Marketing Templates

Writing, publishing and promoting a blog post consists of several steps. If more than one person is involved, keeping track of where everything is at can be challenging.  

This Kanban-style board addresses this challenge.  

Each Card is a blog post or an idea for a blog post.  Cards start on the left in the ‘Ideas’ column and then flow to the right into the ‘Done’ Column.   The rows are a couple of audiences that blogs will be written for– your different audience personas. 

We’ve left a note card in ORANGE in every column so you can learn how Cardsmith tracks our blogs. Feel free to adapt this board to your process by adding, deleting columns or changing the titles of columns. If a team member named Mike is responsible for creating images for Post – Add “Mike” to the Images column title for added clarity.

Pro Tips: 

1. Make sure to set the default card if you add or remove fields from the blog post card.
2. A key factor in what makes Kanban work is to limit work in process, which in turn limits multi-tasking, keeps the team focused and helps get more blog posts done faster and in a nice predictable flow. Because consistency is key with blogging, you can use the visual kanban to show you what steps may be impeding the flow of work and which steps are starved for work.
3. When someone moves a card to the next step (column) they can leave a board comment for the person responsible for the next step. That person will then see an alert on their board the next time they login to Cardsmith. This makes handoffs seamless and lets the work FLOW!
4. You can hold down the shift key and click to select several cards (such as the orange header cards).  Once you have multiple cards selected, use the left side card menu to delete them all in one step.  

If you really want to go deep on Kanban and how it can be setup to make your blog posts flow quickly and consistently through the process check out this post: https://cardsmith.co/how-to-build-your-own-kanban-or-scrumban-board-in-12-steps/

Modify this board to fit your social media strategy and then use it to be prepared for frequent posts. This format is a clever combination of a Monday-Friday Calendar plus a Kanban to keep your social media channels full of valuable content for your followers.

For process geeks:  Note that we’ve created a hybrid of a Monday-Friday calendar with a Kanban approach by putting the Ideas/Backlog/Do Next/Doing and Ready process steps vertically from bottom up.  Think of this like your best ideas bubbling up to the top.

This template helps you structure and begin to write a business book.

Use it to outline topics by chapter, note your thoughts and main points, and even track research articles and links.

Visualize and communicate social ads CTR (or other metric) by audience, message and time.

Our marketing co-founder created this board as a way to review Facebook ads with her freelance clients. They can easily see metrics related to various ad message/image/audience combinations.

Use this team roles and bio board so that you and your team can:

1. quickly see who else is on the team and what their role is.
2. If you need a Bio for someone who is speaking, or authoring an article, you can quickly find it.

Keeping this board up to date takes only seconds every time you add a new team member, and it pays off because everyone will have this information at their fingertips.

A simple CRM to track leads, opportunities, speaking gigs and referral sources.

This board was provided by founding user Jerry Vieira from The QMP Group. Jerry is one of the few management consultants never wanting for work. It is because he works this board religiously to move forward with prospective clients and keep his referral network active.

The cards in this board have different fields appropriate to each column. Because Cardsmith currently has one “Default Card” per board, you should use the “Copy Card” function to create a new empty card with the relevant fields.

This is an example of a visual project plan. In this case, we’ve mapped out a hypothetical website project for a taco cart. 

Your plan can also be a project tracking tool if you use the check mark to notate tasks being completed. You can move tasks forward in time, but we don’t recommend that. Leave the plan alone, and work the tasks or deliverables scheduled in past weeks. This way at a glance you can tell if the project is running on time.  

Pro Tips:

1. You can use this board a visual project status report if you color cards Red, Yellow or Green and/or use Card Icons to indicate work blockages
2. You can use connectors to visually communicate dependencies between tasks, deliverables or milestones.