When working at a marketing agency, employees are used to wearing numerous hats, making their days fast-paced. That being said, speed is essential for agency employees. Communication, decision-making, and task execution need to happen seamlessly – often within a few minutes. This is one of the many reasons that project managers and other marketers are turning to Slack integrations to ensure all campaign tasks are organized and delegated appropriately. Slack integrations help your team automate turning messages into formal tasks, making sure nothing gets lost as you assign tasks to your team members.
These integrations instantly turn messages into actionable tasks, reducing missed deadlines, eliminating manual follow-ups, and boosting team productivity.
For marketing agencies, where multiple campaigns, client needs, and deliverables are shifting and in flux, automation is not just a want or a convenience; it’s a critical feature of an efficient campaign.
Why Automate Tasks Assignments in Slack?
Slack is an essential tool for teams, especially remote and hybrid teams. In fact, Slack has 38.8 million daily active users, totaling more than 750,000 organizations. Plus, 77% of the Fortune 100 companies use Slack, valuing the company at $26.51 billion. That being said, Slack is used in various industries, across time zones, and is the main form of communication for many teams. While helpful, this tool can also be overwhelming for some, because if workflows are not transferred to a project management software such as Asana, there’s a risk that tasks will be forgotten.
Automating Task Assignments Solves Key Challenges:
- Speed: Capture tasks the moment they arise, without needing to switch apps or put more on your to do list!
- Accountability: Assign tasks with clear owners and deadlines to ensure everyone is on the same page.
- Transparency: Allow the entire team to track tasks and progress for increased accountability.
- Productivity: Minimize the cognitive load of context-switching between tools and further reduce the need for repetitive work.
For those working at a marketing agency like Online Optimism, this means:
- Quickly logging client feedback into Slack during conversations.
- Instantly assigning action items during meetings.
- Avoiding delays in approvals, revisions, and posting schedules.
Instead of relying on memory or manual tracking, Slack integrations help ensure action items happen when they need to, which directly impacts overall client satisfaction and campaign performance.
Top Slack Integrations for Task Automation
As previously mentioned, working at an agency requires juggling multiple accounts with different timelines, goals, and project scopes, making automation a necessity. Whether it’s managing social campaign approvals, coordinating content production days, or tracking creative feedback, the right Slack integrations can help maintain order and scale operations.
Slack Workflow Builder
This builder allows custom forms for new campaign ideas or optimizations suggested in a Slack channel, automatically assigning them to the correct person.
Asana for Slack
Utilizing Asana for Slack allows users to turn feedback from a client in Slack into an Asana task for the correct person, without the project manager needing to leave the Slack channel.
Trello for Slack
For agencies that use Trello, you can drop social media posts into the Trello board for approvals.
Jira Cloud for Slack
Jire allows users to manage bug reports for websites or landing pages through a Slack automation, allowing more time to focus on the issue rather than providing tasks to the necessary employees.
Setting Up Automated Task Assignments: A Step-by-Step Guide
At Online Optimism, we use Asana, along with 100,000 other organizations, one of the most popular project management software products organizations use with Slack. Below is how to connect Asana to Slack to make sure things are set up properly to further streamline tasks and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
Step 1: Connect Asana to Slack
- In Slack, go to Apps and search for Asana
- Install the app and grant permissions to access your Slack workspace and Asana account
Step 2: Choose Your Workflow
Once you’ve completed step 1, it’s time to decide when you want tasks to automatically be created. Some examples:
- Manually: Right-click a message and create a task
- Automatically: Use a keyword trigger (e.g. ‘#edits’) to prompt action
Step 3: Create Tasks from Slack Messages
- Hover over any Slack message
- Click More actions (the three dots), then select Create a task in Asana
- A window will pop up where you can:
- Name the ask
- Assign it to a team member
- Set a project and due date
Step 4: Automate Notifications
Set up Slack notifications for whatever works best for you.
Some of our top ones include:
- New tasks assigned to you
- Changes to important tasks
- Completed or overdue tasks
Advanced Automations
Now that you’ve set up some automations, you can dig deeper into advanced options to further enhance your organization’s efficiency. Below are some ideas:
Keyword or Emoji Triggers
- Set a rule where adding a specific emoji like a checkmark automatically converts the massage into a task.
- Create a custom workflow where a form appears if someone mentions “urgent task” in a channel.
Multi-Step Automations
If your organization uses Zapier, for example, you can set Slack up to automatically create a project, assign a team member, and send a confirmation message in Slack if someone posts in a channel with a specific keyword, such as “New Client.”
Channel-Specific Automations
Set different automations depending on the channel. For example, “social media campaign optimization” can automatically become a task assigned to the department lead.
Auto-Assign Based on Message Sender
You can also configure automations to dynamically assign tasks based on who submitted the original message!
Best Practices for Slack Automation Success
While setting up automation is powerful, a few best practices will make your workflows even more effective:
- Keep it simple: Start with basic automations before layering complexity.
- Communicate workflows clearly: Make sure everyone knows how task creation happens to avoid confusion.
- Review and adjust: Analyze your automations’ effectiveness monthly and tweak rules if needed.
- Avoid over-automation: Too many automatic tasks can flood your team with low-priority work. Focus on key workflows first.
Pro tip for marketing agencies: start with the workflows that have the most repetitive back-and-forth, like ad approvals, asset deliveries, or feedback cycles. Automating these first will free up your team for more creative, high-value work!
Make Slack Work Smarter, Not Harder
Automating task assignments in Slack turns communication into real action — instantly. Whether you’re managing internal deliverables or coordinating multiple client campaigns, Slack automations give marketing agencies a massive competitive edge: faster execution, fewer missed steps, and happier clients.
Start simple: pick one integration like Asana, Trello, or Jira, and automate a basic workflow today. From there, you’ll build a robust system where no important task — whether it’s a social post, blog draft, or campaign launch — ever falls through the cracks. Because, in the agency world, speed and precision are everything.
Ready to Supercharge Your Slack Workflows?
At Online Optimism, we don’t just talk about strong workflows: we build and manage them for you.
As a full-service marketing agency, we specialize in creating efficient Slack automations, seamless project management systems, and strategic processes that ensure your campaigns launch faster, perform better, and deliver real results. Let us handle the backend, so your team can focus on creativity, strategy, and growth.
Contact Online Optimism today to streamline your operations and strengthen your next campaign!
