How to Optimize Your Video Marketing Strategy with Project Management Tools

Even the greatest video marketing strategy will fall flat on its face without comprehensive planning.

Organizing yourself and your team around your video marketing goals is key to enduring success.
Unfortunately, email is not the right tool for the job.

The more tasks you need to assign to scriptwriters, camera operators, and editors, the more complicated your video production schedule becomes. Keeping things ad-hoc will lead to missed deadlines and expensive re-shoots.

 

The best video marketers use project management tools like Asana, Trello, and monday.com to organize their marketing strategy. These tools make sure that everyone is filled in and actively on-board with the project, from the initial brainstorm to final delivery.

 

These three platforms are already market leaders. Each one brings a slightly different use case to the table, but the underlying value is the same. Even if you choose to use Basecamp, Slack, or any of the hundreds of other project management software titles out there, having a clear framework in mind from the start will help.

 

remote female worker

Project management: The answer to remote work

Of the many changes that 2020 brought to the public sphere, the global shift to remote work is likely to be the longest-lasting. Even after the pandemic crisis is over, remote and hybrid workspaces will remain the norm for many industries.

Professional marketers who organize video production using remote-friendly project management solutions now will be better-equipped to thrive in tomorrow’s market. The more flexible and resilient your infrastructure is, the better-equipped you become.

If you’re experiencing issues with process streamlining, implementing project management tools will help you figure out where the problem lies. It helps you see if it is you, them, or the work that is the issue.

 

“You have to make sure that your software will be actually used by your employees. Hence, you have to provide simple templates and clear processes. At my previous company, we also had a lot of tutorials on how to exactly use what software.”
-Max Benz from Let’s be crazy.

 

 

video for marketing

Brainstorming comes first

Before we jump into the specifics of using Asana, Trello, or monday.com to manage video production projects, we need to cover video marketing strategy brainstorming. These tools work best when the team already knows what they need to do.

There is no need to brainstorm using a specialized management app. A simple Google Sheet will do. Have your team discuss and upvote ideas on the sheet so you can generate a master sheet that contains all the data your project management suite will need.

Here is an example of what your content strategy master sheet should look like. This one contains information for written content as well, which you can use to augment your video strategy. Your videos meta tags and need keywords, too!

 

project management tools

Why not brainstorm directly within your project management app?

Using a simple collaborative spreadsheet for planning helps keep your project management workflow clean. You don’t want to clutter your video production processes with unanswered questions, creeping scope, and new guidelines – these should all be worked out beforehand.

This crucial step ensures that once you assign a task in Asana, Trello, or Monday, it has already been discussed by the team. If you have to answer any questions, they will be new ones.

Secondly, your supervisor will appreciate having a single point of reference. For an executive or a director, reviewing a single master spreadsheet is far better than diving into an entirely different platform and swimming through every minute detail on the way.

 

video production

Going into video production mode

Each of the three main project management tools is built in its own way. Getting the most of the one you choose requires learning how to use some of its unique features.

 

  1. Video production with Asana

Asana allows users to break their departments into individual components. For video production, the three main groups you will want to establish are:

  • Producers and Editors
  • Strategy and Leadership
  • Community and Operations

Since Asana supports broad overview and engagement, you can use it to establish high-level oversight of every video’s individual workflow. That workflow should start from planning (where you input the data directly from your master sheet) and move on to production, editing, and distribution.

You can further divide the process into individual columns:

  1. Scripting
  2. Screencasting
  3. Filming
  4. Editing
  5. Feedback
  6. Finished
  7. Final Files

Here’s what something like that would look like in Asana:

asana task management

By far the most important time-saving Asana feature you will be using are Templates. You can use these to follow the full video lifecycle in a way that is standardized and trackable. This helps keep the entire team on-task and maintains visibility for all stakeholders involved.

 

  1. Video production with Trello

Trello is organized into lanes. Every task you need to complete gets assigned to its own lane, where every stakeholders commentary is visible and available.

Since everyone with access to the board is going to head straight to their own lane, the best workflow is one that segments each stage in the production process as much as possible.

For instance, while it might make sense to have a single column for “Review” in Asana, a Trello user might be better off subdividing the process further. You may be better served with separate lanes for each individual step in the review process – or for each individual stakeholder who performs the review.

 

trello task

 

In general, Trello favors a more fragmented workflow approach. Generalized “catch-all” lanes can generate lots of back-and-forth commentary that is hard to keep track of.

 

Wherever you have a different team of people executing or approving a process, that’s a good place to create a new Trello lane. The Trello workflow works best when every user stays in his or her lane.

 

  1. Video production with monday.com

monday.com’s visual board approach makes it easy to qualify individual steps in the video production process. While Trello encourages a fragmented approach, monday.com excels at streamlining processes and giving instant visual feedback.

monday.com’s visual status labels are the key feature that makes this possible.
If you depend on users, clients, and stakeholders to provide assets or approve different steps, monday.com makes it easy to qualify their response.

These status labels are color-coded for simplicity and effectiveness. There is nothing ambiguous about a bright green Done label over your task. The same goes for the yellow Working On It label and the red Stuck label.

 

monday.com

monday.com also supports the use of multiple boards. This makes it a flexible tool for very large groups of people with varying responsibilities. If you run a video production agency with hundreds of clients, you may want to set up separate boards for pre-production, production, and post-production.

 

You can set up tasks to travel between boards. Once a particular project reaches the end of the Production board, it will automatically enter the first step of the Post-Production board. You can find a useful template here.

 

  1. Video production with ProofHub

ProofHub allows control at the individual level by letting you assign custom roles and granting access levels accordingly. For instance, a typical video production team with their roles defined in ProofHub would look like:

  1. Script writer
  2. Producer
  3. Editor
  4. Production Manager

 

proofhub

 

ProofHub brings a more collaborative approach to task management that makes it stand out amongst the lot. Every time you need to discuss ideas, you can create a discussion topic, add people to it and start brainstorming.

 

Further, stages in the video production process get specifically highlighted with its custom workflows. Since specific people are associated with every stage of the process, it becomes easy for individuals to manage their work and time. Here’s an example of a typical workflow in ProofHub for a video production team:

  • Ideation
  • Scriptwriting
  • Production
  • Editing
  • Post-production

 

man looks at computer

Final thoughts and takeaways

The video production process is much more streamlined than ever before. A major contributing factor to this are sophisticated project management tools, deployed by enterprises and small companies alike. Platforms such as ProofHub, monday.com, Trello and Asana can be leaned on throughout the entire  video production cycle; from the initial brainstorming sessions all the way to the video presentation and distribution stage. We highly recommend you use them. We do😎.

Originally published on December 14th, 2020, updated on November 22nd, 2021
The Blog

How to Optimize Your Video Marketing Strategy with Project Management Tools

by Austin Jesse Mitchell time to read: 6 min
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