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How We Use Trello to Manage Our Content Marketing

Written by Pisano | Apr 26, 2016 4:30:00 PM

One of the basic needs of human being is communication. When we are understood by others, we become satisfied and happy. For Pisano, the definition of happiness is a world where customers and enterprises can communicate with each other whenever they want and stay connected as much as they need to.

Pisano is a user-friendly mobile web application for collecting real-time feedback. We are working to get your business surrounded by happy customers. For the same purpose, we created this blog and named it “Pisano Happy Customers”. We constantly create contemporary and useful content about Customer Experience (CX). Below is a list of what you can expect to find in “Pisano Happy Customers”:

  • Success stories of happy Pisano customers
  • Enterprise strategies to create your own happy customers
  • Best practices for customer satisfaction and customer experience
  • Updates and new features of Pisano products

We hope our blog posts will help you in gaining and maintaining your own happy customers. In order to help you, we prioritize consistency and relevancy. Plus, writing content is an amazing process when you have a well-managed schedule. At this point, Trello has been very beneficial for us. Let us tell you how we use Trello for managing our blog.

Trello

As we all know, Trello is a famous collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what and what is in process. It also happens to be the main tool of our marketing team for producing content (together with Google Drive and Google Docs). Our awesome Content Marketing Calendar board has 10 lists in total; 7 lists for stages of writing, a list for the content checklist, a list for our newsletter operations and a FYI list. Each post you see on our blog goes through a detailed process.

In the image below, the very first list on the left is “Content Checklist”. It contains the necessary steps for our content creation pipeline. You can see how we list all steps as separate cards. This makes it easier to keep track of important points like “Target Audience”, “Language” and “Keywords”. We always keep this checklist in mind as our actual content creation funnel takes place.

Just like this entry you are currently reading, our writing process starts under the “Article Ideas” list and ends up listed under “Published”. We manage the entire funnel in one Trello board.

Where do these brilliant ideas come from?

Ideas are our mind child. They are also the precious starting point in reaching you. Just like the Greek goddess Athena who leaped out of god Zeus’ forehead, we are a fast paced team helping other business teams get connected to their own customers. In other words, our content reflects us being both in a manager’s and a customer’s shoes at the same time.

As human beings, all of our experiences and daily lives become resources for our writing. However, the main stream for our blog ideas is “Friday Marketing Team Meetings”. Each Friday, we get together and decide on a few quality ideas out of the ones we pile up. Then, we open a card for each idea and the details of the idea is usually explained within the card. This is also where we add one (or two… or three) labels to distinguish under what type of content this article is named under. We use following labels:

  • CX (every aspect of customer experience)
  • CRM (like the CX label, but for customer relationship management)
  • PR (our PR efforts are labeled with the stylish pink label)
  • Marketing & Growth & Startup (our growth story is told in this label)
  • Technical & Product (nice label for product details)
  • Corporate (this label is for Pisano stuff)
  • Customer (this one is all about our happy customers)
  • Sales (this label is a shiny Pokemon; our sales efforts get this label)

Content Checklist

After the labeling and initial research, we move the cards to our “Planned/Scheduled” list. When the publication deadline is set, we start on the first draft of the post. And its card is moved to “In Progress” list. While working on the draft, each item on our “Content Check List” is checked off. These are:

  • Target Audience (talking to the right person matters)
  • Message (what we are talking about)
  • Language (you should NOT see a Turkish post on Happy Customers blog)
  • Keywords (pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it?)
  • Goal (what we want you to understand)

Here is the first draft for this article. Notice the changes with the title, content etc?

Working with the Draft & Review

After we’re done with all the items on our checklist and the draft, its card is moved to “In Review” list. Reviews are quickly done by other marketing team members and the final draft is moved along the publication calendar on Trello. According to our current plans, we plan to publish 2–3 post in a week.

The image below shows how a card for Pisano kiosk set up looks like in the “In Progress” list.

Design & Graphics (Cool Stuff)

After we settle all the discussions and issues about the draft, we add a card on Design team’s board. This card describes the design and graphics we want for our post. When the Design team prepares the visuals, they add a comment on the card to let the editor of the post know that it’s ready to publish. Then we move the card on the Content Marketing Board to “Ready to Publish” list.

Just Push the Publish Button!

For now, we’re using Medium to host our blog posts (keep checking our website, something exciting is coming up). Medium has a great post scheduling feature. When an article is ready to publish the editor just sets up the post in our blog and schedules its publication date and time on Medium.

We drag the card of the post to “Published” list and archive it when the post goes live on our blog.

This image shows our published entries on Happy Customers.

We, as Pisano team, want our products to be useful and practical. We think that Trello has the same purpose with us in respect of being simple and user-friendly.

Are you ready to surround your business with happy customers?