Kanban Board for Inbound Marketing

Use case

Customer story

Industry: Marketing

Use case: Inbound marketing

Favorite feature: Alerts

Inbound marketing is one of the leading trends in business. Its goal is to earn the attention of customers by providing interesting content. Inbound marketing promotes a company through new internet based media such as: blogs, social media, and email marketing to bring customers closer to the brand and transform them into loyal and powerful brand promoters.


Kanban method is a universal mindset that can be used to organize and manage inbound marketing efforts. To start, you need to design an appropriate Kanban board by dividing a work flow into stages represented by columns. Please take a look at the following board example. To enlarge, click on the image.

kanban board for inbound marketing

Columns from left to right represent the subsequent work flow stages. However, there are two special columns that are commonly useful for inbound marketing people: alerts and monitoring.

  • Alerts - this column serves to receive notifications from your monitoring and analytics applications (eg. Moz, Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Hootsuite) that support your inbound marketing activities. You can integrate email alerts from any software you are using. Follow simple 6-step guide that is available here.
  • Monitoring – this column is reserved for tasks you want to monitor and you need to wait for the results. It is a perfect place to put actions like A/B test results or brand mentions monitoring. You can skip this column if a task is not a monitoring but action.

The next important element of your board is a card that represents a task. You can customize card template to see only the most important and valuable information. In the case of inbound marketing efforts the following card fields seem to be substantial:

  • Assignment - add this field to your card template to assign team member to a task. The person who you have assigned will receive email notifications.
  • Due dates - did you ever missed any important deadline? Some inbound marketing efforts need to be done exactly at the specific moment to bring the most value. Today we can calculate what is the best time to send tweet, newsletter or to publish a blog post. Due dates help you use the opportunity to bring more people to your website and to gain new customers.
  • Attachments - inbound marketing, especially content creation, requires creativity... and a lot of paper. Attachments allow you to keep all notes, mind maps and outlines in one place. You can simply attach files to your task from your computer, Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive. Save the trees!
Inbound marketing card example

Thanks to Zapier integration, Kanban Tool can be easily sync with web applications that support your marketing efforts. For example a new Kanban Tool card can be created automatically after:

  • a new comment is added to your Wordpress
  • whenever a photo or image with the specified tag is posted on Instagram
  • a new post on your Facebook profile is added
  • a new Mailchimp campaign is sent
  • a new article is published in the feed or category in Feedly
  • a new mention comes through for the specified alert in Mention or Twitter.

There are so many possibilities waiting for you to try them out!

kanban for inbound marketing example

Improving marketing results with Kanban

Inbound marketing actions are usually easy to monitor. You can control the results of your activities by tracking signups or purchases using popular website analytics tools such as Google Analytics or MixPanel. Additionally, Kanban board allows you to monitor the amount of time you spend on a specified task category (social media, blog or email marketing) using Lead and Cycle Time diagram. By comparing the results of your marketing actions (signups or conversions) and the time you spend on them, you can identify the most effective inbound marketing efforts and the best customer sources. For example, we assume that:

  • to write a blog post you need 5 hours on average and it generates 10 new customers,
  • an infographic is more time-consuming. On average, you spend 16 hours to create one. However, it helps you gain 60 new customers.

In conclusion, the blog post effectiveness is 2, while info graphic is 3,75. Maybe you should consider employing a new designer and creating more infographics?

Core benefits for marketers

Kanban board helps you manage inbound marketing efforts efficiently and effectively. The biggest advantages for the marketers are:

  • easy work organization and tasks distribution using visual management approach,
  • the access to important alerts and notifications from one place,
  • ability to evaluate your marketing tools and methods in order to find the most efficient strategies.