how you can best utilize Asana to organize your deliverables, timelines, and team members when launching an ad campaign… Stay tuned!
Trello
While Asana may Intentional Spark’s be-all, end-all software for task management, some business owners prefer Trello. This software is great because you can organize your high-level operations into different boards with associated task lists, so your deliverables for your ad campaigns can be organized in a visual flow so you have greater transparency into where you are exactly in the phases of launching your ad campaign. Basically, Trello is a Pinterest board for task management.
Photo Credit: Trello.com
Much like Asana, you can assign Trello Cards (which are basically like post-it notes) of individual tasks to different members on your team with associated due dates and checklists (i.e. subtasks).
One thing to note (if you are a fan of the visual layout of tasks) is that Asana now has Board layouts for Projects that functions very similar to Trello. BUT what we love about Asana is that you can set dependencies on Tasks — a feature that Trello doesn’t have just quite ironed out yet.
Slack
Slack’s motto is that it “replaces email inside your company”… and it really does!
Outside of Asana, we use Slack for our main method of communication with our Ad Managers. Slack is a communication software that lets you create different Channels of communication with your team members so you can have giant message boards to constantly stay up-to-date on your ad campaigns with your team members. We create different Channels for each of our ad clients, but you could even set up a different Channel for each ad campaign you run if you wanted to keep things super granular.
Slack is a great messaging platform because you can run chat searches on specific keywords and you can create Threads within a particular message, so certain discussions can stay organized and not get lost in all the noise.
Photo Credit: Slack.com
You also have the ability to DM team members, and they have a great mobile app, so you will always be able to communicate with your team about your ad campaigns no matter where you are!
But what we love most about Slack is their GIF feature!!!
Rev.com
If you are creating videos for your ad campaigns (which, YOU SHOULD BE… It’s almost 2020 people!), Rev could be your new best friend. With Rev, you can upload your ad videos to Rev’s platform and they can either add captions directly into your videos, or provide you with written transcriptions of your videos to utilize for your ad campaigns. We haven’t used this feature yet, but they also do foreign subtitles!
Rev.com doesn’t have a membership fee, and for every 1-minute of your video, you pay $1 for either Captions or Transcriptions… It’s so cheap! Plus, Rev.com has a really quick turnaround and will email you your finalized captioned video or transcript in 24 hours or less, so you can launch your campaign videos as quickly as possible.
Hootsuite
While it’s not necessary, having an organic social media strategy that compliments your paid advertising campaign is always advised! Hootsuite is a social media scheduling tool that allows you to create, preview, and schedule your social media posts across a variety of platforms – Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. This is great because you don’t have to waste time posting organic content every day of your campaign in real-time — and we know how busy your campaign week(s) can be — but, instead, create your campaign content all in one go and schedule it to post at a later date.
Photo Credit: Hootsuite.com
You can also organize your social media accounts in Hootsuite in an easy-to-navigate Dashboard, so you can easily see what’s scheduled, what you have already posted, and who is engaging with your content.
What we also love about Hootsuite is that since you can schedule future posts, as a business owner, you can have your team members create posts that you can review, preview, and edit as needed. As a bonus, their premium memberships allow you to track results and analytics on your organic social media posts.
Your Turn: Do you currently run Instagram & Facebook advertising campaigns? What 3rd party tools do you and your team use to stay organized when prepping for, launching, and managing your ad campaigns? ‘Tis the season for sharing, so please hit us up in the comments!
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