Fireclay Tile’s marketing team saves 600 hours a quarter with Asana

When you see eye-catching tile in commercial spaces like Whole Foods, WeWork, and boutique hotels or beautiful offices like Google’s, chances are it’s the work of Fireclay Tile. Beloved by commercial and residential interior designers and enthusiasts alike, Fireclay Tile has been a leading tile vendor in the industry since 1986. They make any space memorable, and the marketing team is responsible for building and sustaining their reputation.

Jamie Chappell leads Fireclay Tile’s marketing team as its Creative Director, where she is responsible for everything related to the brand—messaging, campaigns, merchandising, packaging, and collaborations with leading designers. While the marketing team is lean at Fireclay, they have ambitious engagement and web traffic metrics. To hit their goals, marketing must operate like a well-oiled machine. When Jamie joined Fireclay in 2013, however, the team was struggling to scale and execute their marketing programs because:

• Information was siloed in email and spreadsheets, making it difficult to collaborate with cross-functional teams and external partners.

• People spent too much time answering emails or attending inefficient meetings and not enough on execution.

• Work frequently fell through the cracks, resulting in missed deadlines and delayed campaigns.

• Marketing processes weren’t standardized so the team had to start every new campaign from scratch, which slowed them down.

Additionally, Jamie struggled to provide company leadership with real-time insights into campaign development. She knew the team needed a solution to centralize, standardize, and manage all of their work—from strategic planning to team meetings—so they could deliver campaigns that kept Fireclay Tile at the forefront of the interior design industry.

Since moving all of our marketing processes into Asana, we’re able to execute 2X as many programs and campaigns because we’re operating more efficiently.  ”

Finding the right solution to break down silos and scale

As Jamie evaluated work management solutions, she knew the team needed one that was powerful enough to standardize operations across the team, but flexible enough to support their different workflows. Asana met their business needs while also being intuitive enough to drive company-wide adoption.

To ensure a successful rollout of Asana, Jaime used a standard product launch as a project example to train the team on how to use Asana. Since everyone was familiar with how chaotic and messy launches could be, Jamie showed the team how they could use Asana to organize their entire plan so that every step, responsibility, and deadline would be clear and all relevant files could be accessible from one place. By showing the team the impact Asana would have on their work, Jamie not only got buy-in, but enthusiasm for the new tool.

From strategy to execution: managing everything in Asana

Over the past four years, Asana has become the marketing team’s system of record, where they manage everything from strategic planning to email newsletter production. Once their strategy is set for the year, it gets translated into a master marketing calendar in Asana. Marketing initiatives such as major campaigns, product launches, and partnerships are then built out in projects using templates the team created to standardize all their processes.

With Asana, we’ve been able to save our team an estimated 50 hours per week that used to be spent answering emails and attending check-in meetings. Now they spend that time focusing on creating powerful marketing campaigns. ”

With Asana, the marketing team is now able to:

• Collaborate more effectively, present new ideas, and share feedback with the team as well as cross-functional partners because everyone can access all work, communication, and files in one place.

• Prioritize the right work because they have clear timelines and can see how it contributes to their strategy and departmental goals.

• Quickly and easily report on the status and progress of their marketing activities to leadership in real time without manually gathering the information.

• Optimize their processes and project plans with standardized templates to increase efficiency and improve the impact of their marketing activities.

Once we standardized and templatized our marketing processes, our team was able to focus on creating powerful campaigns and I was able to take myself out of the execution phase because I knew I could see how work was progressing whenever I needed. ”

After seeing the positive impact using Asana had on the marketing team, other departments at Fireclay Tile were eager to adapt it to their workflows as well. Now the whole company is using Asana to manage every aspect of the business to drive scale and efficiency.