Agile is the name of the game for the marketing team at Bitly. Here's how a team of four can manage content for an audience of millions. Over 600 million links per month come through Bitly’s link management platform, which adds up when you consider they’ve been in business since 2008. To serve such a wide audience, Bitly has developed a noteworthy content production pipeline to feature an incredible volume of customer use cases, ebooks, videos, guides, and webinars.
Senior Content Strategist Blaise Lucey recently shared how they run their design and content creation workflow with Trello. Blaise’s team of four creates and manages the entire content strategy at Bitly. In a typical month, the team will work on multiple webinars, ebooks and other offerings, including over a dozen blog posts and visual collateral pieces.
To say these guys are keeping busy would be an understatement! Read on to learn how Bitly is able to produce so much, so quickly while using Trello to create a central hub for design resources. They’ve even included an agile marketing sample board below that you can use to inspire your team’s design process.
Designing A Visually Agile Workflow
Bitly’s marketing design board is set up in the spirit of a traditional Agile workflow. The intent is to keep things moving forward, and as Blaise explained, it really works for his team.
"We use Trello to make content happen. If you don’t have design and marketing in alignment for content management, it’s pretty much a word document."
Using Trello has allowed Blaise’s team to majorly cut down on marketing and design meetings because a lot of the correspondence happens directly on the cards themselves. Using labels to identify what type of content something will be, (Is it for the website? Is it product related?) has been another way to limit superfluous communication between the two teams.
Anyone viewing the board can see the status of a project, whether it’s simply in the Backlog or has already been Released (or is somewhere in between). The team heavily relies on due dates as well as the Calendar Power-Up to keep track of progress along their virtual content assembly line.
Besides using the calendar, the Marketing Team also keeps assets in Trello (or attached to Trello cards) as much as possible. Whether it’s a Google Doc being attached with the Google Drive Power-Up or design images uploaded as card covers, Trello is the central hub for content and assets at Bitly. Card covers allow anyone coming to the marketing design board to get a visual snapshot of what projects are in the works.
When it comes to customer use cases, production also needs to involve third-party companies and sources. Rather than separate this process from the core production funnel, the board also serves as a repository for live pre-approved assets that anyone in the company can reference (think quotes, testimonials, and images) as they have already been cleared for public brand use by employees.
When Blaise’s team was working on the Bitly website redesign, Trello served as the source of truth. Collecting customer testimonials was a breeze as each card represented a customer/company.
"We use Trello to make content happen. If you don’t have design and marketing in alignment for content management, it’s pretty much a word document." - Blaise Lucey, Senior Content Strategist at Bitly
The Customer Success team was able to collaborate with Marketing and Design right on these cards, and once a quote and headshot was approved it could live in that “Complete” column forever. Anyone who then came to this board looking for a testimonial would know which assets were approved for use.
Design Production Done Right
The Marketing Design board works at Bitly because the workflow is detailed, yet still has that agile momentum that fuels productivity. It provides a valuable historical catalog of live content, assets that are ready to use, and a process that is both visually accountable and collaborative.
As Blaise says, “Anything having to do with the product deserves a custom image.” Having a clean, organized, and date-abiding design board helps Blaise’s team stay on track and prioritized, while also ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks.
Activate the agile mindset in your marketing production process by copying this sample Marketing Design board, courtesy of Bitly!
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