Trello for Marketing Teams. One board and a bar chart

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

Isn’t Marketing the art of being different? Don’t listen to the mainstream and forget ‘many boards’. The complex tool will only kill your creativity. What a typical marketing team needs is the simple board, with ‘To do’, ‘In progress’ and ‘Done’ lists. But – follow these two rules: 

• 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?