Jira for Marketing Teams: How to use Jira to Run Successful Campaigns

| Wed, July 20, 2022 | Atlassian Products | Guides | 0 comments

Organising a marketing campaign is not as easy as it may appear! Within any campaign, there are many things to do and track: copy, resources, subtasks, and due dates - to name just a few! It can feel like a disproportionate amount of your time is spent organising and the rest is spent on status updates with no set time for each task.

The wide variety of different tasks require different methods of progress tracking; this could be done through spreadsheets, email communication, or Slack updates. But all these different channels can often create a complicated web of tracking and project details. It’s scattered and hard to manage, often leading to blocks and delays.

Sounds like a headache, right? Well, Jira is a tool that can streamline this process. It can help marketing teams keep all their information in one place - increasing the visibility and convenience of each project. This blog goes through what Jira is, why it’s useful for marketing teams, and examples of how it has benefited us at New Verve.

What is Jira?

The goal of Jira software is to facilitate team collaboration. It’s a tool that allows a team to track and accomplish tasks with transparency in monitoring, planning and reporting. It has powerful features for marketing teams; such as integrated solutions for cross-functional projects and it allows a team to easily be brought together to collaborate on a shared project.

Without Jira, marketers have a few options on how to track all their tasks, subtasks and team progress but they may not be as efficient as using Jira. Pre-Jira, you could either message your coworker, have multiple meetings and send a plethora of emails but now with Jira, there is no need. It can offer peace of mind with its planning, tracking and prioritisation tools which can help any marketing campaign become that little bit less frantic.

Jira is typically associated with software development and ITSM; don’t be fooled though, its functionality can be hugely beneficial to business teams too.

What Makes Jira Useful for Marketing Teams?

Let’s get specific - why should you use Jira for marketing? Below we’ve listed just a handful of ways Jira makes marketing more efficient, collaborative and centralised:

Creative Benefits

Marketing can involve a lot of different skills; creativity being just one of them. With many creative briefs to follow, it’s important to gather the important information that needs to be contained in creative marketing projects (such as graphics and video creation).

Guidelines, requirements, information and feedback can all be contained within Jira, making creative tasks methodical and coherent. Review cycles are also available making it easy to keep track of status updates with Jira workflows. It is fast and simple to see what is ‘In progress’, ‘In review’, ‘Done’ or ‘Rejected’.

Customisable Workflows

Customisable workflows are used to streamline a team’s process, identify blocks and bottlenecks and importantly, ensure tasks aren’t forgotten.

There are huge benefits to using Jira for marketing workflows. They can be used to track, log and notify team members automatically, removing some of the unnecessary chaos that can come with fast-paced and busy marketing campaigns.

Moreover, the customisable aspect means your team can adapt the tool to their quirks and collaborative style. This is particularly specifically useful for diverse teams that you may see in marketing. Jira was created to benefit all types of teams and management styles.

If the workflows are audited regularly, they can also help to identify issues with the project management and team’s success. This can lead to faster solutions and a more efficient process.

Content Management

It can be a struggle to keep content relevant and planned. Having a content calendar is helpful but not if it’s in a folder, on a different server, or hundreds of clicks away from the pages you usually work on.

Using Jira, you can keep your content schedule, plans and deadlines in one place. You do this by turning your content plan into Jira tickets and from then you can set deadlines and plan your content creation efficiently.

Streamlining these processes frees up time for your content team to undertake important tasks such as fact-checking, deadline setting and approval. This also leaves more time for research and staying on top of the latest trends; something which can amplify the efficiency of your content.

Project and Event Information

Jira helps marketing teams view all their information in one central place. With Jira, you don’t need to enter into a spiral of emails; you can quickly check out all the information you need on the Jira board. You’ll be able to see all sub-tasks, who they are assigned to and whether they’re complete at a glance.

This reduces the web of communication that often occurs when organising a marketing campaign. Using Jira for marketing ensures that everybody in the team can access this single source of truth instead.

This has the bonus of time efficiency and autonomy. If everyone can find the information they need easily it reduces the back and forth communication simply trying to work out where files are stored. This is crucial when working on a time-sensitive campaign.

Reports and Analysis

If you struggle to collect all the information on your project together at the end to produce a report or perform an analysis then Jira can become your new best friend. You can get a high-level overview of the status of your project and what is still left to do.

The Jira dashboard is customisable so you’re able to highlight tasks of high priority using different colours and - in the calendar view - see when all the due dates are. That’s not all: if you then want more information on a certain task, click on it and the information will appear.

Examples from our Own Experience at New Verve

Crumbs: CRM for Jira

New Verve recently released a Crumbs: CRM for Jira demo video which is full of information on how to use the features within the app.

This project was managed through Jira. It began with the creation of a Jira ticket which outlined the process that needed to be followed and was linked to the information that needed to be included in the video. There were then tasks such as script planning and recording that needed to be organised.

This was undertaken using Confluence and then linking the Confluence page to the Jira issue. The video was designed using Canva which was then also linked into the Jira ticket so that the team could follow the progress. This meant that everyone involved could stay up to date and add relevant feedback to the Jira ticket through the ‘comments’ bar.

Once the video was finished the workflow was updated to ‘In review’ to give the team a chance to make suggestions, give feedback and eventually approve the video. Using Jira for this process ensured that the marketing team could communicate easily and link all comments and tasks back to the project simply.

It streamlined the process by using a customised Jira workflow and ensured that all aspects of the task were included in the demo video and no important information went unforeseen.

Atlassian in Scotland

The Atlassian in Scotland series is a large-scale webinar event that New Verve organises. Each year, a new topic is explored and discussed. The series brings together local, national, and international Atlassian users to collaborate and discover more about Atlassian tools.

The event involves a host of preparation and organisation. Ensuring the timeline runs smoothly and the host of experts that present are well informed about the schedule and expectations. There is also the audience to consider and how best to advertise the event.

The marketing team generally planned out all these tasks and more through Jira, from approaching speakers to scheduling recordings. Due to Atlassian in Scotland being a series event there was a huge advantage in using Jira to supplement the marketing tasks.

This is because Jira enables automation and the process for Atlassian in Scotland was repeated multiple times. Automation resulted in a more streamlined environment, tasks such as ticket creation could be automated creating more team independence and efficiency.

Summary

If you’re not already using Jira for your marketing team, it may be time to consider doing so! We’ve shown that it can improve planning, sticking to deadlines and content management. It is an indispensable tool that can help maintain a streamlined workflow by keeping all important information for a project in one place.

Let’s not forget the tracking and automation abilities it offers. With Jira’s personalisation options for workflow, it is simple to keep on top of campaigns. The automation tool is especially handy for day-to-day or repetitive tasks and ensures that nothing is left unnoticed.

With Jira, managing a marketing campaign can be less chaotic and allow your team to reap the benefits of extra time to spend on the tasks rather than trying to track them and find out the why’s, where’s and when’s.

Related Reading

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