Templating.App – Standard Approach to Creating (Social) Media with Templates in Jira

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Advertising agencies are unique businesses. They can come in many sizes and organizational shapes. Some advertising agencies focus on one type of medium, for example, print ads in magazines or newspapers. Other ad agencies might focus on advertising for a particular industry. Examples of this could be advertising for toys or advertising for alcohol producers. Finally, advertising agencies might focus on a specific target audience, like children or young adults.

No matter the industry or target audience, at the core of every advertising agency are the ads themselves. A successful ad agency will run a lot of ads for a lot of different customers. The ad agencies' margins for profit are built into each ad, so the more ad campaigns that they run, the better they are. This could mean they expand their target customer to include more industries or more target audiences.

So how do agencies keep track of all their campaigns? How do they track campaigns as they progress through the campaign lifecycle? How do they know who is responsible for each campaign? How do they report on the campaigns at the end of the year? After the ad is done, how do they reflect upon their work and see if they can improve? After all, everyone (ad agencies included) is moving towards a more agile focus in their business. Being able to pivot and quickly adapt to the changing market conditions is of the utmost importance.

One way ad agencies could track their work is through Jira.

Use Jira for ad campaigns

Jira is the leader in issue tracking and work management software. Jira is built upon the concept of issues or work items. These work items then follow a workflow containing statuses. All of these work items, workflows, and statuses are completely customizable, meaning you could realistically track any type of work, such as an ad campaign. Jira also allows you to customize the layout and information collected for each work item, which helps you make decisions regarding that piece of work and report on certain items given criteria.

Overall, Jira is a great place to track all types of work and this is not exclusive to software teams. Jira issues could in fact be campaigns or types of campaigns. They could be the work that is done within a campaign or the work that is done to prepare for a campaign. Let’s take a closer look.

Ads as issues

If you are working in an ad agency and would like to use Jira, you might consider using Campaign as an issue type that is at the Epic level or higher in the issue hierarchy. Beneath each Campaign, you could have an issue type for each different type of work that needs to be done. If the work items within a campaign aren’t overly complex, you could just use the standard Tasks for issues.

If you look at the image below, you see an example of how this could work.

Templating.app - Standard approach to creating (social) media - example of social media campaign setup with default Jira issues

As you can see, we have a campaign issue type with custom fields for Target Audience, Region, and Budget. We also have “Child issues” at the bottom of the Campaign where we can track all the smaller tasks that need to get done.

Templating.app - Standard approach to creating (social) media - child issues in social media campaign setup

If you're an ad agency, this could be a great way to track your work, but it could also become tedious. If you have hundreds or thousands of campaigns to run, it would be creating all of those campaigns in Jira, then all of the smaller tasks within each campaign. Not only would this be a tedious task, it would be extremely time-consuming and remedial.

There must be an easier way.

Templates

With Templating.app 🚀 build Issue Templates for Jira cloud you can quickly and easily configure issue templates for your most repetitive campaigns. The intuitive interface allows any user to easily create a template which will allow them to input new issues even easier. Let’s take a look at how this could work.

The first step is to install Templating.app in your Jira instance. If you are a site admin you can do that yourself, but if you are not, you will need to contact the person responsible for managing your Jira instance.

After you have the app installed, you can start to create templates. To create templates, choose the “Apps” dropdown at the top of Jira and then “Issue Templates”.

Templating.app - Standard approach to creating (social) media - Issue Templates in Apps menu in Jira

Next, choose “Create a Template” in the top right corner. Enter your template details as necessary.

Templating.app - Standard approach to creating (social) media - creating a new template with templating.app

The quickest and easiest way to add issues to a template is to use an already existing issue.

Templating.app - Standard approach to creating (social) media - insert existing issue button highlighted

You can do this with the “Insert existing issue” button. Once you find the issue that you would like to import, you can choose whether to include the child issues or not. Then you can import your issue details.

Templating.app - Standard approach to creating (social) media -inserting an issue

After you have imported your issue, you could have your template ready to go. Keeping with our example of an ad agency creating campaigns, if you and the team have a successful campaign, it could make sense to use that structure as a template. Using the above feature of Templating.app would allow you to quickly and easily create this template.

If you decide to start from scratch, the interface for Templating.app is intuitive enough for you to create your issues and hierarchy. If you want, you can create a standard Campaign template for all your YouTube campaigns. It could look something like below.

Templating.app - Standard approach to creating (social) media - example of standard issue template for youtube campaign

Now, for all your future YouTube Campaigns, all you need to do is create the YouTube Campaign template once, instead of creating seven or eight issues every time.

Dynamic Templates

Templating.app can save us lots of time, but you may be thinking, “I still need to enter the details for each issue.” Since it’s important that each task does not lose context of the overall campaign, we would need to enter the details for the custom fields, budget, target audience, and region.

This will, in a way, negate the time savings we have gotten from creating the template itself. So what can we do?

Templating.app comes with the ability to add “variables” to your templates. Variables present the user with fields to complete before they create issues from a template. The variables can then be dynamically populated in various fields of the issue template upon creation. Let’s take a look.

To add a variable, navigate to your issue template, and choose “Forms & Variables" on the left side.

Templating.app - Standard approach to creating (social) media - Form & Variables section

From there, you can select “Add variable” and choose from a list of variable types pictured below.

Templating.app - Standard approach to creating (social) media - List of variables that can currently be added to template in templating.app

For our example of creating new ad campaigns, we have chosen to create a text input variable for the “Campaign name”. We have also set a variable for the budget, target audience, and region. This way, we only have to enter the data once when creating the set of issues.

Templating.app - Standard approach to creating (social) media - adding variables for target audience

We can use the variables Region, Target Audience, and Campaign name to populate the summary. This will give us a standard naming convention for all our YouTube Campaign issues. We will also populate the Budget field with the Budget variable. Our template issues could now look like this:

Templating.app - Standard approach to creating (social) media - Issue template with variables in Summary

When you go to create a campaign, you will be prompted to fill out a short form of your variables:Templating.app - Standard approach to creating (social) media - prompt to fill in variables when creating issue with issue template

After you fill out the form and hit “Submit”, you could have an issue with Child issues that looks like this:

Templating.app - Standard approach to creating (social) media - finished YouTube campaign template for New Toy Car video

Automate your ad campaign task creation

Ad agencies are responsible for creating campaigns across social media platforms that attract customers to the products they are advertising for. The most important aspect of an ad campaign is the content itself, not the tracking that happens within any work management tool. This means that agencies should spend the majority of their time focusing on the content of their campaigns, rather than the project management component.

With Templating.app, social media teams can save time inputting repetitive tasks and focus on what’s important, creating great content.

Try Templating.app for free on the Atlassian Marketplace. Feel free to write us an email or book a free demo if you need any additional help.


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