Microsoft Teams’ Planner: How it Can Help You Create This Year’s Marketing Strategy

As you plan this year’s marketing strategy, you may want to consider how new technology may be able to help your department. Microsoft Team planner is an intuitive, easy-to-use project management platform, which can be integrated with Microsoft Teams and MS Office 365. If your organization is looking for a better way to organize and manage its marketing strategies, the Microsoft team planner may be able to provide some of the features that they need.

Here are some of the benefits of Microsoft team planner, in addition to the advantages of integrating it with the Microsoft Office 365 platform.

What is Microsoft Planner?

Microsoft Planner is a task management and project management tool that can be directly integrated into Microsoft Teams and other MS Office products. Microsoft Planner creates an easy-to-use overview of tasks that need to be completed, in an all-in-one dashboard that can be shared among team members. As an organizational tool, the purpose of Planner is to make it easier for employees to work together, consolidating all of their information and keeping it both visible and transparent.

Through the Microsoft Team planner, team members are able to share assignments, collaborate with each other, and hold discussions about projects and tasks. As a cross-platform product, the planner can be accessed from anywhere and is usable on desktops, mobile phones, and other smart devices. Email notifications and Microsoft Teams-based functionality ensure that team members do not miss any important tasks and that everyone on the team is always on the same page.

For marketing strategists, the Microsoft team planner makes it easy for multiple marketing teams and departments to connect together and collaborate. Within the planner, team members can track different marketing projects, breaking each project down into easy to achieve steps, and ensuring that all team members know which strategies and tasks they’re responsible for.

Why Integrate Microsoft Teams and Planner?

While Microsoft’s Planner can be used as a standalone product, there are many benefits to integrating Planner into the Microsoft Teams platform. Within Office 365, the Microsoft Teams platform provides chat channels and one-on-one chatrooms through which MS team members can communicate, connect, and collaborate. When integrated with the planner, Microsoft Teams makes it possible to:

• Easily see what other team members are doing. Marketing teams need to be able to work together effectively. With an integration between the two platforms, team members will be able to easily see the tasks and projects that each other are assigned to.
• Assign tasks within teams. Marketing teams are often working on multiple strategies and campaigns at once. In Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Planner projects and tasks can quickly be deployed and tracked, with each team member being aware of the projects they are responsible for.
• Collaborate more efficiently on tasks. Marketing teams must frequently review and collaborate on large amounts of documents and media. Combining Microsoft Planner with Microsoft Teams makes it possible to easily discuss, share, and modify these documents in real-time, through Microsoft Teams attachments, notes, and integrated files.

Connecting the Microsoft team planner with Microsoft Teams is similar to connecting the Microsoft calendar to Microsoft Teams: it makes it possible to manage, monitor, and maintain team planning from inside of the Microsoft Teams platform.

Integrating Microsoft Planner with Teams

Microsoft Planner can be easily integrated with Microsoft Teams by adding a planner tab within the Microsoft Teams platform. On the Microsoft Teams platform, select “Add a Tab.” On the “Add a Tab” screen, “Planner” will be visible to select.

Once you’ve selected the Microsoft Planner, a new tab will be added to Microsoft Teams. This tab can be viewed by members of the team and can be directly modified within the Microsoft Teams dashboard. In Microsoft Teams, you can:

• Add a “bucket.” Each bucket is a selection of tasks, often known used to denote large sections of a project.
• Add a “task.” Each task falls under a bucket and is intended to break each bucket down into small, manageable steps.

Once tasks have been created, they can be assigned directly to members of the team. Team members will be alerted to the fact that they have been assigned a task. Meanwhile, you can customize the task by:

• Setting a status for the task and a due date.
• Placing the task at a priority level, including custom priority levels.
• Adding checklist items, descriptions, and attachments to further define the task.

On the Microsoft Teams dashboard, each task can be discussed with team members, and these discussions will be saved so that they can easily be referenced. All of this together makes it easier for even large teams to collaborate and communicate effectively across the Microsoft Teams ecosystem.

When paired with Microsoft Teams, the Planner becomes a powerful addition to any marketing strategy. If you’re interested in improving your marketing technology, the time to switch to Microsoft Teams is now. Get started with Microsoft Teams by contacting Red River today.