Trello, in their excellent ‘Trello for Marketing Teams’ article, offer five various boards to do your marketing. We say: just set up a simple board with three lists – To do, In progress, Done – and a timeline/bar chart Power-Up on top of it. Where does our recommendation of simplicity originates?
Check Lynda’s 30-sec. video below to learn, why you should ‘be on the simple side’, and not overcomplicate your Trello marketing boards.
The single Marketing board you need
- trade shows, trips, ‘get back to it & review in 6 months’ sort of things as well as all the outsourced jobs… You need to plan these ahead. Use some calendar plugin on top of the Trello board. Or – better yet – use a timeline-based Gantt chart (bar chart) Power-Up.
- some marketing teams/professionals will need to ‘prove to the management’. This is why the ‘Done’ list on the below board actually reads ‘Done 2019.01.01-31’. Archive your ‘Done’ lists periodically – every month or so – to retain access to those archived tasks, just in case.
Gantt chart on top of Marketing Trello board?
You might say ‘Isn’t a plain calendar enough?’ Sure, the calendar makes keeping an eye on deadlines easy. Listen to Lynda again: visualization is the key. Calendars sort of fail here and here is why: bigger tasks, epics – they tend to last 1, 2 or 3 weeks. Such a lengthy task could be a temporary display in your showroom, some long term training program or just about any task that takes three weeks to be completed. The Gantt chart will show a three-week-long bar to represent such an event.
The Gantt chart basically shows two things:
- how ‘big’ a task is – represented by the length of a bar on the chart
- when it happens – you see the start and end date
This way you get a bird’s eye view on how busy your team is on any given day or in any given month.

Re-arranging tasks and setting dependencies between them in BigPicture Power-Up for Trello.
What else does the Gantt chart Power-Up bring to marketing teams?
- dependencies between tasks – represented by the dashed arrows on the above animation
- milestones (key tasks, diamond shaped)
- time markers (key dates)
- various time perspectives
and more. Watch the below tutorial video or browse the BigPicture documentation.
Professional project managers love the Gantt charts. And who is a marketer anyway?